[158] How is it that our author, who is evidently partial to Villehardouin, has neglected to speak of his skilful retreat from Adrianople, upon which Gibbon bestows such high praise “His masterly retreat of three days would have deserved the praise of Xenophon and the ten thousand.” Gibbon has fine passages on Villehardouin.—Trans.
[159] Innocent, to get rid of the neighbourhood of the emperor, demanded of Philip Augustus a knight who might marry a daughter of Tancred, and possibly reconquer Sicily. The adventures and the wars of Gauthier de Brienne are related by Conrad, abbot of Usberg, Robert the Monk, Alberic, and, as we have already said, by the author of the Acts of Innocent.
[160] We cannot refrain from offering our readers a curious passage from an excellent manuscript memoir which M. Jourdain has communicated to us, entitled Recherches sur les Anciennes Versions Latines d’Aristote employées par les Ecclésiastiques du 13me Siècle. “Two circumstances contributed in the thirteenth century to materially spread the knowledge of the Greek language in the West. Baldwin, who was placed upon the imperial throne, wrote to Pope Innocent III. to beg of him to send to him men distinguished by their piety and knowledge, chosen from the religious orders and the University of Paris, to instruct his new people in the Catholic religion and Latin letters. The pope wrote to several monastic orders and to the University of Paris. About the same time Philip Augustus founded at Paris, near the mountain St. Geneviève, a Constantinopolitan college, destined to receive the young Greeks of the most distinguished families of Constantinople. The intention of this prince was to extinguish in the hearts of these young men the hatred they had imbibed against the Latins, by offering to them all sorts of kind treatment, and perhaps also to secure hostages against the fickleness and bad faith of the Greeks.” We can conceive that this circumstance contributed powerfully in diffusing the knowledge of Greek, not only in France but in all the West, for Paris was then the most celebrated school, and almost all the men to whom Latin translations from the Greek are attributed, had studied in that city: we must also assign to the same cause the Latin versions of Aristotle made from the Greek and published before St. Thomas. Nevertheless, if the Arabs had not previously spread throughout the West a taste for the Peripatetic philosophy, it is very doubtful whether the relations established between the East and the West by the inauguration of Baldwin, would have produced any desire to obtain it from purer sources.
[161] Since their restoration to Venice, the history of these three celebrated horses has given birth to three dissertations. In one (Narrazione Storica dei Quatro Cavalli di Bronzo, &c.), Count Cicognara, president of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at Venice, pretends that this monument was cast at Rome in the reign of Nero, in commemoration of the victory over Tiridates. M. Schlegel (Lettera ai Signori Compilatori della Biblioteca Italiana) rejects this opinion of the count, and thinks that the four bronze horses are from the hands of a Greek statuary of the time of Alexander.—Dei Quatro Cavalli della Basilica di S. Marco. Andre Mustoxidi, a very learned young Greek, makes this superb group come from Chios, which was rich in skilful sculptors, and believes they were transmitted to Rome in the time of Verres, and to Constantinople under Theodosius the Great.
[162] We find in the first volume of an Italian work entitled Storia d’Incisa e del già celebre suo Marchesato, published at Asti, in 1810, a precious monument; this is a charter which proves the sending of the seeds of maize to a city of Montferrat. This is a very interesting document.
[163] It is well worthy of remark that it is very little more than a quarter of a century since this sentence was written; and, in that short period, what has not science effected!—the East, of which we were then said to be so ignorant, is better known to Europeans than it was at any time during the crusades.—Trans.
[164] The account of this famine, and the disasters by which it was followed, is to be found in its details, in Les Relations de l’Egypte, translated from Abdallatif by M. Letvestre de Lacy. This Arabian author was a skilful physician and an enlightened man; and his recital, which contains many extraordinary facts, bears all the characters of truth.
[165] The circumstances of this earthquake are related by Abdallatif, the Latin historians scarcely name this great calamity.
[166] M. Langlès has furnished us with this valuable incident, which he has taken from the Persian biographer Daulet Chah. The biographer adds, that a merchant of Aleppo redeemed Saadi, by paying the Christians the sum of ten golden crowns, and he likewise gave the poet another hundred as the dowry of his daughter, whom he gave him in marriage.
[167] History has great trouble in following the events of this period through the cloud of anarchy which reigned everywhere; and that which increases the difficulty is, that the authors of our old chronicles were only acquainted with the kingdom of Jerusalem, and knew nothing of what was going on in the interior of the states. The Arab historians, on the contrary, take much more note of the expeditions of the interior than of the events that happened at Ptolemaïs, situated on the sea-coast, and in some sort isolated from the rest of Syria.