disorder and confusion. Impecunious as always, he had been obliged to pawn the duchy to his brother William Rufus in order to raise the funds for the expedition. With him went his fighting uncle, Odo of Bayeux, and the duke’s chaplain Arnulf, more famous in due time as patriarch of Jerusalem. It does not appear that Robert was an element of special strength in the crusading host, although he fought by the side of the other leaders at Nicæa and Antioch and at the taking of Jerusalem. He spent the winter pleasantly in the south of Italy on his way to the East, so that he reached Constantinople after most of the others had gone ahead, and he slipped away from the hardships of the siege of Antioch to take his ease amidst the pleasant fare and Cyprian wines of Laodicea[67]--Robert was always something of a Laodicean! When his vows as a crusader had been fulfilled at the Holy Sepulchre, he withdrew from the stern work of the new kingdom of Jerusalem and started home, bringing back a Norman bride of the south for the blessing of St. Michael of the Peril, and hanging up his standard in his mother’s abbey-church at Caen. Legend, however, was kind to Robert: before long he had killed a giant Saracen in single combat and refused the crown of the Latin kingdom because he felt himself unworthy, until he became the hero of a whole long-forgotten cycle of romance. The real Norman heroes of the First Crusade must be sought elsewhere, again among the descendants of Tancred of Hauteville. When Robert Curthose and his companions reached the south on their outward journey, they found the Norman armies engaged in the siege of Amalfi under the great Count Roger and Guiscard’s eldest son Bohemond, a fair-haired, deep-chested son of the north, “so tall in stature that he stood above the tallest men by nearly a cubit.” The fresh enterprise caught the imagination of Bohemond, who had lost the greater part of his father’s heritage to his brother Roger Borsa and saw the possibility of a new realm in the East; and, cutting a great cloak into crosses for himself and his followers, he withdrew from the siege and began preparations for the expedition to Palestine. Among those who bound themselves to the great undertaking were five grandsons and two great-grandsons of Tancred of Hauteville, chief among them Bohemond’s nephew Tancred, whose loyalty and prowess were to be proved on many a desperate battle-field of Syria. Commanding what was perhaps the strongest contingent in the crusading army and profiting by the experience of his campaigns in the Balkans in his father’s reign, Bohemond proved the most vigorous and resourceful leader of the First Crusade. His object, however, had little connection with the relief of the Eastern Empire or the liberation of the Holy City, but was directed toward the formation of a great Syrian principality for himself, such as the other members of his family had created in Italy and Sicily. As the centre for such a