[Illustration: Fig. 101.--Reception of Gautier-sans-Avoir by the King of Hungary, who permits him to pass through his territory with the Crusaders.--From a Miniature in the “Histoire des Empereurs,” a Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century (Library of the Arsenal, Paris).] The spring of the year 1096 witnessed the first departure of the Crusaders, in two numerous bodies, under the orders of Peter the Hermit himself, and of a poor but valiant warrior, Gautier-sans-Avoir (Fig. 101). But these undisciplined masses, forced to support themselves on their road by pillage, were dispersed and nearly destroyed by the nations through whose countries they had to pass, and who were ruined by their advent as they might have been by an army of locusts. Only a few thousand ever reached Constantinople, when the Emperor Alexis I., who had summoned the Western Christians to his aid against the Turks, succoured them, and enabled them to await the arrival of the more regular expeditions, which had started three months later under Godefroy de Bouillon. [Illustration: Fig. 102.--Taking of Nicæa by the Crusaders, in 1097; from a Window ordered by the Abbé Suger for the Church of the Abbey of St. Denis, and now destroyed.--From the “Monuments de la Monarchic Française,” by Montfaucon (Twelfth Century).] It was then only that the real Crusade, that is to say, the actual war against the unbelievers, commenced. In March, 1097, the Christian army crossed the Bosphorus from Thrace, seized Nicæa (Fig. 102), penetrated into Syria, and laid siege to the important town of Antioch, which by an act of treachery was forced to surrender in June, 1098. In the spring of the following year the soldiers of Christ entered Palestine, but it was not till the 15th of July, 1099, that the holy city fell into their hands, and that Godefroy de Bouillon (Figs. 103 and 104), elected king by the principal leaders of the victorious army, under the modest title of Baron of the Holy Sepulchre, founded the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem. [Illustration: Fig. 103.--Godefroy de Bouillon, crowned with the Instruments of our Lord’s Passion.--From a Woodcut of the end of the Fifteenth Century, in the Burgundian Library, Brussels.] [Illustration: Fig. 104.--Tomb of Godefroy de Bouillon, as it existed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, with the inscription:--“Hic jacet inclitus Godfridus de Bulion, qui totam istam terram acquisivit cultui Christiano, cujus anima cum Christo requiescat. Amen.” (“Here lies the illustrious Godefroy de Bouillon, who won all this Holy Land to the worship of Christ. May his soul rest with Jesus.”)--Monument of the early part of the Twelfth Century, now destroyed, from a Drawing taken on the spot in 1828, now in the possession of M. Ambr. Firmin-Didot.]