At the time of his election, Godfrey was in the fulness of his strength and vigour, about forty years of age. He was tall, but not above the stature of ordinarily tall men; his countenance was handsome and attractive; and his beard and hair were a reddish brown. In manners he was courteous, and in living, simple and unostentatious. The first king of Christian Jerusalem, the only one of all the Crusaders whose life was pure, whose motives were disinterested, whose end and aim was the glory of God, was also the only king who came near the standard set up by Robert of Flanders, as one who should be foremost in virtue as well as in arms. The kingdom over which he ruled was a kingdom without frontiers, save those which the sword had made. Right and left of the path of the Crusaders, between Cæsarea and Jerusalem, the Saracens had fallen back in terror of the advancing army. The space left free was all that Godfrey could call his own. To the north, Bohemond held Antioch, Baldwin, Edessa, and Tancred was soon to occupy Galilee. Egypt threatened in the south, wild Bedawín in the east, and on the north and north-west were gathering, disorganized as yet, but soon to assume the form of armies, the fanatic Mohammedans, maddened by their loss. It must be remembered that during the whole eighty years of its existence the kingdom of Jerusalem was never for one single moment free from war and war’s alarms. At this time the joy of the soldiers was increased by the announcement made by a Christian inhabitant of Jerusalem that he had buried in the city, before the Crusaders came, a cross which contained a piece of the True Cross. This relic was dug up after a solemn procession, and borne in state to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where it was intrusted to the care of Arnold, who had been appointed to act in the place of the patriarch. The appetite for relics had grown _en mangeant_. Besides the holy lance, and this piece of the True Cross, every knight, almost every common soldier, had been enabled to enrich himself with something precious—a bone or a piece of cloth, which had once belonged to a saint, a nail which had helped to crucify him, or the axe which had beheaded him. And there can be no doubt that the possession of these relics most materially helped to inspire them with courage. While the princes were still deliberating over the choice of a king, came the news that the Egyptian Caliph had assembled together a vast army, which was even then marching across the desert under the command of a renegade Armenian named Afdhal. He it was who had taken Jerusalem from the Turks only eleven months before the siege by the Crusaders. The army contained not only the flower of the Egyptian troops, but also many thousands of Mohammedan warriors from Damascus and Bagdad, eager to wipe out the disgrace of their defeats.