The age of the crusades

CHAP. I.—Introductory—Outline of Study.—Problem of the Crusades.—Outline of Preliminary Study . . . 1

CHAP. II.—State of Society—Ignorance—Dulness of Life—Superstition—Low Sense of Justice—Cruelty—Taste for War.—Sporadic Culture—Great Men.—Budding Art.—Ignorance—Few Industries—Degradation.—Narrow Limitation of Life.—Superstition.—Laws—Private Combat—The Ordeal.—Hardness of Manners—Brutality.—Cruelties.—Love of War.—Cruelty of Greeks . . . 6

CHAP. III.—Chivalry—Rules—Education of Knight—Ceremonies—Influence on Character.—Rules of Chivalry.—Rites.—Defects . . . 26

CHAP. IV.—The Feudal System—General Principles—Influence on People.—Minute Subdivision of Europe.—Baronial Independence.—Bondage of the Masses.—Communes.—Feudalism and the Crusades . . . 32

CHAP. V.—The Impoverished Condition of Europe.—Pauperism at Home.—Plenty Abroad . . . 40

CHAP. VI.—The Papal Policy—Demoralization of the World and the Church—Hildebrand’s Purpose Inherited by his Successors.—Corruption of the Papacy.—Hildebrand’s Plan of Reform.—Previous Prestige of the Papacy . . . 43

CHAP. VII.—The Mohammedan Menace—The Rise of Islam—Saracens—Turks.—The Doctrine of Islam.—Koran and Caliphate.—Rapid Conquest by the Saracens.—Saracens viamong Christians.—The Turks.—Conquest by the Turks . . . 51

CHAP. VIII.—Pilgrimages—Origin and Growth of the Custom—Extent.—Rise of the Custom of Pilgrimage.—Pilgrim Superstitions.—Incentives to Pilgrimage . . . 64

CHAP. IX.—The Story of the Crusades.—The Summons—Peter the Hermit—Pope Urban—Popular Excitement.—Peter the Hermit.—Universal Enthusiasm.—Europe Swarms Eastward . . . 71

CHAP. X.—The First Crusade.—The Crusade of the Crowd.—Walter the Penniless.—Peter.—Gottschalk.—Volkman.—Emico.—General Disaster . . . 78

CHAP. XI.—The Crusade under the Chieftains, Godfrey, Raymond, Bohemond, Tancred, Hugh, Robert of Normandy.—Godfrey.—Raymond.—Bohemond.—Tancred.—Hugh.—Robert of Normandy.—Various Routes of the Chieftains.—Character of Alexius—Fear of Latins . . . 82

CHAP. XII.—The Fall of Nicæa.—Contrast of Christian and Moslem Soldier.—Capture of Nicæa—Treachery of Alexius . . . 91

CHAP. XIII.—Battle of Dorylæum—Tarsus—Defection of Baldwin.—Victory of Dorylæum.—Capture of Tarsus.—Baldwin Seizes Edessa . . . 96

CHAP. XIV.—Before Antioch.—The Crusaders before Antioch.—Discouragement of the Christians.—Exploits.—Battles of Children . . . 101

CHAP. XV.—The Fall of Antioch.—Treachery of Phirous.—Capture of Antioch . . . 108

CHAP. XVI.—The Holy Lance.—Kerbogha Invests Antioch.—The Holy Lance.—Kerbogha Routed.—The Holy Lance Discredited . . . 112

CHAP. XVII.—On to Jerusalem.—The Crusaders Enter Palestine.—On to Jerusalem . . . 120

CHAP. XVIII.—The Capture of Jerusalem.—Suffering before viiJerusalem.—Procession around the City.—Final Assault.—Christian Cruelty.—Jerusalem Despoiled . . . 125

CHAP. XIX.—Godfrey, First Baron of the Holy Sepulchre—Conquest of the Land—The Kingdom of Jerusalem.—Godfrey’s Rule.—Victory at Ascalon.—Return of Crusaders.—Godfrey’s Prowess.—Death of Godfrey . . . 134

CHAP. XX.—Baldwin I., King of Jerusalem.—Baldwin I., King of Jerusalem.—Ruse of Bohemond.—Death of Tancred . . . 144

CHAP. XXI.—King Baldwin II.—King Foulque—King Baldwin III.—Exploits of Zenghi—Rise of Nourredin.—Reign of Baldwin II.—King Foulque.—King Baldwin III.—Fall of Edessa . . . 150

CHAP. XXII.—Military Orders—Hospitallers—Templars—Teutonic Knights.—The Hospitallers.—Templars.—Teutonic Knights . . . 156

CHAP. XXIII.—Europe between the First and Second Crusades—Kingship in France—Papal Aggrandizement—Abélard—Arnold of Brescia—Bernard.-Kingship in France.—Abélard.—Arnold of Brescia.—Bernard’s Influence . . . 160

CHAP. XXIV.—The Second Crusade.—Bernard—Conrad III.—Louis VII.—Suger—Siege of Damascus.—Bernard Preaches Crusade.—Start of French and Germans.—Disastrous Beginning.—The Kings Reach Palestine.—Divisions among Crusaders.—Abbé Suger . . . 166

CHAP. XXV.—Nourredin—Rise of Saladin—King Guy—Queen Sibylla.—Nourredin.—Baldwin.—Amaury.—Rise of Saladin.—Baldwin IV.—Sibylla and King Guy . . . 178

CHAP. XXVI.—Battle of Tiberias—Fall of Jerusalem.—The Field of Tiberias.—Crusaders’ Overthrow at Tiberias.—Fall of Jerusalem.—Magnanimity of Saladin . . . 186

CHAP. XXVII.—Europe between the Second and Third Crusades—Superstition—The Waldenses—Degradation of the Papacy—France under Louis—England under Henry II.—Richard Cœur de Lion.—Superstition.—Waldenses.—France—England.—Richard Cœur de Lion.—Coronation of Richard I.—Richard’s Cruelty . . . 195

CHAP. XXVIII.—The Third Crusade.—William of Tyre—Barbarossa.—Call to Crusade.—Frederick Barbarossa.—Bombast of Champions.—Death of Frederick Barbarossa . . . 206

CHAP. XXX.—The Coming of Philip Augustus and Richard—Fall of Acre.—Sea Voyage of the English.—Richard Arrives in Palestine.—Crusaders Take Acre.—Finesse of Richard and Saladin.—Assassins.—Richard Retreats.—Peace with Saladin.—Captivity of Richard.—Death of Saladin . . . 219

CHAP. XXXI.—Palestine after the Third Crusade—Henry VI.—Siege of Thoron.—Various Minor Crusades.—Siege of Thoron.—Discouragement of Christendom . . . 236

