Note 56 — Chapter VI
Reading edition
Gibbon.—William of Tyre and Matthew Paris reckon seventy thousand loricati in each of the armies led by Conrad and the French king, Louis VII. The light-armed troops, the peasant infantry, the women and children, and the priests and monks, swelled this swarm to an inconceivable extent. “It is affirmed by the Greeks and Latins, that in the passage of a strait or river, the Byzantine agents, after a tale of nine hundred thousand, desisted from the endless and formidable computation.”—Decline and Fall, vol. xl. p. 107.