Free The Dream and the Tomb by Robert Payne

Lotharingians knew better than to fight. They fled back to their tents.
    On the following day Hugh the Great was sent to Godfrey with another message from the emperor. He spoke of the dangers of continued resistance and the horrors of a full-scale battle. What was wrong with giving an oath of loyalty to the emperor? Godfrey answered that Hugh, from being a great prince of France, had been transformed into a slave and that there was nothing to be gained by being obedient to the emperor. To these arguments Hugh replied that indeed there was everything to be gained: the emperor could offer protection, provisions, friendship, treasure. “Matters will turn out ill for us if we disobey him,” Hugh said. Godfrey, still licking his wounds from the affray of the previous day, replied stubbornly that he expected nothing from the emperor and would act as he saw fit. Hugh gave the message to the emperor, who ordered a general attack the day after Easter Sunday. For the second time Godfrey’s army was in full flight.
    The decision to attack Godfrey was forced on the emperor because news had come that the armies of Raymond of Toulouse and Bohemond, Prince of Otranto, were about to arrive in Constantinople. Though he had shown himself in the past to be a determined enemy of the Byzantine empire, Bohemond presented no immediate danger, for his army was pathetically small, numbering perhaps no more than two or three hundred knights and less than two thousand foot soldiers. The Count of Toulouse’s army was about ten times as large, and Godfrey’s was about half as large as the Provençal army. Since the new armies were coming, the emperor decidedthat two things must be done immediately: Godfrey’s army must cross over to Asia and Godfrey himself must take the oath of allegiance. Twice defeated in battle by the Byzantines, Godfrey at last realized that all further resistance was in vain and that he would face complete destruction if he continued to make war against the emperor.
    Godfrey’s army was ferried across the straits. He set up his camp in Pelecanum, and in a day or two the emperor sent a ship to bring Godfrey to the Bucoleon Palace, a vast and ornate palace on the southern shore of Constantinople. This palace was sometimes known as the Great Palace, not only because it was quite simply the largest of all the palaces in the Western world, but also because it enshrined the traditions of the emperors and the relics of Christ. Here, in one of the many throne rooms, Godfrey knelt before the emperor and recited the oath of loyalty, swearing to be the emperor’s vassal and promising to restore to the emperor all the cities and lands he conquered on his way to Jerusalem, those cities and lands that belonged properly to Byzantium. It was a very solemn moment as the emperor leaned forward and embraced the man who had been his enemy and was now an ally and a vassal.
    There was now peace between Byzantium and the Crusaders. How long it would last no one knew, nor did the parties know exactly what was meant by peace between the Greeks and the Latins. It was a precarious peace, an armed truce, a truce in which no side trusted the other, although both sides had a common aim—the preservation of the Holy Land in Christian hands. The tragedy of the Crusades was that the Greeks and Latins never worked together wholeheartedly. If they had, the Byzantine empire and the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem might have lasted to the present day.

Under the Walls
of Constantinople

    WHEN the Crusaders rode up to the honey-colored walls of Constantinople, there was scarcely one of them who could have guessed at the glories within. They knew it by repute as Midgard, the center of the world. It was a city of gleaming wealth and far-reaching influence, with a dozen splendid palaces and three hundred churches, with great gardens and vast public places where the paving stones were slabs of marble and hundreds of bronze statues stood