Odo dies at Palermo. February, 1097. with the men of conquered lands after another sort from that in which he had dealt with the men of his English earldom. There, in the happy city of the threefold speech,[1] the Bishop of Bayeux might mark, in the great temple of Palermo, once church, then mosque, and now church once more, those forms of art of the Greek and the Saracen, which had lost in grace, if they had gained in strength, in taking the shapes which he had himself followed in his great work in his own Saxon city. There the Earl and Bishop at last ended a career of which Kent and Bayeux could tell so different a tale. Gilbert of Evreux discharged the last corporal work of mercy for his fiercer brother; and the tomb of Odo of Bayeux arose within the walls of the great church of Palermo, soon to boast itself the head of the Sicilian realm.[2] And, after all the changes of later days, amid the small remains which the barbarians of the Renaissance have left us of the church of English Walter, we may, even beside the tomb of the Wonder of the World, stop for a moment to remember that the brother of our Conqueror, the scourge of our land, found his last resting-place so far away alike from Bayeux, from Senlac, and from Rochester.
Duke Robert crosses to Dyrrhachion.
Use of the Bulgarian name.
The Bishop went no further than Palermo; the Duke
went on by the course which the warfare of the Apulian
Normans had lately made familiar. They entered the
Eastern world at Dyrrhachion, where the valour of Normans
and Englishmen had been lately proved.[3] They
passed, in the geography of our authors, through Bulgaria;[4]
that is, they passed through those Illyrian and
- ↑ See Historical Essays, Third Series, 473, 474.
- ↑ Ord. Vit. 765 B, C.
- ↑ See N. C. vol. iv. pp. 625, 626.
- ↑ Orderic (u. s.) says, "tranquillo remige in Bulgariæ partibus applicuit." Fulcher is naturally more exact. They land at Dyrrhachion (386), and then "Bulgarorum regiones, per montium prærupta et loca satis deserta, transivimus." He gives several curious details of the voyage and march.
