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till they were rescued by the venal protection of the Fatimite emir. After visiting the holy places, they embarked for Italy, but only a remnant of two thousand arrived in safety in their native land. Ingulphus, a secretary of William the Conqueror, was a companion of this pilgrimage: he observes that they sallied from Normandy, thirty stout and well-appointed horsemen; but that they repassed the Alps, twenty miserable palmers, with the staff in their hand, and the wallet at their back.80

of Jeru

the Turks.

1096

Emesal

After the defeat of the Romans, the tranquillity of the Conquest Fatimite caliphs was invaded by the Turks.81 One of the salem by lieutenants of Malek Shah, Atsiz the Carizmian, marched into A.D. 1076Syria at the head of a powerful army, and reduced Damascus by famine and the sword. Hems, and the other cities of the [Hims, province, acknowledged the caliph of Bagdad and the sultan of Persia; and the victorious emir advanced without resistance to the banks of the Nile; the Fatimite was preparing to fly into the heart of Africa; but the negroes of his guard and the inhabitants of Cairo made a desperate sally, and repulsed the Turk from the confines of Egypt. In his retreat, he indulged the licence of slaughter and rapine; the judge and notaries of Jerusalem were invited to his camp; and their execution was followed by the massacre of three thousand citizens. The cruelty or the defeat of Atsiz was soon punished by the sultan Toucush, the brother of Malek Shah, who, with a higher title and more formidable powers, asserted the dominion of Syria and Palestine. The house of Seljuk reigned about twenty years in Jerusalem; 82 but the hereditary command of the holy city and

80 Baronius (A.D. 1064, No. 43-56) has transcribed the greater part of the original narratives of Ingulphus, Marianus, and Lambertus. [Descriptions of the Holy Land by pilgrims of the 12th century, translated into English, will be found in vols. iv. and v. of the Library of the Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society.]

81 See Elmacin (Hist. Saracen. p. 349, 350) and Abulpharagius (Dynast. p. 237, vers. Pocock). M. de Guignes (Hist. des Huns, tom. iii. part i. p. 215, 216) adds the testimonies, or rather the names, of Abulfeda and Novairi.

82 From the expedition of Isar Atsiz (A.H. 469, A.D. 1076) to the expulsion of the Ortokides (A.D. 1096). Yet William of Tyre (1. i. c. 6, p. 633) asserts that Jerusalem was thirty-eight years in the hands of the Turks; and an Arabic chronicle, quoted by Pagi (tom. iv. p. 202), supposes that the city was reduced by a Carizmian general to the obedience of the caliph of Bagdad, A.H. 463, A.D. 1070. These early dates are not very compatible with the general history of Asia; and I am sure that, as late as A.D. 1064, the regnum Babylonicum (of Cairo) still prevailed in Palestine) Baronius, A.D. 1064, No. 56). [See Mujir ad-Din, Histoire de Jérusalem, transl. Sauvaire (1876), p. 69-70; who states that Atsiz ibn Auk (the Khwarizmian governor of Damascus) took Jerusalem in 1070-1 and the Abbasid caliph was proclaimed there two years later, and the Ortokids expelled in 1096.]

territory was entrusted or abandoned to the emir Ortok, the chief of a tribe 82 of Turkmans, whose children, after their expulsion from Palestine, formed two dynasties on the borders of Armenia and Assyria.83 The Oriental Christians and the Latin pilgrims deplored a revolution, which, instead of the regular government and old alliance of the caliphs, imposed on their necks the iron yoke of the strangers of the north.84 In his court and camp the great sultan had adopted in some degree the arts and manners of Persia; but the body of the Turkish nation, and more especially the pastoral tribes, still breathed the fierceness of the desert. From Nice to Jerusalem, the western countries of Asia were a scene of foreign and domestic hostility; and the shepherds of Palestine, who held a precarious sway on a doubtful frontier, had neither leisure nor capacity to await the slow profits of commercial and religious freedom. The pilgrims, who, through innumerable perils, had reached the gates of Jerusalem, were the victims of private rapine or public oppression, and often sunk under the pressure of famine and disease, before they were permitted to salute the holy sepulchre. A spirit of native barbarism, or recent zeal, prompted the Turkmans to insult the clergy of every sect; the patriarch was dragged by the hair along the pavement and cast into a dungeon, to extort a ransom from the sympathy of his flock; and the divine worship in the church of the Resurrection was often disturbed by the savage rudeness of its masters. The pathetic tale excited the millions of the West to march under the standard of the Cross to the relief of the Holy Land; and yet how trifling is the sum of these accumulated evils, if compared with the single act of the sacrilege of Hakem, which had been so patiently endured by the Latin Christians! A slighter provocation inflamed the more irascible temper of their descendants: a new spirit had arisen of religious chivalry and papal dominion; a nerve was touched of exquisite feeling; and the sensation vibrated to the heart of Europe.

82 [Family.] 83 De Guignes, Hist. des Huns, tom. i. p. 249-252. 84 Willerm. Tyr. l. i. c. 8, p. 634, who strives hard to magnify the Christian grievances. The Turks exacted an aureus from each pilgrim! The caphar of the Franks is now fourteen dollars; and Europe does not complain of this voluntary tax.

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CHAPTER LVIII

Origin and Numbers of the First Crusade-Characters of the Latin Princes-Their March to Constantinople-Policy of the Greek Emperor Alexius-Conquest of Nice, Antioch, and Jerusalem, by the Franks-Deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre-Godfrey of Bouillon, first King of Jerusalem -Institutions of the French or Latin Kingdom

A

1

crusade.

1099. Peter

BOUT twenty years after the conquest of Jerusalem by The first the Turks, the holy sepulchre was visited by an hermit A.D. 1095of the name of Peter, a native of Amiens, in the pro- the Hermit vince of Picardy in France. His resentment and sympathy were excited by his own injuries and the oppression of the Christian name; he mingled his tears with those of the patriarch, and earnestly inquired if no hopes of relief could be entertained from the Greek emperors of the East. The patriarch exposed the vices and weakness of the successors of Constantine. "I will rouse," exclaimed the hermit, "the martial nations of Europe in your cause;" and Europe was obedient to the call of the hermit. The astonished patriarch

dismissed him with epistles of credit and complaint; and no sooner did he land at Bari than Peter hastened to kiss the feet of the Roman Pontiff. His stature was small, his appearance contemptible; but his eye was keen and lively; and he possessed that vehemence of speech which seldom fails to impart the persuasion of the soul. He was born of a gentleman's

1 Whimsical enough is the origin of the name of Picards, and from thence of Picardie, which does not date earlier than A.D. 1200. It was an academical joke, an epithet first applied to the quarrelsome humour of those students, in the university of Paris, who came from the frontier of France and Flanders (Valesii Notitia Galliarum, p. 447; Longuerue, Description de la France, p. 54).

2 William of Tyre (1. i. c. 11, p. 637, 638) thus describes the hermit: Pusillus, persona contemptibilis, vivacis ingenii, et oculum habens perspicacem gratumque, et sponte fluens ei non deerat eloquium. See Albert Aquensis, p. 185. Guibert, p. 482. Anna Comnena in Alexiad. 1. x. p. 284 [c. 5], &c. with Ducange's notes, p. 349. [In the writers who are contemporary with the First Crusade there is not a

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