them and get them to mount with him.  Up they mount; that and two other neighboring towers are given up to them; the three gates are opened, and the crusaders rush in.  When day appeared, on the 3d of June, 1098, the streets of Antioch were full of corpses; for the Turks, surprised, had been slaughtered without resistance or had fled into the country.  The citadel, filled with those who had been able to take refuge there, still held out; but the entire city was in the power of the crusaders, and the banner of Bohemond floated on an elevated spot over against the citadel.

In spite of their triumph the crusaders were not so near marching on Jerusalem as Bohemond had promised.  Everywhere, throughout Syria and Mesopotamia, the Mussulmans were rising to go and deliver Antioch; an immense army was already in motion; there were eleven hundred thousand men according to Matthew of Edessa, six hundred and sixty thousand according to Foucher of Chartres, three hundred thousand according to Raoul of Caen, and only two hundred thousand according to William of Tyre and Albert of Aix.  The discrepancy in the figures is a sufficient proof of their untruthfulness.  The last number was enough to disquiet the crusaders, already much reduced by so many marches, battles, sufferings, and desertions.  An old Mussulman warrior, celebrated at that time throughout Western Asia, Corbogha, sultan of Mossoul (hard by what was ancient Nineveh), commanded all the hostile forces, and four days after the capture of Antioch he was already completely round the place, enclosing the crusaders within the walls of which they had just become the masters.  They were thus and all on a sudden besieged in their turn, having even in the very midst of them, in the citadel which still held out, a hostile force.  Whilst they had been besieging Antioch, the Emperor Alexis Comnenus had begun to march with an army to get his share in their successes, and was advancing into Asia Minor when he heard that the Mussulmans, in immense numbers, were investing the Christian army in Antioch, and not in a condition, it was said, to hold out long.  The emperor immediately retraced his steps towards Constantinople, and the crusaders found that they had no Greek aid to hope for.  The blockade, becoming stricter day by day, soon brought about a horrible famine in Antioch.  Instead of repeating here, in general terms, the ordinary descriptions of this cruel scourge, we will reproduce its particular and striking features as they have been traced out by contemporary chroniclers.  “The Christian people,” says William of Tyre, “had recourse before long, to procure themselves any food whatever, to all sorts of shameful means.  Nobles, free men, did not blush to hungrily stretch out the hand to nobodies, asking with troublesome pertinacity for what was too often refused.  There were seen the very strongest, those whom their signal valor had rendered illustrious in the midst of the army, now supported on crutches, dragging themselves half-dead