CHAP. XXXII.—The Fourth Crusade.—History and Condition of Constantinople.—Weakness of Greek Emperors.—Foreign Aggressions.—Antipathy of Europeans.—Riches of Constantinople.—Suburban Wealth . . . 242

CHAP. XXXIII.—The Summons to the Fourth Crusade—Contract with Venice—Egypt the Destination—Philip of Swabia.—Fulque.—Venetian Ships Hired.—Crusaders to Attack Egypt.—Inducement to Divert Crusade . . . 253

CHAP. XXXIV.—The Plot for the Diversion of the Crusade—Capture of Zara.—Dandolo’s Treachery.—Fleet Sails against Zara.—Revolt of Crusaders.—Young Alexius’s Promises . . . 260

CHAP. XXXV.—On to Constantinople—Capture of Galata.—Voyage to Constantinople.—Protest of the Greek Emperor.—Capture of the Golden Horn . . . 268

CHAP. XXXVI.—Constantinople Secured to Isaac and Young Alexius—Usurpation of Mourtzouphlos.—Assault upon the City.—Flight of Alexius.—Isaac Restored.—Young Alexius Coemperor.—Great Fire.—Mourtzouphlos.—Latins Attempt the Sovereignty . . . 274

ixCHAP. XXXVII.—Capture of Constantinople.—Fall of Constantinople.—Plunder of the City.—Nicetas.—Relics Stolen . . . 284

CHAP. XXXVIII.—Founding the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople.—Baldwin Elected Emperor.—Fatal Influence of the Fourth Crusade . . . 291

CHAP. XXXIX.—Between the Fourth and Fifth Crusades—Condition of East and West—The Children’s Crusade.—Eastern Disasters.—John of Brienne.—The Children’s Crusade . . . 296

CHAP. XL.—The Fifth Crusade.—Disaster of Marietta.—Start of the Crusaders.—Assault of Mount Tabor.—Damietta.—The Affair of Damietta.—Pelagius.—Francis of Assisi.—Disaster at Damietta . . . 301

CHAP. XLI.—The Sixth Crusade.—Frederick II. and Pope Gregory IX.—Pope Gregory IX.—Papal Anathema of Frederick.—Frederick Acquires Jerusalem.—Return of Frederick.—Popular Discontent with the Pope . . . 313

CHAP. XLII.—Between the Sixth and Seventh Crusades.—The Tartars.—The Carismian Invasion.—Tartars.—Carismians.—Carismians at Jerusalem and Gaza . . . 324

CHAP. XLIII.—The Seventh Crusade.—St. Louis.—Innocent IV. and Frederick.—St. Louis.—Personal Qualities.—Piety of Louis.—Takes the Cross.—Louis’s Zeal for Crusade.—Delay at Cyprus.—Victory at Damietta.—Vice and Strife among the Victors.—Sultana Chegger-Eddour.—Foolhardiness of D’Artois.—Disaster at Mansourah.—Horrors of the Christian Retreat.—Heroism of Marguerite and Louis.—Massacre of the Sultan.—Escape of Louis to Acre.—Louis Lingers in Palestine.—Louis Returns to France . . . 328

CHAP. XLIV.—The Eighth Crusade.—Death of St. Louis—Fall of Acre.—Bibars Sultan.—Louis Reënlists.—Death of St. Louis.—The Fall of Acre . . . 361

CHAP. XLV.—Results of the Crusades.—Kingship.—Unity of Europe.—The Papacy.—Liberal Thought.—Increased Knowledge.—Arts.—Literature.—Commerce—The Turkish Power.—Growth of European Kingdoms.—Unity of Europe.—Prestige of the Papacy.—Lost Prestige of the Papacy.—Popular Liberty.—Arts.—Education.—Commerce.—Wealth.—Rise of Ottomans . . . 368

I. PRINTED COLLECTIONS OF THE SOURCES OF THE HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES.

The sources of the history of the crusades will be found collected in the following works, to which reference is made in the entries which follow:

Jacobus Bongarsius: Gesta Dei per Francos, sive orientalium expeditionum, et regni Francorum Hierosolimitani historia (ab a. 1095 ad 1420) a variis, sed illius ævi scriptoribus, litteris commendata; Hanoviæ [Hanau], 1611, fol.

Martin Bouquet: Rerum Gallicarum et Francicarum scriptores. Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France; Paris, 1738-1876, 23 vols.

François Pierre Guillaume Guizot: Collection des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France depuis la fondation de la monarchie française jusqu’au 13. siècle; Paris, 1823-35, 31 vols., 8vo.

Jacques Paul Migne: III., Patrologiæ Græcæ Latine tantum editæ, tom. i.-lxxxi.

Recueil des historiens des croisades, publié par les soins de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres; Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1841 sqq.; vol. xv., 1895.

Paul E. D. Riant: Expéditions et pèlerinages des Scandinaves en Terre-Sainte au temps des croisades; Paris, Imprimerie Lainé et Havard, 1865-69, 2 vols. ( vol. ii. being tables).

Paul E. D. Riant: Inventaire critique des lettres historiques des croisades, ... 786-1100; Paris, 1880 (in Archives de l’Orient latin, vol. i.; Paris, 1881).

II. THE PRINCIPAL SOURCES OF THE HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES.

A. Chronicles of Eye-witnesses.

Albert of Aix (Albertus Aquensis): Historia Hierosolymitana. A.D. 1095-1121 (in Recueil. Hist. occid., iv., pp. 265-713; and in xiiMigne, Pat. Lat., clxvi., col. 389-716. French translation in Guizot, Collection, xx., xxi.).

Baldric, Archbishop of Dol (Baldricus Andegavensis, later archiepiscopus Dolensis): Historiæ Hierosolymitanæ libri iv. A.D. 1095-99 (in Recueil. Hist. occid., iv., pp. 1-111; and in Migne, Pat. Lat., clxvi., col. 1057-1152).

Anna Comnena: Alexiadis libri xv. A.D. 1069-1118 (in Recueilt] Histor. grecs, i., 2, pp. 65-179; and in Migne [Greek tex. and Latin translation], Pat. Græc. cxxxi., col. 79-1212. Latin translation also in Migne, Pat. Græc. Lat., lxviii., col. 903-1516).

Ekkehard of Urach (Ekkehardus Uraugiensis): Hierosolymita. A.D. 1095-1187 (in Recueil. Hist. occid., v., pp. 1-40; and in Migne, Pat. Lat., cliv., col. 1059-62).

Foulcher of Chartres (Fulcherius Carnotensis): Gesta Francorum Jherusalem peregrinantium. A.D. 1095-1127 (in Recueil. Hist. occid., iii., pp. 311-485; and in Migne, Pat. Lat., clv., col. 825-940. French translation in Guizot, Collection, xxiv., pp. 1-275).

