II
He joined himself to a band of adventurers who were passing.
He learned to know hunger, thirst, fevers, and vermin. He became accustomed to the din of mellays and the sight of the dying. The wind tanned his skin. His limbs became calloused by contact with his armour; and since he was very strong, courageous, temperate, and of good counsel, he had no trouble in obtaining the command of a company.
At the beginning of a battle he roused his soldiers with a great wave of his sword. With a knotted rope he climbed the walls of citadels at night, swayed about by the hurricane, while the drops of Greek fire stuck to his cuirass, and the boiling pitch and melted lead streamed down from the battlements. Often the hurtling of a stone shivered his buckler. Bridges overloaded with men collapsed beneath him. With a sweep of his mace he rid himself of fourteen horsemen. In the lists he defeated all who came forward. More than a score of times he was taken for dead.
Thanks to divine favour he always escaped; for he protected churchmen, orphans, widows, and especially aged men. When he saw one of these last walking in front of him, he called to him, in order to see his face, as if he were afraid of killing him by mistake.
Fugitive slaves, revolted peasants, portionless bastards, all sorts of desperate men flocked to his banner, and he gathered an army of his own.
It increased. He became famous. He was sought after.
He aided in turn the Dauphin of France and the King of England, the Templars of Jerusalem, the Surenas of the Parthians, the Negus of Abyssinia, and the Emperor of Calicut. He fought Scandinavians covered with fish-scales, negroes furnished with targets of hippopotamus hide and mounted on red asses, golden-skinned Indians, brandishing above their diadems broad sabres brighter than mirrors. He vanquished the Troglodytes and the Anthropophagi. He traversed regions so torrid that under the burning heat of the sun the hair of men’s heads took fire of itself like torches; and others so icy that men’s arms came away from their bodies and fell to the ground; and countries where there were so many fogs that they marched surrounded by phantoms.
States in difficulty consulted him. He obtained unhoped-for terms in interviews with ambassadors. If a monarch governed ill, he arrived suddenly and remonstrated with him. He set peoples free. He delivered queens shut up in towers. It was he, and no other, who smote the great serpent of Milan and the dragon of Oberbirbach.
Now, the Emperor of Occitania, having triumphed over the Spanish Mussulmans, had united in concubinage with the sister of the Caliph of Cordova, and had a daughter by her, whom he had brought up as a Christian. But the Caliph, making as if he wished to be converted, came to him on a visit accompanied by a numerous escort, massacred all his garrison and plunged him into a dungeon-pit, where he treated him most harshly, in order to extract treasure from him.