Of very different stuff was Raymond, Count of Toulouse, the first to volunteer but the last of the Crusading chiefs actually to set out for the East. He was now over fifty years of age, and, declaring that that was the last journey he should ever make, he {77} determined to be well prepared. With the idea of choosing a route as yet untried by his predecessors, Raymond took his way through Lombardy into the desolate country of Dalmatia and Slavonia. "It was already winter," says a writer of the time, "when Raymond's men were toiling over the barren mountains of Dalmatia, where for three weeks we saw neither beast nor bird. For almost forty days did we struggle on through mists so thick that we could actually feel them, and brush them aside with a motion of the hand." The weak, the sick, and the old suffered terribly from the attacks of the wild natives upon their rear; the bareness of the country gave no chance of even purchasing food, much less of foraging. It was with intense relief that they entered the Emperor's domains, "for here," writes one of the travellers, "we believed that we were in our own country; for we thought that Alexios and his followers were our brothers-in-arms." In this belief the troops of Raymond found themselves mistaken, for they were harassed on all sides by the Emperor's soldiers. Alexios, as usual, disclaimed all responsibility, and begged the Count to hasten to Constantinople. There, to his disgust, the old warrior found that Godfrey, Bohemond, and the other leaders had all taken the oath of fealty, and were very anxious that he should follow their example. This Raymond emphatically refused to do. "Be it far from me," said he to Alexios, "that I should take any lord for this way save Christ only, for whose sake I have come hither. If thou art willing to take the cross also, and accompany us to Jerusalem, I and my men and all that I have will be at thy disposal." Meantime came news to the Count that the army {78} he had left when he accepted the call to Constantinople, had been attacked by the troops of the perfidious Emperor, whose aim, possibly, was to frighten Raymond into submission; but he had quite mistaken his man. Furious at this treachery, Raymond called upon his colleagues to join him in an attack upon the capital. But here he met with unexpected opposition. Bohemond, indeed, went so far as to threaten that if an open conflict took place, he would be found on the side of the Emperor, and even Godfrey urged most strongly that he should overlook everything rather than weaken their cause by fighting against fellow-Christians.