Gilo: Historia gestorum viæ nostri temporis Hierosolymitanæ libri iv. A.D. 1095-99 (in Migne, Pat. Lat., clv., col. 943-994).

Guibert of Nogent (Guibertus, abbas monast. s. Mariæ Novigenti): Historia Hierosolymitana quæ dicitur Gesta Dei per Francos, libri viii. A.D. 1095-1110 (in Recueil. Hist. occid., iv., pp. 115-263; also in Migne, Pat. Lat., clvi., col. 679-838. French translation in Guizot, Collection, ix., pp. 1-338).

Prince de Joinville: Histoire de Saint Louys, IX. du nom, roy de France (in Bouquet, xx., pp. 191-304. Numerous other editions, e.g., Wailly, with translation in modern French; Paris, Didot, 1874. English translation in Bohn’s Antiquarian Library, Chronicles of the Crusades).

Raymond of Agiles (Raimundus de Agiles): Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Hierusalem a. 1095 ad 1099 (in Recueil. Hist. occid., iii., pp. 235-309; and in Migne, Pat. Lat., clv., col. 591-668. French translation in Guizot, Collection, xxi., pp. 227-397).

Tudebod (Tudebodus): Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere ab a. 1095 ad 1099, libri v. (in Recueil. Hist. occid., iii., pp. 1-117; and in Migne, Pat. Lat., clv., col. 763-823. French translation, Mémoires de l’historien Pierre Tudebode sur son pèlerinage à Jérusalem; Paris, Champion, 1878).

Villehardouin: Histoire de l’empire de Constantinople sous les empereurs françois (in Bouquet, xviii., pp. 432-514. With modern French translation, Paris, Lemerre, 1891, 2 vols. English translation, London, 1829).

William of Tyre (Guilelmus Tyrius): Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum. A.D. 1095-1184 (in Recueil. Hist. occid., i.; and in Migne, Pat. Lat., cci., col. 209-892. English translation by Mary Noyes Colvin; London, Early English Text Society, 1893).

Anselm of Ripemont (Anselmus de Ribodimonte): Epistolæ ad Manassem archiepiscopum Remensem duæ. A.D. 1098 (in Recueil. Hist. occid., iii., pp. 890-893).

Alexius I., Comnenus: Epistola ad Robertum I., Flandriæ comitem. A.D. 1098 (in Recueil. Histor. grecs, iv., p. 132; and in Migne, Pat. Græc., cxxxi., col. 564-568; Pat. Lat., clv., col. 465-470. German translation by H. Floto, Kaiser Heinrich IV., vol. ii., p. 354; Stuttgart, 1854).

Godfrey (Godefridus Bullonius): Epistolæ et diplomata (in Migne, Pat. Lat., clv., col. 389-398).

Stephen of Blois (Stephanus Carnotensis et Blesensis) to his wife: Epistolæ duæ (in Recueil. Hist. occid., iii., pp. 883-893).

C. Contemporary and Very Early Writers.

Matthew Paris: English History from 1253 to 1273 (translation in Bohn’s Antiquarian Library; London, Bell; New York, Macmillan).

Roger of Hovenden: Chronica; edited by William Stubbs (in Rerum Britannicarum medii ævi Scriptores [see under Stubbs, p. viii.], No. 51, vols. i.-iv., 1868-71).

Roger of Wendover: Flowers of History (in Bohn’s Antiquarian Library; London, Bell; New York, Macmillan).

Willibald, The Travels of, A.D. 721-727 (in Bohn’s Antiquarian Library [London, Bell; New York, Macmillan], in the vol. edited by Thomas Wright, Early Travels in Palestine, pp. 13-22).

III. WORKS ON THE CRUSADES WRITTEN FROM THE SOURCES.

T. A. Archer and Charles L. Kingsford: The Crusades: The Story of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem; New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895.

Heinrich Hagenmeyer: Peter der Eremite: ein kritischer Beitrag zur Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges; Leipzig, Harrassowitz, 1879.

Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren: Historische Werke; Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1821-26, 14 parts.

Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren: Essai sur l’influence des croisades; French translation, Paris, 1808.

xivThomas Keightley: The Crusaders; London, S. P. C. K., 1834, 2 vols.; new ed., Parker, 1852, 1 vol.

Bernard Kugler: Geschichte der Kreuzzüge; Berlin, G. Grote, 1880; 2. Aufl., 1891.

Bernard Kugler: Neue Analekten zur Geschichte des 2. Kreuzzuges; Tübingen, Fries, 1883.

Jean Pierre Armand de la Porte des Vaulx: Les croisades, et le royaume latin de Jérusalem; Limoges, Ardant, 1863.

Louis Maimbourg: Histoire des croisades; Paris, 1675, 2 vols.; 2d ed., 1682, 4 vols. English translation, The History of the Holy War; London, 1686, fol.

Joseph François Michaud: Histoire des croisades; Paris, 1812-22, 7 vols.; 9th ed., Paris, Vivès, 1856, 4 vols.; illustrated by Doré, 1875-76, 2 vols., fol.

Joseph François Michaud: History of the Crusades; translation, London, Routledge, 1852. New ed., with supplementary chapter by Hamilton W. Mabie; New York, Armstrong, 1881, 3 vols.

Edwin Pears: The Fall of Constantinople; being the Story of the Fourth Crusade; London, Longmans & Co.; New York, Harpers, 1886.

Reinhold Röhricht: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kreuzzüge; Berlin, Weidmann, 1874-78, 2 vols.

Reinhold Röhricht: Quellenbeiträge zur Geschichte der Kreuzzüge. Bd. i., Zur Geschichte Salâh-ad-dîns; Berlin, Weidmann, 1879.

Reinhold Röhricht: Studien zur Geschichte des fünften Kreuzzuges; Innsbruck, Wagner, 1891.

William Stubbs: Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I. (in Rerum Britannicarum medii ævi Scriptores [No. 38, vol. i., 1864], published by the authority of her Majesty’s Treasury, under the direction of the Master of the Rolls [hence called the “Rolls Series”]; London, 1858 sqq.).

Heinrich Carl Ludolf von Sybel: Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges; Leipzig, Fleischer, 1841; 2. Aufl., 1881.

Heinrich Carl Ludolf von Sybel: History and Literature of the Crusades; translated by Lady Duff-Gordon [not a translation of the preceding, but a compilation from his writings]; London, Chapman, 1861.

Friedrich Wilken: Geschichte der Kreuzzüge nach morgenländischen und abendländischen Berichten; Leipzig, Vogel, 1807-32, 7 parts.

James Bryce: The Holy Roman Empire; London and New York, Macmillan, 1864; 8th ed., 1888.

