Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/549

 The Cr uies 465 his soldiers to attack Godfrey's army, encamped in the suburbs of his capital, because their chief at first refused to take the oath of feudal homage to him. The Emperor's daughter Anna, in her history of the times, gives a sad picture of the outrageous conduct of the crusaders. They, on the other hand, denounced the Greeks as traitors, cowards, and liars; The eastern Emperor had hoped to use his western allies to reconquer Asia Minor and force back the I'urks. The leading knights, on the contrary, dreamed of carving out principalities for themselves in the former dominions of the Emperor, and proposed to control them by right of conquest. Later we find both Greeks and western Christians shamelessly allying themselves with the Mohammedans against each other. The relations of the eastern and western enemies of the Turks were well illustrated when the cru- saders besieged their first town, Nicaea. When it was just ready to surrender, the Greeks arranged with the enemy to have their troOps ad- mitted first. They then closed the gates against their western confeder- ates and invited them to move on. The first real allies that the crusaders met with were the Christian Armenians, who gave them aid after their terrible march through Asia Minor. With their help Baldwin got possession of Edessa, of which he made himself prince. The chiefs induced the great body of the crusaders to postpone the march on Jerusalem, and a year was spent in taking the Fig. 171. Knight of the First Crusade In the time of the Crusades knights wore a coat of inter- woven iron rings, called a hauberk, to protect them- selves. The habit of using the rigid iron plates, of which later armor was constructed, did not come in until the Crusades were over Dissension among the leaders of the crusaders