Robert at Rome.
His reception by Roger of Apulia. vividness, but with less sympathy than one could have wished for the general objects of the holy war.[1] A few points in Robert's eastern career are all that need now be touched on. He and his companions passed by Lucca, and there received the blessing of the orthodox Pope Urban.[2] They went on to what should have been Urban's see, and found how truly the English Chronicler spoke when he said that Urban nothing had of the settle at Rome. When they went to pay their devotions in the basilica of Saint Peter, they met with much such entertainment from the followers of the schismatic Clement as the monks of Glastonbury had met with from their abbot Thurstan.[3] They reached southern Italy, now a duchy of the house of Hauteville, and the reigning Duke Roger, son of the renowned Wiscard, is said to have welcomed his natural lord in the head of the ducal house of his ancestral land.[4]
At the time of their coming, Duke Roger, his uncle Count Roger of Sicily, who had won back a realm for Christendom, and his brother Bohemond—Mark Bohe-*
- ↑ I refer to Sir Francis Palgrave's chapter "Robert the Crusader," the eleventh in the fourth volume of his "Normandy and England." He goes further off from the scene of our common story than I can undertake to follow him.
- ↑ Will. Malms, iv. 350. But our best account just at this moment is that by Fulcher of Chartres in the "Gesta Dei per Francos," which Orderic (718 B) witnesses to as a "certum et verax volumen." Here we read (385), "Nos Franci occidentales, per Italiam excursa Gallia transeuntes cum usque Lucam pervenissemus, invenimus prope urbem illam Urbanum apostolicum, cum quo locuti sunt comes Robertus Normannus, et comes Stephanus, nos quoque cæteri qui voluimus."
- ↑ Fulcher (u. s.) graphically describes this scene; "Cum in basilica beati Petri introissemus, invenimus ante altare homines Guiberti, papæ stolidi, qui oblationes altari superpositas, gladios suos in manibus tenentes, inique arripiebant: alii vero super trabes ejusdem monasterii cursitabant; et inde deorsum ubi prostrati orabamus, lapides jaciebant."
- ↑ Ord. Vit. 724 D. "Rogerius dux, cognomento Bursa, ducem Normanniæ cum sociis suis, utpote naturalem dominum suum, honorifice suscepit."
