about Antioch and disputes about Marrah!  We will take good care there be no quarrel touching this town; come, throw we down its walls; restore we peace amongst the princes, and set we the count at liberty:  when Marrah no longer exists, he will no longer fear to lose it.”  The multitude rushed to surround Marrah, and worked so eagerly at the demolition of its ramparts that the count of Toulouse, touched by this popular feeling as if it were a proof of the divine will, himself put the finishing touch to the work of destruction and ordered the speedy departure of the army.  At their head marched he, barefooted, with his clergy and the bishop of Akbar, all imploring the mercy of God and the protection of the saints.  After him marched Tancred with forty knights and many foot.  “Who then may resist this people,” said Turks and Saracens one to another, “so stubborn and cruel, whom, for the space of a year, nor famine, nor the sword, nor any other danger could cause to abandon the siege of Antioch, and who now are feeding upon human flesh?” In fact a rumor had spread that, in their extreme distress for want of provisions, the crusaders had eaten corpses of Saracens found in the moats of Marrah.

Several of the chiefs, hitherto undecided, now followed the popular impulse, whilst others still hesitated.  But on the approach of spring, 1099, more than eight months after the capture of Antioch, Godfrey of Bouillon, his brother, Eustace of Boulogne, Robert of Flanders, and their following, likewise began to march.  Bohemond, after having accompanied them as far as Laodicea, left them with a promise of rejoining them before Jerusalem, and returned to Antioch, where he remained.  Fresh crusaders arrived from Flanders, Holland, and England, and amongst them the Saxon prince, Edgar Atheling, who had for a brief interval been king of England, between the death of Harold and the coronation of William the Conqueror.  The army pursued its way, pretty slowly, still stopping from time to time to besiege towns, which they took and which the chiefs continued to dispute for amongst themselves.  Envoys from the khalif of Egypt, the new holder of Jerusalem, arrived in the crusaders’ camp, with presents and promises from their master.  They had orders to offer forty thousand pieces of gold to Godfrey, sixty thousand to Bohemond, the most dreaded by the Mussulmans of all the crusaders, and other gifts to divers other chiefs.  Aboul-Kacem further promised liberty of pilgrimage and exercise of the Christian religion in Jerusalem; only the Christians must not enter, unless unarmed.  At this proposal the crusader chiefs cried out with indignation, and declared to the Egyptian envoys that they were going to hasten their march upon Jerusalem, threatening at the same time to push forward to the borders of the Nile.  At the end of the month of flay, 1099, they were all masse upon the frontiers of Phoenicia and Palestine, numbering according to the most sanguine calculations, only fifty thousand fighting men.