From these conversations Peter went again and again to pray in the church of the Resurrection, petitioning ardently for aid in the great undertaking before him. On one of these occasions it is said that he fell asleep,[93] and beheld the Saviour in a vision, who exhorted him to hasten on his journey, and persevere in his design. Without searching for any thing preternatural, the vision is not at all difficult to believe, though the place of its occurrence seems to have been fictitious. Nothing could be more natural than for Peter the Hermit, with his mind full of the mission he was about to undertake, to dream that the Being in whose cause he believed himself engaged appeared to encourage him, and to hasten his enterprise; and it is easy to conceive that, with full confidence in this manifestation of heavenly favour, he should set forth upon his journey with enthusiastic zeal. Bearing the letter of the patriarch, Peter now returned in haste to Italy, and sought out the pope, to declare the miseries of the church in the Holy Land, and to propose the means of its deliverance. Urban II., who then occupied the apostolic chair, had inherited from Gregory wars and contestations with the emperor Henry IV., and was at the same time embroiled with the weak and luxurious Philip I. of France, on the subject of that king's adulterous intercourse with Bertrade. He, as well as Gregory, had taken refuge in Apulia and Calabria, and had thrown himself upon the protection of the famous Robert Guiscard, who readily granted him the aid of that powerful mind which made the utmost parts of the earth tremble.[94] It does not correctly appear at what place Urban sojourned at the time of Peter's arrival in Italy.[95] His whole support was, evidently, still in the family of Guiscard; and it seems that with Boemond, Prince of Tarentum, the gallant and chivalrous son of Robert, he first held council upon the hermit's[96] great and interesting proposal, before he determined on the line of conduct to be pursued. One of the historians of the crusades,[97] attributing perhaps somewhat too much the spirit of modern politics to an age whose genius was of very different quality, supposes that the course determined on by the pope and his ally was, in fact, principally a shrewd plot to fix Urban firmly in the Vatican, and to forward Boemond's ambitious views in Greece. It seems to me, however, that such a supposition is perfectly irreconcilable with the subsequent conduct of either. The pope shortly after threw himself into the midst of his enemies, to hold a council on the subject of the crusades; and Boemond abandoned every thing in Europe to carry on the holy war in Palestine. It is much more natural to imagine that the spirit of their age governed both the prelate and the warrior--the enthusiasm of religion the one, and the enthusiasm of Chivalry the other.