usading chiefs had begun to
discuss the prudence of postponing all operations till the spring, when
Raymond of Toulouse with some other chiefs insisted that delay would
imply fear, and that the imputation of cowardice would insure the
paralysis of their enterprise. The city was therefore at once invested,
so far as the forces of the crusaders could suffice to encircle it; and
a siege began which in the eyes of the military historian must be
absolutely without interest, and of which the issue was decided by
paroxysms of fanatical vehemence on the one side, and by lack, not of
bravery, but of generalship on the other. Of the eastern and northern
walls the blockade was complete; of the west it was partial; and the
failure to invest a portion of the western wall, with two out of the
five gates of the city, left the movements of the Turks in this
direction free.

But the besiegers were in no hurry to begin the work of death. The
wealth of the harvest and the vintage spread before them its
irresistible temptations, and the herds feeding in the rich pastures
seemed to promise an endless feast. The cattle, the corn, and the wine
were alike wasted with besotted folly, while the Turks within the walls
received tidings, it is said, of all that passed in the crusading camp
from some Greek and Armenian Christians to whom they allowed free egress
and ingress. Of this knowledge they availed themselves in planning the
sallies by which they caused great distress to the besiegers, whose
clumsy engines and devices seemed to produce no result beyond the waste
of time, and who felt perhaps that they had done something when they
blocked up the gate of the bridge with huge stones dug from the
neighboring quarries.

Three months passed away, and the crusaders found themselves not
conquerors, but in desperate straits from famine. The winter rains had
turned the land round their camp into a swamp, and lack of food left
them more and more unable to resist the pestilential diseases which were
rapidly thinning their numbers. A foraging expedition under Bohemond and
Tancred filled the camp with food; it was again recklessly wasted. The
second famine scared away Tatikios, the lieutenant of the Greek emperor
Alexius; but the crusading chiefs were perhaps still more disgusted by
the desertion of William of Melun, called "the Carpenter," from the
sledgehammer blows which he dealt out in battle. Hunger obtained a
victory even over the hermit Peter, who