The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon [2022]
But the fate of so many royal armies displayed the toils and perils of a land expedition; and if the Flemings dwelt along the ocean, the French barons were destitute of ships and ignorant of navigation. They embraced the wise resolution of choosing six deputies or representatives, of whom Villehardouin was one, with a discretionary trust to direct the motions, and to pledge the faith, of the whole confederacy. The maritime states of Italy were alone possessed of the means of transporting the holy warriors with their arms and horses; and the six deputies proceeded to Venice, to solicit, on motives of piety or interest, the aid of that powerful republic.
[Footnote 25: See Fleury, Hist. Eccles. tom. xvi. p. 26, &c., and Villehardouin, No. 1, with the observations of Ducange, which I always mean to quote with the original text.]
[Footnote 26: The contemporary life of Pope Innocent III., published by Baluze and Muratori, (Scriptores Rerum Italicarum, tom. iii. pars i. p. 486 - 568, is most valuable for the important and original documents which are inserted in the text. The bull of the crusade may be read, c. 84, 85.]
[Footnote 27: Por-ce que cil pardon, fut issi gran, si s'en esmeurent mult licuers des genz, et mult s'en croisierent, porce que li pardons ere su gran. Villehardouin, No. 1. Our philosophers may refine on the causes of the crusades, but such were the genuine feelings of a French knight.]
[Footnote 28: This number of fiefs (of which 1800 owed liege homage) was enrolled in the church of St. Stephen at Troyes, and attested A.D. 1213, by the marshal and butler of Champagne, (Ducange, Observ. p. 254.)]
[Footnote 29: Campania . . . . militiae privilegio singularius excellit . . . . in tyrociniis . . . . prolusione armorum, &c., Duncage, p. 249, from the old Chronicle of Jerusalem, A.D. 1177 - 1199.]
[Footnote 30: The name of Villehardouin was taken from a village and castle in the diocese of Troyes, near the River Aube, between Bar and Arcis. The family was ancient and noble; the elder branch of our historian existed after the year 1400, the younger, which acquired the principality of Achaia, merged in the house of Savoy, (Ducange, p. 235 - 245.)]
[Footnote 31: This office was held by his father and his descendants; but Ducange has not hunted it with his usual sagacity. I find that, in the year 1356, it was in the family of Conflans; but these provincial have been long since eclipsed by the national marshals of France.]
[Footnote 32: This language, of which I shall produce some specimens, is explained by Vigenere and Ducange, in a version and glossary. The president Des Brosses (Mechanisme des Langues, tom. ii. p. 83) gives it as the example of a language which has ceased to be French, and is understood only by grammarians.]
[Footnote 33: His age, and his own expression, moi qui ceste oeuvre dicta. (No. 62, &c.,) may justify the suspicion (more probable than Mr. Wood's on Homer) that he could neither read nor write. Yet Champagne may boast of the two first historians, the noble authors of French prose, Villehardouin and Joinville.]
[Footnote 34: The crusade and reigns of the counts of Flanders, Baldwin and his brother Henry, are the subject of a particular history by the Jesuit Doutremens, (Constantinopolis Belgica; Turnaci, 1638, in 4to.,) which I have only seen with the eyes of Ducange.]
In the invasion of Italy by Attila, I have mentioned ^35 the flight of the Venetians from the fallen cities of the continent, and their obscure shelter in the chain of islands that line the extremity of the Adriatic Gulf. In the midst of the waters, free, indigent, laborious, and inaccessible, they gradually coalesced into a republic: the first foundations of Venice