Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 6 (1897).djvu/348

 326 THE DECLINE AND FALL the emperor, and that of the kmg, was each composed of seventy thousand knights and their immediate attendants in the fiekl,i2 and, if the Hght-armed troops, the peasant infantry, the women and children, the priests and monks, be rigorously excluded, the full account will scarcely be satisfied with four hundred thousand souls. The West, from Rome to Britain, was called into action ; the kings of Poland and Bohemia obeyed the summons of Conrad ; and it is affirmed by the Greeks and Latins that, in the passage of a strait or river, the Byzantine agents, after a tale of nine hundred thousand, desisted from the endless and formidable computation.^^ In the third crusade, as the French and English preferred the navigation of the Medi- terranean, the host of Frederic Barbarossa was less numerous. Fifteen thousand knights, and as many squires, were the flower of the German chivalry ; sixty thousand horse and one hundred thousand foot were mustered by the emperor in the plains of Hungar)^ ; and after such repetitions we shall no longer be startled at the six hundred thousand pilgrims which credulity has ascribed to this last emigration. ^^ Such extravagant reckon- ings prove only the astonishment of contemporaries ; but their astonishment most strongly bears testimony to the existence of an enormous though indefinite multitude. The Greeks might applaud their superior knowledge of the arts and stratagems of war, but they confessed the strength and courage of the French cavalry and the infantry of the Germans ; ^"^ and the strangers 1' William of Tyre, and Matthew Paris, reckon 70,000 loricati in each of the armies. [The same number is given by the Annals of Pohlde (ad ann. 1147), which were first published in Pertz's Mon. xvi. p. 48 sqq., in 1859.] !■* The imperfect enumeration is mentioned by Cinnamus {kvviviKovTa. fivptdSa) [in connexion with the crossing of the Danube ; Nicetas (p. 87, ed. Bonn) speaks of a numbering at the crossing of the Hellespont], and confirmed by Odo de Diogilo apud Ducange ad Cinnamum, with the more precise sum of 900,556. [The Annals of Magdeburg give 650,000, and the Annals of Egmond 1,600,000.] Why must therefore the version and comment suppose the mOdest and insufficient reckoning of 90,000? Does not Godfrey of Viterbo (Pantheon, p. xix. in Mura- tori, torn. vii. p. 462) exclaim Numerum si poscere quosras — Millia millena milites agmen erat? 15 This extraragant account is given by Albert of Stade (apud Struvium, p. 414 [Chronicon ; Pertz, Mon. xvi. p. 283 sqq.J); my calculation is borrowed from Godfrey of Viterbo, Arnold of Lubeck [Chronica Slavorum, Pertz, Mon. xxi. p. 115 sgq.], apud eundem, and Bernard Thesaur. (c. 169, p. 804). The original writers are silent. The Mahometans gave him 200,000 or 260,000 men (Bohadin. in Vit. Saladin. p. no). 1'' I must observe that, in the second and third crusades, the subjects of Con- rad and Frederic are st3-led by the Greeks and Orientals Alamanni. The Lechi and Tzechi of Cinnamus are the Poles and Bohemians ; and it is for the French that he reserves the ancient appellation of Germans. He likewise names the BpiTTtoi, or 'RpiTa.vvoi [BptTTCoi re Kai BpeTafoi, li. 12J.