I40 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



faults with respect to rhetorical display.' This besetting sin often 

 obscures the truth. The narrative shifts quickly from prose to verse, 

 and the involved sentence is not always precise. An excellent illustra- 

 tion of this tendency appears in Guibert's version of the appeals. He 

 says Urban was moved by the gifts and entreaties of Alexius to come 

 into France, but much more by the general dangers that threatened 

 Christendom as a result of Saracen attacks from Spain. ^ He does not 

 specify any appeal in particular, nor does he allude to any council in 

 Italy. This in itself tends to show that he did not consider Placentia 

 worthy of record in this connection; and the omission is the more 

 striking because he devoted two books to the preliminaries of the cru- 

 sade. He had previously recorded the letter of Alexius to his patron, 

 Robert of Flanders, about 1088, and therefore knew that Alexius had 

 sought aid. His allusion to gifts doubtless goes back to the appeals of 

 1082 and 1085, recorded by Anna Comnena,^ the daughter of Alexius, 

 an eyewitness of the First Crusade. At any rate, Guibert significantly 

 employs the plural form — precihus — thus uniting all the earlier appeals. 

 And, far from ascribing supreme importance to any one of them, he 

 regards them all as inferior to such other factors as Urban's French 

 training and Saracen raids from Spain. In this he is undoubtedly 

 correct and modern historians ought to follow him rather than Bernold 

 as a guide for the First Crusade. 



The second historian who deserves examination is Ekkehard of 

 Aurach, a German monk, whose Chronicon Universale contains much 

 information on this period. We are fortunate in having both the earlier 

 and later drafts of this work. In the earlier draft the entries for the 

 years 1095, 1096, and 1097 show no knowledge of appeals for aid by 

 Alexius and no prejudice against him.'* But in iioi Ekkehard went 



' Recueil.TV, ii8: Decet'enim licet que prorsus operosa historiam verborum elegantia coronari. C/. also 

 Thurot in Revue Hislorique, II, 107. 



' Recuetl, IV, 135: "Is itaque vir eximius quum ab Alexi Graecorum principe magnis honoraretur exeniis, 

 et precibus quidem, sed multo propensius generali Christianitatis periculo pulsaretur, quae quotidianis gen- 

 tilibus minuebatur incursibus (Sarracenorum namquc irruptionibus Hispanias audiebat saepissirae conturbari) 

 pro hoc ipso, suae gentis soUicitaturus homines, commeatum facere destinavit in Franciam." 



3 Alexiad (ed. Reifferscheid, 1884) lib. Ill, c. 10; lib. V, c. 3. y, for the appeal of 1088 see lib. VI., c. 6, 7. 

 II. For an appeal about logi see lib. VIII, c. s, and Chalandon, Essai sur le Rigne d'Alexis ler, p. 129. 

 These are all confirmed by one or more Latin writers. 



* See text and readings in Migne's Palrologia. 



