matia [59] and Sclavonia. The weather was a
perpetual fog; the land was mountainous and desolate; the natives were
either fugitive or hostile: loose in their religion and government, they
refused to furnish provisions or guides; murdered the stragglers; and
exercised by night and day the vigilance of the count, who derived
more security from the punishment of some captive robbers than from his
interview and treaty with the prince of Scodra. [60] 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. [61] 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. [62] 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. [63] [631]

[Footnote 581: Carloman (or Calmany) demanded the brother of Godfrey as
hostage but Count Baldwin refus