This conduct greatly irritated Alexius, and he made several efforts to bring Tancred back without success; but the arrival of Raimond de St. Gilles, Count of Toulouse, with the immense army of the Languedocian crusaders, soon called the attention of the emperor in another direction. The Count of Toulouse has been very variously represented, and no doubt can exist that he was a bold and skilful leader, a courageous and resolute man. He was, it is said, intolerant and tenacious of reverence, fond of pomp and display, and withal revengeful, though his revenge was always of a bold and open character. Not so his avarice, which led him to commit as many pitiful meannesses as ever sprang from that basest of desires. He was proud, too, beyond all question; but where his covetousness did not overbalance the other great principle of his nature, he maintained, in his general conduct, that line of moral firmness which dignifies pride, and raises it almost to a virtue. Under the banners of the Count of Toulouse marched the gay Chivalry of all the south of France--Gascons, and Provençals, and Auvergnats--people, in whose hearts the memory of Saracen invasions from Spain was still fresh; and whose quick and passionate dispositions had at once embraced with enthusiasm the holy war. A glorious train of lords and knights followed their noble chief, and the legate of the pope, as well as several other bishops, gave religious dignity to this body of the crusaders. The count directed his course by Sclavonia towards Greece, notwithstanding that the season was unfavourable, as he set out in winter.[189] During the journey he displayed, in the highest degree, every quality of a great commander. Innumerable difficulties, on which we cannot pause, assailed him even during the first part of his march through the barren and inhospitable passes which lay between his own fair land and Greece. When he had reached the dominions of Alexius, whose call for aid he had not forgotten, the count imagined, to use the words of his chaplain, that he was in his native land, so much did he rely upon the welcome and protection of the Greek emperor. But he, like the chiefs who had preceded him, was deceived, and the same series of harassing persecutions awaited him on the way. An act of seasonable[190] but barbarous vengeance, however, in mutilating and disfiguring several of the prisoners, so much frightened the savage hordes which the emperor had cast upon his track, that the rest of the journey passed in comparative tranquillity. Like those who had gone before, the count was permitted to enter the imperial city with but few attendants.