e world. When Hildebrand the monk, mounting the
papal throne as Gregory VII, excommunicated the German Emperor, Henry
IV, he placed the imperial crown upon the head of none other than
Rudolph of Rheinfelden, the governor of Transjurane Burgundy and of the
province of Gruyere. After Henry, forced to submission, had scaled the
icy heights of the Alps to prostrate himself before Hildebrand at
Canossa, after Rudolph had been killed in battle by Henry's supporter
Godfrey de Bouillon, Hildebrand's pupil and successor Urban II,
journeying to Clermont in Cisjurane Burgundy, summoned all Europe in
torrents of fiery eloquence to rise and deliver the Holy Land from the
power of the Saracens. Unmarked in the churchly parchments which alone
record the history of these times, were the successors of Turimbert; but
in the period of the first Crusade, Guillaume I, of the succeeding and
unbroken line of Gruyere counts, appears as the head of a numerous and
powerful family preeminent for their loyalty to the church. Among the
shining names of chivalry immortalized in the annals of the Holy wars
are those of Guillaume, of his son Ulric, chanoine of the Church at
Lausanne, and of his nephews Hughes and Turin.

Not with Peter the Hermit, the hallucinated dwarf whose sobbing
eloquence had led an innumerable motley host of unnamed peasants to
certain disaster in the deserts of the East, went the hundred Gruyerian
soldiers led by Guillaume, but with the knights and priests of Romand
Switzerland, the Burgundian French and Lombard nobles who swelled the
fabled hosts of Godfrey de Bouillon. With gifts of lands to churches and
to priories and with the blessing of the lord bishop of their county the
Gruyere pilgrims, eager to battle for the holy cause, obeyed with ardor
the cry of _Dieu le veut, Diex le volt_, and leaving their country,
faced without faltering, dangers and distant lands and carried their
scarlet banner with its silver crane, bravely among the bravest.

"The young bergeres of Gruyere," so runs the chronicle, "barred the
gates of the city to prevent their departure, by force the gates were
burst, and the poor maidens wept as they listened to the
standard-bearers cry, a hundred times repeated, "_En Avant la Grue,
S'agit d'aller, reviendra qui pourra._" How wide is the ocean we must
cross," they asked as they galloped down the valleys, "as wide as the
lake we must pass when we go to pray to our Lady of Lausanne?"

Tasso, the poet of t