George Finlay: A History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time, B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864; Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1877, 7 vols.

Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; London, 1776-81, 6 vols. Best completed ed. by William Smith; London, Murray, 1854-55, 8 vols.; New York, Harpers. New ed., with additional notes by J. B. Bury; London and New York, Macmillan, 1896 sqq. (Chaps. lvii.-lxi., The Crusades, separately issued by A. Murray; London, 1869.)

François Pierre Guillaume Guizot: The History of Civilization from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution; translation (in Bohn’s Standard Library; London, Bell; New York, Macmillan; 3 vols.).

François Pierre Guillaume Guizot: The History of France from the Earliest Times to the Year 1789; translation, London, Low, 1870-81, 6 vols.

Henry Hallam: View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages; London, Murray, 1818, 2 vols.; 11th ed., 1855, 3 vols.; later eds.; reprinted, New York, Armstrong, 2 vols.

David Hume: The History of England; modern ed., London, Ward, Lock & Co., 1880, 3 vols.; Amer. ed., Harpers, 6 vols.

Henry Hart Milman: History of Latin Christianity; London, Murray, 1854-55, 6 vols.; 4th ed., 1867, 9 vols.; reprinted, New York, Armstrong, 8 vols.

William Robertson: The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V., with a View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century; London, 1769; reprinted, Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1857, 3 vols.; later editions.

V. POETICAL TREATMENT OF THE HISTORY OF THE FIRST CRUSADE.

Torquato Tasso: Gerusalemme Liberata; Venice, 1580. English translation, Jerusalem Delivered; New York, Appleton.

After the lapse of eight hundred years the story of the crusades still furnishes the most fascinating, if not the most instructive, pages of Christian history. Romance has entertained the generations from the days of the Italian Tasso to those of Walter Scott with the rude yet chivalric characters of those mediæval times. Ponderous knights and dashing emirs, fair women and saintly apparitions, continue to move over the mimic stage of the imagination. Poetry, in all the tongues of modern Europe, draws its imagery from scenes that were enacted while these languages were being formed from their classic or barbaric originals. The hymnology of the church is enriched by the songs of those who caught their rhythm from the march of the crusading host. Bernard of Clugny watched the salvation armies of the olden time as they sauntered by his cloister window. Now catching their spirit, and anon oppressed with their failure to express the truest prowess of the believer’s soul, he tried to lift men’s faith to the Jerusalem above:

is not unlike the chorus of a Latin hymn of Berthier of Orleans, which was sung under the tent and on the field:

The student of human nature, also, will find here his most subtle and perplexing, but at the same time his most suggestive, subjects. Never before or since was there such exalted faith combined with such grotesque superstition, such splendid self-sacrifice mingled with cruel and unrestrained selfishness, such holy purpose with its wings entangled, torn, and besmeared in vicious environments.

3To the historical scholar this period is unsurpassed in importance by any, if we except the days of the birth of Christianity. The age of the crusades covers the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For two hundred years, to use the vigorous language of the Greek princess Anna Comnena, who witnessed the first crusade, “Europe was loosened from its foundations and hurled against Asia.” As an Alpine glacier presses down into the valley, only to melt away at the summer line, yet with renewed snows repeals the fatal experiment from year to year, so seven times Western Christendom replenished its mighty armaments, to see them destroyed at the border-land of Oriental conquest.

To define the causes of these vast movements is a task which both tempts and tantalizes the historian. It is surely unlearned to ascribe even the first crusade to the sole influence of any man, though he were an Urban II. and wielded the temporal and spiritual authority of the Papacy in its most puissant days. It is puerile to say, as Michaud does, speaking of Peter the Hermit, “The glory of delivering Jerusalem belongs to a single pilgrim, possessed of no other power than the influence of his character and genius.” It is equally uncritical, if not blasphemous, to attribute these most unfortunate and ill-timed ventures to the Almighty, as the same writer does in these words: “No power on earth could have produced such a great revolution. It only belonged to Him whose will gives birth to and disperses tempests to throw all at once into human hearts that enthusiasm which silenced all other passions and drew on the multitude as if by an invisible power.”

4To even approximate an understanding of this subject, one must first become familiar with the great racial movements which culminated in that age; must be able to estimate the tendencies of society at a time when it knew not the forces which were struggling within itself; must penetrate the policies of statesmen and ecclesiastics who veiled their ambition under the self-delusion that they were serving God or their fellow-men; and, besides all this, he must gauge the passions and habits of common people, their ignorance and superstition, if not the true heavenly ardor which led them to offer themselves as fuel for the most stupendous human sacrifice the world has known. Were one thus equipped with information, one’s philosophical judgment might still be baffled with the inquiry, What was the chief cause of the crusades? An observation of Dean Milman is especially applicable to this subject: “When all the motives which stir the human mind and heart, the most impulsive passion and the profoundest policy, conspire together, it is impossible to discover which is the dominant influence in guiding to a certain course of action.” The mighty tide of events we are to consider was not unlike a vast river which sweeps through many lands and has many tributary streams, some of whose sources are hidden in the depth of the unexplored wilderness.

Our preliminary study will therefore be wisely limited to an inquiry into the conditions of life and thought in the eleventh century which facilitated or prompted the great movement.

1. The intellectual and moral state of society in the eleventh century, especially its rudeness and warlike spirit.

3. The feudal system, which provided for the easy mobilization of men in war or adventure.

4. The impoverished condition of Europe, which forced enterprise to seek its reward in foreign countries.

7. The prevailing superstition, which credited to pilgrimage the virtues of piety, and substituted exploits in the Holy Land for the plainer duties of holy life.

Cardinal Baronius, the historian of the church down to the year 1198, designated the period which then closed as the Dark Ages. The propriety of the title has insured its perpetuity. The era of the crusades is almost evenly divided by the date which all scholars, following Baronius, regard as marking the end of the worst and the beginning of better times. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were the battle-ground on which the grim spectres of the old met the bright advancing spirits of the new civilization.

It must be remembered that the peoples then dominant were the descendants of those barbaric hordes whose irruption from northern Europe and western Asia had swept away the Roman empire. The fierce spirit of the Frank in Gaul, of the Goth in Spain, and of the Lombard in Italy was not yet tempered by the arts and philosophy their fathers had so nearly destroyed, and whose renaissance had not yet begun. 7It was but a few generations since the people that had inherited the Roman civilization had been largely exterminated. So complete had been the ravage that in the eighth century much of the land in Italy still remained forest and marsh, a condition to which it had reverted. Parcels of ground were purchased by strangers as eremi, the title secured by the fact of having cleared and cultivated any given spot. The reader can readily paint his own picture of the society which settled these lands by recalling such facts as that from 900 to 930 Italy was under the Huns; in 911 Normandy was conquered by Rollo the Dane; in 1029 the Normans possessed themselves of the south of Italy.

