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294 THE DECLINE AND FALL issued some naked and savage fanatics, ferocious at home, but unwarlike abroad. Had not superstition condemned the sacri- legious prudence of depriving the poorest or weakest Christian of the merit of the pilgrimage, the useless crowd, with mouths but without hands, might have been stationed in the Greek empire, till their companions had opened and secured the way of the Lord. A small remnant of the pilgrims, who passed the Bosphorus, was permitted to visit the holy sepulchre. Their northern constitution was scorched by the rays, and infected by the vapours, of a Syrian sun. They consumed, with heedless prodigality, their stores of water and provisions ; their numbers exhausted the inland country ; the sea was remote, the Greeks were unfriendly, and the Christians of every sect fled before the voracious and cruel rapine of their brethren. In the dire neces- sity of famine, they sometimes roasted and devoured the flesh of their infant or adult captives. Among the Turks and Saracens, the idolaters of Europe were rendered more odious by the name and reputation of cannibals ; the spies who introduced them- selves into the kitchen of Bohemond were shewn several human bodies turning on the spit ; and the artful Norman encouraged a report, which increased at the same time the abhorrence and the terror of the infidels. ^^ Siege of I have expatiated with pleasure on the first steps of the i(^! May 14- crusaders, as they paint the manners and character of Europe ; ^^ but I shall abridge the tedious and uniform narrative of their blind achievements, which were performed by strength and are described by ignorance. From their first station in the neigh- bourhood of Nicomedia, they advanced in successive divisions, passed the contracted limit of the Greek empire, opened a road through the hills, and commenced, by the siege of his capital, their pious warfare against the Turkish sultan. His kingdom of Roum extended from the Hellespont to the confines of Syria and barred the pilgrimage of Jerusalem ; his name was Kilidge-Arslan, or Soliman,5-' of the race of Seljuk, and son 81 This cannibal hunger, sometimes real, more frequently an artifice or a lie, may be found in Anna Comnena (Alexias, 1. x. p. 288 [c. 7]), Guibert (p. 546), Radulph. Cadom. (c. 97). The stratagem is related by the author of the Gesta Francoruni, the monk Robert Baldric, and Raymond des Agiles, in the siege and famine of Antioch. [In the Romance of Richard Coeur de Lion (edited by Weber) Richard eats the heads of Saracens.] 8'- His Musulman appellation of Soliman is used by the Latins, and his char- acter is highly embellished by Tasso. His Turkish name of Kilidge-Arslan (a.H. 485-500, A.D. 1192-1206; see de Guignes's Tables, torn. i. p. 245) is employed by the Orientals, and with some corruption by the Greeks ; but little more than his name can be found in the Mahometan writers, who are dry and sulky on the