[Footnote 17:  I give Sismondi’s idea as it stands, but there was no question in the matter of monotony or of danger.  The journey was made on foot because it was the most laborious way, and the most humble.]

[Footnote 18:  See farther on, p. 110, the analogies with English arrangements of the same kind.]

“In one of the earliest years of the eleventh century, about forty of these religious travellers, having returned from the Holy Land, chanced to have met together in Salerno at the moment when a small Saracen fleet came to insult the town, and demand of it a military contribution.  The inhabitants of South Italy, at this time, abandoned to the delights of their enchanted climate, had lost nearly all military courage.  The Salernitani saw with astonishment forty Norman knights, after having demanded horses and arms from the Prince of Salerno, order the gates of the town to be opened, charge the Saracens fearlessly, and put them to flight.  The Salernitani followed, however, the example given them by these brave warriors, and those of the Mussulmans who escaped their swords were forced to re-embark in all haste.

“The Prince of Salerno, Guaimar III., tried in vain to keep the warrior-pilgrims at his court:  but at his solicitation other companies established themselves on the rocks of Salerno and Amalfi, until, on Christmas Day, 1041, (exactly a quarter of a century before the coronation here at Westminster of the Conqueror,) they gathered their scattered forces at Aversa,[19] twelve groups of them under twelve chosen counts, and all under the Lombard Ardoin, as commander-in-chief.”  Be so good as to note that,—­a marvellous key-note of historical fact about the unjesting Lombards, I cannot find the total Norman number:  the chief contingent, under William of the Iron Arm, the son of Tancred of Hauteville, was only of three hundred knights; the Count of Aversa’s troop, of the same number, is named as an important part of the little army—­admit it for ten times Tancred’s, three thousand men in all.  At Aversa, these three thousand men form, coolly on Christmas Day, 1041, the design of—­well, I told you they didn’t design much, only, now we’re here, we may as well, while we’re about it,—­overthrow the Greek empire!  That was their little game!—­a Christmas mumming to purpose.  The following year, the whole of Apulia was divided among them.

[Footnote 19:  In Lombardy, south of Pavia.]

I will not spoil, by abstracting, the magnificent following history of Robert Guiscard, the most wonderful soldier of that or any other time:  I leave you to finish it for yourselves, only asking you to read together with it, the sketch, in Turner’s history of the Anglo-Saxons, of Alfred’s long previous war with the Norman Hasting; pointing out to you for foci of character in each contest, the culminating incidents of naval battle.  In Guiscard’s struggle with the Greeks, he encounters for their chief naval force the Venetian fleet under the Doge