Culture, however, was not entirely extinct. The age produced many fine specimens of what is best in manhood and womanhood, although, in comparison with the general condition, these were like sporadic bushes on the breast of a land-slide, whose roots have maintained their hold through the rushing débris, or which have sprung up afresh in the new soil.

There were some men whose genius and virtues would have adorned any age. Among these was Gerbert, Pope Sylvester II. (died 1003), whose attainments in science led to the legend that he was in communication with the devil. Lanfranc (1005-89), the monk of Bec and Caen, whom William the Conqueror appointed to the see of Canterbury, is still renowned for his great logical ability and biblical scholarship. Anselm (1033-1109) merited the praise which Dante bestowed upon him as among the worthiest spirits he saw in paradise. Bérenger (998-1088), though discredited 8for heresy, possessed a prowess and independence of mind which made him the forerunner of the later Reformers. Hildebrand (1020(?)-85), however we may reprobate the hardness of his ambition and the tyrannical nature of his projects, must be recognized as among the greatest of mankind for astuteness of judgment and ability to execute the most gigantic and hazardous plans. Abélard (1079-1142) was a lad of sixteen at the time of the first crusade, but had begun to puzzle his teacher, William of Champeaux, in his dialectical tilts, deriding the obsolete method of inquiry, and declaring that it was more sport to debate than to fight in a tournament. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), whose pen was to control Christendom for a generation, and whose sainthood shines through all ages, was in the nursery when the soldiers of the cross started for the East. There were noble women, too. Bernard owed much of his talent and virtue to his mother, Aletta, whose memory is the imperishable ornament of womanhood. The great Countess Matilda spoke many languages, was chosen counsellor of Pope Gregory VII., and won her place in Dante’s catalogue of saints as the celestial messenger heralding the chariot throne of the glorified Beatrice. The praise of the great crusading captain Godfrey halos his mother, Ida of Bouillon, to whom he confessed that, next to the grace of God, he owed whatever goodness made him beloved of men.

The intellectuality of this period exercised itself almost entirely with theological and religious subjects. Men in seclusion elaborated and defended existing church doctrines, and gave pious flight to their imaginations. 9But of literature as such there was none; even the Troubadours had not begun to rhyme the Provençal tongue. The hot breath of the crusades themselves forced the débris of the Latin to send out its first flowers of poesy.

In this age at least may be discerned the budding of a taste and sentiment that betokened the refinement of after times. Gothic architecture, the first efflorescence of the Northern genius after it had been planted in the soil of Southern art, now appeared in such buildings as the cathedrals of Pisa, Modena, Parma, Siena, Strasburg, Treves, Worms, Mayence, Basel, Chartres, Brussels, and the foundation of St. Mark’s in Venice. The dreaded year 1000 having safely passed without the anticipated destruction of the world, faith reinspired art to build temples on earth. New monasteries appeared, palatial in structure, to accommodate the people who sought in seclusion escape from the hardness or the dreariness of life in the world.

It must, however, be recognized that whatever brilliancy of intelligence, beauty of character, or enterprise appeared betokened a coming rather than illustrated a passing age, like the wild flowers that shoot from the cold ground in the early spring. To picture these brighter things, were the genial task pursued to any great extent, would endanger the accuracy of the impression made upon the reader’s mind. Hallam truly says of this period: “History which reflects only the more prominent features of society cannot exhibit the virtues that were scarcely able to struggle through the general depravation.”

10This was an age of gross ignorance. The art of making paper from cotton had just been discovered, and, while it contributed somewhat to the diffusion of knowledge by giving cheaper manuscript books than those on vellum, the world was to wait four centuries longer for the printing-press to popularize the habit of seeking information. The few manuscripts which existed were the property of monasteries or of the nobility, who kept them as articles of furniture rather than for their practical use. We have a verbal monument to the ignorance of these times in the expression we still use when we speak of “signing,” or making a mark to signify, one’s name. In the ninth century Herbaud, the supreme judge of the empire, could not write his name, and as late as the fourteenth century Du Guesclin, high constable of France, was equally innocent of letters. One of their contemporaries gives this tribute to the ecclesiastics of the time: “They were given rather to the gullet than to the tongue (gulæ quam glossæ). They preferred to be schooled in salmon rather than in Solomon (salmone quam Solomone).” Few priests could translate the breviary they recited with parrot tongues. Of the history of the grand civilization just behind them the people knew nothing; even the laws which had so long preserved the state and society, those of Justinian, were forgotten except in some cloisters, where they were studied as classic lore.

The practical methods of modern inquiry into the meaning of the world, the incessant discovery of new resources in nature for the comfort and luxury of living, have stimulated and enlarged the human mind; 11and in the new interests thus created men have found a healthful diversion alike from the engrossments of animalism and the morbid fancies of superstition. But in the time we are studying there was no real scientific thought that was not instantly suppressed by the authorities of the church as the suggestion of heretics or of the Saracens. Roger Bacon, who flourished so late as the close of the crusades, paid with fourteen years’ imprisonment for his temerity in proposing the more rational methods of viewing the world, which his great namesake, Francis Bacon, three hundred and fifty years later, more completely formulated for general acceptance.

The industrial arts had been lost or had come to be entirely neglected after the barbaric conquest which swept away the Roman civilization, and during the centuries since there had been scarcely any attempt to revive them. The very faculty of invention seems to have become paralyzed by disuse. It was not until 1148 that Roger of Sicily established a silk factory at Palermo, which, Hallam says, “gave the earliest impulse to the industry of Italy.”

Such times were necessarily marked by the narrow limitation and degradation of common life.

The vast majority of people lived in the country, in complete isolation from their fellows, seeking sustenance in most primitive ways from the breast of mother nature; or they were huddled together in rude hamlets under the walls of the castles, whose lords enslaved while they protected them; for such was the chaotic condition of society that every one was compelled to seek safety with service under some possessor 12of a stronghold. Cities there were, crowded with dense masses of humanity, the breeding-places of all sorts of vice and social disorder. Towns owe their existence to some community of interest, such as similar industrial pursuits or convenience for trade; these, of course, had scarcely begun to spring up.

If the immediate environment of the common man furnished no stimulus to enterprise, neither was it provided by anything beyond his neighborhood. Without a system of monetary exchange, trade was limited to barter or to the purchasing power of purse and belt. A brief journey with merchandise was executed with hazard. Every petty lord exacted toll of those who passed the border of his estate. Many of the occupants of the castles lived by open robbery, and kept men-at-arms, as they kept their falcons, to pounce upon their prey. Not only the goods, the persons also of travellers were regarded as legitimate booty, the victims being held for ransom and often sold as slaves. So enterprising were these robber knights that it is said to have been dangerous for the king to go from Paris to St.-Denis without an army at his back. The armed merchantman rode generally with lance in rest. In towns, says Thierry, “nobles, sword in hand, committed robbery on the burghers, and in turn the burghers committed violence upon the peasants who came to buy or sell at the market of the town.”

