e vagrants whom Peter and Walter had brought thus far on the road to
Jerusalem were scattered about the land in search of food; and it was no
hard task for David to cheat the main body with the false tidings that
their companions had carried the walls of Nice, and were revelling in
the pleasures and spoils of his capital. The doomed horde rushed into
the plain which fronts the city; and a vast heap of bones alone remained
to tell the story of the great catastrophe, when the forces which might
more legitimately claim the name of an army passed the spot where the
Seljukian had entrapped and crushed his victims. In this wild expedition
not less, it is said, than three hundred thousand human beings had
already paid the penalty of their lives.

Still the First Crusade was destined to accomplish more than any of the
seven or eight crusades which followed it; and this measure of success
it achieved probably because none of the great European sovereigns took
part in it. The task of setting up a Latin kingdom in Palestine was to
be achieved by princes of the second order.

Of these the foremost and the most deservedly illustrious was Godfrey,
of Bouillon in the Ardennes, a kinsman of the counts of Boulogne, and
Duke of Lotharingen (Lorraine). In the service of the emperor Henry IV,
the enemy or the victim of Hildebrand, he had been the first to mount
the walls of Rome and cleave his way into the city; he might now hope
that his crusading vow would be accepted as an atonement for his
sacrilege. Speaking the Frank and Teutonic dialects with equal ease, he
exercised by his bravery, his wisdom, and the uprightness of his life an
influence which brought to his standard, it is said, not less than
eighty thousand infantry and ten thousand horsemen, together with his
brothers Baldwin and Eustace, Count of Boulogne.

Among the most conspicuous of Godfrey's colleagues was Hugh, Count of
Vermandois. With him may be placed the Norman duke Robert, whose
carelessness had lost him the crown of England, and who had now pawned
his duchy for a pittance scarcely less paltry than that for which Esau
bartered away his birthright. The number of the great chiefs who led the
pilgrims from Northern Europe is completed with the names of Robert,
Count of Flanders, and of Stephen, Count of Chartres, Troyes, and Blois.

Foremost, by virtue of his title and office, among the leaders of the
southern bands was the papal legate Adhemar (Aymer) Bishop of Puy--