In the autumn of 1204 Boniface set out to conquer his Greek dominions. The King of Salonika belonged to a family, which was no stranger to the ways of the Orient. One of his brothers had married the daughter of the Greek Emperor Manuel I; another brother and a nephew were Kings of Jerusalem—a vain dignity which has descended from them, together with the Marquisate of Montferrat, to the present Italian dynasty. Married to the affable widow of the Greek Emperor Isaac II, Boniface was a sympathetic figure to the Greeks, who had speedily flocked in numbers to his side, and several of whom accompanied him on his march through Greece. Among these was the bastard Michael Angelos, of whom we shall hear later as the founder of a new dynasty. With the King of Salonika there went too a motley crowd of Crusaders in quest of fiefs, men of many nationalities, Lombards, Flemings, Frenchmen and Germans. There were Guillaume de Champlitte, a grandson of the Count of Champagne; Othon de la Roche, son of a Burgundian noble; Jacques d’Avesnes, son of a Flemish crusader who had been at the siege of Acre, and his two nephews, Jacques and Nicholas de St Omer; Berthold von Katzenellenbogen, a Rhenish warrior who had given the signal for setting fire to Constantinople; the Marquess Guido Pallavicini, youngest son of a nobleman from near Parma, who had gone to Greece because at home every common man could hale him before the courts; Thomas de Stromoncourt, and Ravano dalle Carceri of Verona, brother of the _podestà_ Realdo, whose name still figures on the _Casa dei Mercanti_ there. Just as the modern general takes with him a band of war-correspondents to chronicle his achievements, so Boniface was accompanied by Rambaud de Vaqueiras, a troubadour from Provence, who afterwards boasted in one of the letters in verse which he addressed to his patron, that he “had helped him to conquer the Empire of the East and the Kingdom of Salonika, the island of Pelops and the Duchy of Athens.” Such were the men at whose head the Marquess of Montferrat marched through the classic vale of Tempe, the route of so many armies, into the great fertile plain of Thessaly.