There was considerable foreign commerce on the Mediterranean. The merchants of Pisa, Genoa, and Venice were in rivalry with those of Byzantium, and with the Saracens who held the ports of Spain and 13North Africa. But, as what are known as maritime laws were not agreed upon until the thirteenth century, commerce was little more than piracy. The trade vessels were burdened with men for their defence, or for rifling the cargoes of less puissant marauders. The mariner’s compass had been invented, but was not in common use, so that trade was compelled to follow the coast-lines, in perpetual hazard of wreck and robbers. There was no importation of things for common use; the labor and danger of transportation limited the articles of trade to those of rarest value, which became the spoil of the powerful or the purchase of the rich. The ordinary man received no benefit from other neighborhoods than his own, except that the air of heaven was sweetened by its passage over the mountains and seas which separated him from his kind.

It is difficult for us to realize what must have been the inane stupidity of the ordinary lives of men. Homes were almost as dreary in their outward appointments as the nests of eagles or the caves of beasts. In the city were narrow apartments of stone or the shanty with its mud-built walls, often as contracted as the cells of the monastery and as damp and fetid as the vaults of the prison; so that the monk lost little of this world’s comfort in entering his religious retreat, and the prisoner might think himself happy at times in being better housed than he would have been had he made his home with honest toil. If one lived in the country the habitation was a hut but little better than the shelter provided for cattle. Indeed, in many cases the “ox knew his owner” from having 14slept on the same straw, and the “ass his master’s crib” from its proximity to the family table. The floor of the rude domicile was of earth or stone, the windows unglazed, so that to exclude the winter weather was to shut out the light also. A hole in the roof scarcely sufficed to carry off the smoke from the stoveless fires. No books entertained man’s thoughts, no pictures pleased his eye; his news was the gossip of oft-told tales, his faith such as a priest, himself unable to read, might impose upon his less intelligent parishioners. Even the peasant’s liberty of his own solitude was denied him; he could not range the woods nor float upon the streams at his pleasure. We are told of certain instances where the rustics rebelled against these restrictions imposed upon them. “They took short cuts through the woods, or used the fords and rivers at will;” but they were punished by the knights, who “cut off the hands and feet of the trespassers.” If the rich were better conditioned, their residences were unfurnished with that which the middle classes in our day regard as necessary to comfort and decency. The bounty of the table was without variety. Apparel, however gay, was such as could be wrought by the women of the household. The tapestries which excite our admiration were the product of untold toil or purchased at vast expense. Within the castle was spacious monotony, relieved too generally by the grossness of private debauch; without was the wilderness, threaded by roads that were unfit for wheeled vehicles, menaced by wild beasts and more dangerous men.

The common recreation of the lordly classes was 15hunting and hawking, bear-baiting and fighting. Men rode with sword and spear, the ubiquitous falcon on arm, and hounds in leash. So universal were such pastimes that, in lack of more intellectual and refined resources, the highest dignitaries of the church displayed the weapons of the chase together with the insignia of their sacred office. So much of life was wasted in these amusements that the Council of the Lateran, in 1180, forbade the bishops indulging in these sports while on their pastoral journeys. Previously Pope Alexander III. (1159-64), by special edict, relieved the common clergy from the necessity of keeping the archdeacons in hounds and falcons during their visits to the churches.

Such a limitation of the more generous and worthy interests of mankind, which stimulate and enlarge the mind, left the common intelligence in an almost infantile condition. Sismondi says that even the nobles came to count it a duty not to think. One can readily believe this on recalling the titles given at court to the various royal personages who graced it: Pepin the Short, Charles the Bald, William the Red, Louis the Fat, etc.

Fancy, however, will generally survive the failure of the logical and æsthetic faculties, and thus men become the easy prey of superstition. All sorts of stories of things supernatural, the invention of designing priests or born of the surprise of ignorance at the unusual in nature, were believed without question. The winds that rustled the leaves of the forest were supposed to be the voices of saintly ghosts, and when with wintry weight they moaned through the branches 16or screeched along the icy rocks, it was believed that the damned were groaning in their pains or that demons were threatening men. Every flash or shadow that could not readily be explained was regarded as a hopeful or vengeful apparition from the unseen world. This credulity was not confined to the illiterate and boorish. The chroniclers of that age, upon whose learning we depend for the facts of our history, relate with equal gravity the deeds of demons and men, connect the doings of courts and the course of comets, and intermingle in relation of cause and effect the storms of nature and the wars of nations. Thus superstition completed the work of mental inoccupancy, as vermin and bats inhabit an unfurnished cell.

Such a condition of the mental faculties could have only a deleterious influence on the moral sense. We are not, therefore, surprised to find the conscience of the age correspondingly crude.

This ethical degradation was reflected in the low state of the laws, if the changeable wills or whims of a host of petty lords can be dignified with the title of legislation. Power claimed possession with little regard for the method of acquisition. Disputes, when relegated to the pretence of a court, were tried not by weighing evidence, but by counting the number of compurgators, that is, of those persons who would swear that they believed the oath of one or the other party. When the contestants were gentlemen or of the noble order, the cases were arbitrated on the field of Private Combat. Even the judge or referee of the combat was himself liable to challenge from either party that felt itself aggrieved by his decision. Priests, 17invalids, and women were accustomed to choose some one from among their relatives or friends to champion their cause. There was no appeal to candid judgment after a full hearing of the facts, except in case of dispute between slaves, villains, and freemen of inferior condition, whose owners or lords might be disposed to fair dealing. A relic of the mediæval custom of private combat is the modern duel.

The personal encounter often grew to the dimensions of neighborhood war, in which kinsmen and retainers were involved until entire districts were laid waste. Neither the power of Charlemagne nor that of the church prevailed against this unreasonable custom. The one exception to this statement was the temporary lull in the carnage during what was known as the Truce of God, an expedient agreed upon in certain places, according to which raids and riots were confined to the half of the week succeeding the Sabbath. But the adoption of this merciful rule forces our attention to its necessity, since “man’s inhumanity to man” was destroying entire populations as in a deluge of blood.

