Duke Godfrey, the son of count Eustace of Boulogne, had two brothers: Baldwin, who ruled Edessa, and succeeded his brother as king of Jerusalem, and who still rules there; and Eustace, who rules in the county he inherited from his father. They had a powerful father, who was competent in worldly affairs, and their mother was, if I am not mistaken, a learned Lotharingian aristocrat, but most remarkable for her innate serenity and great devotion to God. The joys she received from such exemplary sons were due, we believe, to her profound religious belief. Godfrey, about whom we are now speaking, had received a duchy in Lotharingia as his maternal heritage. All three, in no way inferior to their mother in honesty, flourished in great military deeds, as well as in the restraint of their behavior. The glorious woman used to say, when she marveled at the result of the journey and the success of her sons, that she had heard from the mouth of her son the duke a prediction of the outcome long before the beginning of the expedition. For he said that he wanted to go to Jerusalem not as a simple pilgrim, as others had done, but forcefully, with a large army, if he could raise one. In accordance with this divinely inspired intuition, fortune later smiled on his project. The three brothers, heedless of the great honors they already had, set out on the journey. But even as Godfrey was wiser than his other brothers, so he was equipped with a larger army. He was joined by Baldwin, Count of Mons, son of Robert, the paternal uncle of the young count of Flanders. With the splendid knightly ceremony and spectacle, the band of powerful young men entered the land of the Hungarians, in possession of what Peter was unable to obtain: control over his army. Two days before Christmas, the first of the French leaders to arrive, they reached the city of Constantinople, but their lodgings were outside the city. The treacherous emperor, frightened when he heard that the brilliant duke had arrived, offered formal, but grudging signs of respect, and offered him permission to dwell in front of the walls, in a suburb of the city. And so, after accepting the emperor's offer, the duke and each of his men sent their own squires to get straw and whatever was necessary for their horses from wherever they could. While they were thinking that they could go safely and securely wherever they wished, the foul prince secretly ordered the men around him to kill, without making any distinctions, all of the men who were carrying out the duke's instructions, wherever they found them. When Baldwin, the duke's brother, found out about this, he set an ambush; when he discovered the Turcopolitans violently attacking his own men, he forcefully attacked them, as was right. And with God's favor he won such a victory that he captured sixty of them; he killed some of them and handed others over to his brother the duke. When news of this event reached the