rview and treaty with the prince of Scodra. His march between
Durazzo and Constantinople was harassed, without being stopped, by
the peasants and soldiers of the Greek emperor; and the same faint and
ambiguous hostility was prepared for the remaining chiefs, who passed
the Adriatic from the coast of Italy. Bohemond had arms and vessels,
and foresight and discipline; and his name was not forgotten in the
provinces of Epirus and Thessaly. Whatever obstacles he encountered were
surmounted by his military conduct and the valor of Tancred; and if the
Norman prince affected to spare the Greeks, he gorged his soldiers with
the full plunder of an heretical castle. The nobles of France pressed
forwards with the vain and thoughtless ardor of which their nation has
been sometimes accused. From the Alps to Apulia the march of Hugh the
Great, of the two Roberts, and of Stephen of Chartres, through a wealthy
country, and amidst the applauding Catholics, was a devout or triumphant
progress: they kissed the feet of the Roman pontiff; and the golden
standard of St. Peter was delivered to the brother of the French
monarch. But in this visit of piety and pleasure, they neglected to
secure the season, and the means of their embarkation: the winter was
insensibly lost: their troops were scattered and corrupted in the towns
of Italy. They separately accomplished their passage, regardless
of safety or dignity; and within nine months from the feast of the
Assumption, the day appointed by Urban, all the Latin princes had
reached Constantinople. But the count of Vermandois was produced as
a captive; his foremost vessels were scattered by a tempest; and his
person, against the law of nations, was detained by the lieutenants of
Alexius. Yet the arrival of Hugh had been announced by four-and-twenty
knights in golden armor, who commanded the emperor to revere the general
of the Latin Christians, the brother of the king of kings.

In some oriental tale I have read the fable of a shepherd, who was
ruined by the accomplishment of his own wishes: he had prayed for water;
the Ganges was turned into his grounds, and his flock and cottage were
swept away by the inundation. Such was the fortune, or at least the
apprehension of the Greek emperor Alexius Comnenus, whose name has
already appeared in this history, and whose conduct is so differently
represented by his daughter Anne, and by the Latin writers. In the
council of Placentia, his ambassadors had solic