When for any reason the combat was inexpedient the question of right was decided by the Ordeal. The accused party presumed to walk through fire or on burning ploughshares, to handle hot iron, float upon water, plunge the bare arm into a boiling caldron, or swallow a bit of consecrated bread with appeal to Heaven to strike one dead if guilty. If one endured the Ordeal unscathed he was said to be acquitted by the judgment of God. It is not necessary to explain the apparent impunity with which some of the worst 18criminals passed these trials, nor to cite the multitude of cases in which persons of otherwise undoubted innocence were adjudged guilty because they perished in this irrelevant attempt to vindicate themselves. The fact that questions involving the most sacred rights of the individual, such as the holding of property, the protection of the body from mutilation on the rack, the retaining of life, and the vindication of character, were not so much as brought to the court of intelligence and conscience argues the degradation of both these faculties.

If further evidence be needed that the very sense of justice had become largely extinguished, it is found in the prevalence of judicial perjury, allowed, and even prompted, by legalized custom. Before the combat both parties were required to partake of the sacrament, in which act one of the contestants, being guilty, was forced to commit sacrilege. Witnesses were sworn upon the relics of the saints; but, notwithstanding these things were believed to have in them a limitless power to help or hurt those who touched their sacred incasements, the people seem to have credited the righteousness of the dead as little as the impartiality of the living, and the guilty were accustomed to perjure themselves without dread of consequences. The soul of good Robert of France was so afflicted by the universal consciencelessness in this respect that he devised an expedient for averting the wrath of the saints, who might justly avenge the slight put upon their bones. He ordered that the relics should be secretly removed from the casket that was supposed to contain them, so that the would-be 19perjurer might not actually commit the crime he intended. If this act illustrated the mercy, it also displayed the lack of true moral sentiment in him who, in contrast with his fellows, was known as the “good king.”

Such stifling of the sense of justice was quite naturally attended by the suppression of the gentler emotions of kindness and humanity. This was an age of almost incredible cruelty. Natural affection, of course, survived in the love of parents and children, husbands and wives. There were delightful friendships which illumined the social gloom like threads of gold in some dark fabric. Men and women lived and died for one another, as they will always do while a lineament of the divine remains in the human. But, beyond the fascination of the individual and the obligations of kinship, the sentiment of love seemed unknown to the masses. The founders of the great benevolent orders, men like Dominic and Francis of Assisi, oppressed by this deadness to the essential Christian spirit, were in the near future to unbind the hearts of men that they might come forth to more generous life; but that day had not yet come. Men apparently had lost the sympathetic imagination by which the pains and grief of the unfortunate are transferred to the hearts of others. Dean Stanley remarks of even the thirteenth century that “the age had no sense of obligation to the poor and middle class.” It was still needful that rulers should repeat the dying counsel of Charlemagne to his sons, “not to deprive widows and orphans of their remaining estates.”

This insensibility to the needs of others was accompanied 20by a positive gratification in scenes of cruelty. The popular stories which mothers taught their children were in praise of heroes whom we would regard as butchers and bruisers. A favorite legend was of Renoart, the flower of early Chivalry—he of the ugly visage and gigantic frame, whose mace laid open the brains of his antagonists, and who broke the skull of the monk who refused to indulge his whim of exchanging clothes with him. What child of that age had not heard of Roland, the hero of Roncesvalles, whose unstinted praises went far to form the manly habits of many generations? He was an enfant terrible, who tore his swaddling-clothes in pieces, belabored his mother furiously, and gave early promise of his prowess by beating lifeless the porter of the castle who would not let him go out to play. And how charming Roland’s love-making to the fair Aude! He saw her for the first time amid the galaxy of beauties assembled to witness his combat with Oliver. Unable to restrain his passion, he rushed from the lists, threw himself upon her, and would have carried her off bodily had not Oliver given him one of those blows the echo of which has rung the praises of this mediæval prize-fighter down the ages.

But the people of the eleventh century did not need to go back to an earlier era for examples of this sort of manliness. Foulques the Black, the greatest of the counts of Anjou (987-1040), was pious enough to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but not sufficiently humane to refrain from burning his young wife at the stake, decked for her doom in her gayest attire. He was so humble that he paraded the streets of the Holy 21City with a halter about his neck, while the blood streamed from the scourge-wounds on his shoulders, yet he forced his own son to be bridled and saddled like an ass and to crouch on all fours at his feet. Of the whole line of Anjou at this period the historian Green remarks that “their shameless wickedness degraded them below the level of man.” The house of Normandy contested the palm of greatness with the Angevins, but were equally rude. When William of Normandy, afterwards the Conqueror of England, learned that Baldwin of Flanders had refused him his daughter Matilda in marriage, the chronicle says “he forced his way into the countess’s chamber, found the daughter, took her by her tresses, dragged her about the room, and trampled her under his feet.” The young lady does not seem to have been grieved by the violence of the wooing, but rather to have acquired a better appreciation of the lordly qualities of her future husband. We may be permitted to doubt the accuracy of this story, but the fact that it was so early chronicled and generally believed attests the popular taste. William Rufus (1056-1100) is thus described by one who knew him: “The outrager of humanity, of law, and of nature; beastly in his pleasures, a murderer and blasphemous scoffer.” Henry I. of England (1068-1135) put out the eyes of his brother Robert and of his two grandchildren, and forced his daughter to cross a frozen fosse, stripped half naked.

The penalties under law also revealed the hardness of men’s hearts. Criminals were hung by their feet, by their necks, or by their thumbs, with burning 22matter fastened upon some part of the body; they were put into dungeons with snakes, and into cages too small to allow the full motion of the limbs; they were made to wear wooden or iron collars of enormous weight, so arranged that the culprit could take no position without feeling the burden.

In battle the soldier was to despise the bow, his delight to face the enemy at point of sword, his glory the blood that bespattered him from the gurgling arteries of the foe, or that trickled from his own wounds. No Fabian policy gave éclat to the warrior; victory was measured by the heaps of the slain, not by the progress of the cause. No quarter was ordinarily given or expected on the capture of strongholds; and not infrequently the entire surviving population of conquered cities paid with their lives the penalty for having permitted themselves to be defended by the vanquished. Raymond of Toulouse we shall learn to admire as our story advances. He was one of the most self-restrained and chivalric of the early crusaders; yet he put out the eyes and cut off the noses of his captives, and sent them thus mutilated to their homes, as a warning to their neighbors not to molest the march of the “soldiers of the cross.” Of this act of atrocity the chronicler of the day remarks: “It is not easy to do justice to the bravery and wisdom conspicuously displayed by the count here.” Too commonly the innocence of childhood, the venerableness of age, and the sacredness of sex were indiscriminately outraged by the license of conquest.

The love of war for its own sake was the dominant passion of such people. When no plausible pretext 23could be urged for declaration of hostilities, it burst out between neighborhoods as by spontaneous combustion. Raids and counter-raids took the place of the commercial rivalries of later times.

