Catalonia and Castile furnished a great number of Crusaders: the king of Portugal, and James, king of Arragon, took the cross. Dona Sancha, one of the daughters of the Arragonese prince, had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and had died in the hospital of St. John, after devoting many years to the service of pilgrims and the sick. James had several times conquered the Moors; but neither his exploits against the infidels, nor the remembrance of a daughter who had fallen a martyr to Christian charity, could sustain his piety against the attacks of his earthly passions, and his shameful connection with Berengaria scandalized Christendom. The pope, to whom he communicated his design of going to the Holy Land, replied that Jesus Christ could not accept the services of a prince _who crucified him every day by his sins_. The king of Arragon, by a strange combination of opposite sentiments, would neither renounce Berengaria nor give up his project of going to fight against the infidels in the East. He renewed his oath in a great assembly at Toledo, at which the ambassadors of the khan of Tartary and of the king of Armenia were present. We read in a Spanish dissertation[26] upon the crusades, that Alphonso the Wise, who was not able to go to the East himself, furnished the king of Arragon with a hundred men and a hundred thousand marvedis in gold; the order of St. James, and other orders of knighthood, who had often accompanied the conqueror of the Moors in his battles, supplied him also with men and money. The city of Barcelona offered him eighty thousand Barcellonese sols, and Majorca fifty thousand silver sols, with two equipped vessels. The fleet, composed of thirty large ships and a great number of smaller craft, in which were embarked eight hundred men-at-arms and two thousand foot-soldiers, set out from Barcelona on the 4th of September, 1268. When they arrived off Majorca, the fleet was dispersed by a tempest; one part of the vessels gained the coasts of Asia, another took shelter in the ports of Sardinia; the vessel the king of Arragon was on board of was cast upon the coast of Languedoc. The arrival at Ptolemaïs of the Arragonese Crusaders, commanded by a natural son of James, restored some hopes to the Franks of Palestine. An envoy from the king of Arragon, according to the Oriental chronicles, repaired to the khan of the Tartars, to announce to him that the Spanish monarch would soon arrive with his army. But whether he was detained by the charms of Berengaria, or whether the tempest that dispersed his fleet made him believe that Heaven was averse to his pilgrimage, James did not arrive. His departure, in which he appeared to despise the counsels of the Holy See, had been severely censured; and his return, which was attributed to his disgraceful passion, met with an equal share of blame. Murmurs likewise arose against the king of Portugal, who had levied the tenths, but did not leave his kingdom.