The ordinary crusading route passed through the Catholic kingdom of Hungary to Bulgaria and thence to Constantinople, where the various companies of armed pilgrims had agreed to meet. It was with the entry into Bulgaria, whose ‘orthodox’[14] king was secretly hostile to the pilgrims, that trouble began. Food and drink were grudged by the suspicious natives even to those willing to pay their way; whereupon the utterly undisciplined forces could not be prevented from retaliating on this inhospitality by fire and pillage. A species of warfare ensued in which Latin stragglers were cut off and murdered by mountain robbers, while the many ‘undesirables’, who had joined the crusaders more in hope of loot and adventure than of pardon, brought an evil reputation on their comrades by their greed and the brutality they exhibited towards the peasants. Reason enough was here to account for the pathetic failure of the advance-guard of crusaders, the poor, the fanatic, the disreputable, drawn together in no settled organization and with no leaders of military repute. Alexius Commenus, who had demanded an army, not a rabble, dealt characteristically with the problem by shipping these first crusaders in haste and unsupported to Asia Minor. There he left them to fall a prey to the Turks, disease, and their own inadequacy, so that few ever saw the coasts of their native lands again. If the First Crusade began in tragedy it ended in triumph, through the arrival in Constantinople of a second force from the West, this time of disciplined troops under the chief military leaders of Europe. Alexius Commenus had good cause to remember the prowess of his old enemy, Bohemund, son of Robert Guiscard, who rode at the head of his Sicilian Normans, while other names of repute were Godfrey de Bouillon, Duke of Lorraine, and Robert, the eldest son of William the Conqueror, with Archbishop Odo of Bayeux, his uncle. ‘Some of the crusaders’, wrote Anna Commena, ‘were guileless men and women, marching in all simplicity to worship at the tomb of Christ; but there were others of a more wicked kind, to wit Bohemund and the like: such men had but one object--to obtain possession of the imperial city.’ These suspicions, perhaps well founded, were natural to the daughter of the untrustworthy Alexius Commenus, who trusted nobody. Hating to entertain at his court so many well-armed and often insolent strangers, yet fearing in his heart to aid their advance lest they should set up a rival kingdom to his own, the Emperor, having cajoled the leaders into promises of homage for any conquests they might make, at length transported them and their followers across the Hellespont.