From the days of Charlemagne it had been the custom to signalize entrance upon manhood by buckling about the loins the sword, the investment with “virile arms.” The church, in hopeless inability to check the universal passion for fight, sought only to direct it to the suppression of ecclesiastical enemies. Pope Paschal (1099) exhorted Count Robert of Flanders to persecute to the utmost the Emperor Henry, saying, “By such battles you shall obtain a place in the heavenly Jerusalem.” Bernard, without dispute the holiest man of the next century, offered no excuse or palliation for his harangue to the faithful: “Let them kill the enemy or die. To submit to die for Christ, or to cause one of His enemies to die, is naught but glory.”

Very characteristic is the story of the death of the youthful Vivien, as told in the famous “Chansons de Geste,” composed about this time, though its alleged events belong to an earlier date. Vivien was the nephew of that William of Orange whose name is associated with the rise of knighthood, as that of the later William of Orange is with a nobler patriotism. There had been a fearful fight. Vivien was mortally wounded, and lay dying ere he had partaken of his first sacrament. The older warrior bent over him on the corpse-strewn field:

“You must confess to me, because I am your nearest relative and there is no priest here.”

The failing lips of the lad began the confession of 24the sins of his brief lifetime. He could think of but a single offence against God or his own nature; so heinous was his conception of the greatness of this one crime that it blotted out the memory of all else. What was this monstrous iniquity?

“I made a vow that I would never retreat one step before an enemy, and this day I have failed to keep my oath.”

William raised the head of the dying boy, placed the consecrated wafer, which he was accustomed to carry for such emergencies, between the eager lips of Vivien, and watched the young soul as, without fear or misgiving, it went to the judgment of Him who is preëminently the God of battles.

In the wars of this period a common sight was that of bishops and archbishops, clad in coats of mail, riding through the streets of their episcopal towns on fierce chargers, and returning to their palaces clotted with dirt and blood. That was a deserved rebuke, as well as a fine sarcasm, with which Richard Cœur de Lion sent the blood-stained armor of the Bishop of Beauvais to the Pope, as the garment of Joseph to Jacob, asking the Holy Father if he recognized his son’s coat.

Even women on occasion put on armor and mingled in the mêlée. Gaita, the wife of Robert Guiscard, fought in the front rank of the Normans in their conflict with the Greeks. When the crusades were in progress many a fair woman adopted the martial costume. The Amazonian Brunhilde is scarcely overdrawn by Scott in “Count Robert of Paris,” and the Moslem heroines of Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” 25stripped of their supernatural resources, might have figured in the Christian camp.

Walter Scott put into the mouth of the Greek Nicephorus a pertinent description of his fellow-Christians of the West: “To whom the strife of combat is as the breath of their nostrils, who, rather than not be engaged in war, will do battle with their nearest neighbors and challenge each other to mortal fight, as much in sport as we would defy a comrade to a chariot-race.”

It is but just to say that, if the Greeks were amazed at the warlike propensities of the Catholics, they expressed no wonder at their cruelty. In this they themselves even excelled their more robust rivals. The dungeons of Constantinople were filled with political offenders whose eyes were torn from their sockets; and more than one imperial candidate resumed his place of honor among a people whose waving banners he was unable to see. The Greek differed from the Frank and German, the Norman and Saxon, chiefly in being a coward and choosing to glut his brutal instincts with the use of the secret torture, the poisoned cup, or the dagger in the back of his victim, rather than with the sword and battle-axe in open fight.

To a people such as we have described the appeal for the crusades, in which the imagined cause of heaven marched in step with their own tastes and habits, was irresistible.

The call for the crusades, while appealing powerfully to the warlike disposition of the people, would not have succeeded in rousing Europe had there not been in the popular heart at least the germs of nobler sentiment. The vitality of conscience notwithstanding its degradation, and an inclination towards the exercise of the finer graces of conduct in spite of the prevalent grossness, manifested themselves in the rise of Chivalry.

The picturesqueness of knight-errantry, and the glamour thrown over the subject by poetry and romance, may mislead us as to the real character of this institution. We must distinguish between the ideals of knighthood and the actual lives of those who, from various motives, thronged the profession. We must not confound the Chivalry of these earlier and ruder ages with that of its more refined, though somewhat effeminate, later days. It would be an equal mistake to pose the half-savage Saxon for a picture of the gallant Provençal, because they were fellows of the 27same order. But, making all allowance for variations, defects, and perversions in Chivalry, the institution went far towards redeeming the character of the middle ages. Among the articles of the chivalric code were the following:

To fight for the faith of Christ. In illustration of this part of his vow, the knight always stood with bared head and unsheathed sword during the reading of the lesson from the gospels in the church service.

To keep one’s word, even returning to prison or death if, having been captured in fair fight, one had promised to do so.

Together with these vows of real virtue were others, which signified more for the carnal pride of the warrior, e.g.:

Never to turn out of a straight road in order to avoid danger from man, beast, or monster.

Never to decline a challenge to equal combat, unless compelled to do so by wounds, sickness, or other equally reasonable hindrance.

The aspirant for knighthood began his career in early boyhood by attending some superior as his page. Lads of noblest families sought to be attached 28to the persons of those renowned in the order, though not to their own fathers, lest their discipline should be over-indulgent. Frequently knights of special note for valor and skill at arms opened schools for the training of youth. The page was expected to wait upon his lord as a body-servant in the bedchamber, the dining-hall, and, when consistent with his tender years, upon the journey and in the camp. It was a maxim of the code that one “should learn to obey before attempting to govern.”

With the development of manly strength, at about his fourteenth year the page became an esquire. He then burnished and repaired the armor of his chief, broke his steeds, led his charger, and carried his shield to the field of battle. In the mêlée he fought by his master’s side, nursed him when wounded, and valued his own life as naught when weighed against his lord’s safety or honor.

The faithful esquire was adubbed a knight at the will and by the hand of his superior. This honor was sometimes awarded on the field of conflict for a specially valiant deed. More commonly the heroic subalterns were summoned to receive the coveted prize when the fight was done. More than one instance is mentioned where the esquire bowed his head beneath the dead hand of his master and there assumed the duty of completing the enterprise in which his chief had fallen. Ordinarily, however, the ceremony was held in the castle hall, or in later times in the church, on the occasion of some festival or upon the candidate’s reaching the year of his majority.

The rite of admission to knighthood was made as 29impressive as possible. The young man, having come from the bath, was clothed in a white tunic, expressive of the purity of his purpose; then in a red robe, symbolical of the blood he was ready to shed; and in a black coat, to remind him of the death that might speedily be his portion. After fasting, the candidate spent the night in prayer. In the morning the priest administered to him the holy communion, and blessed the sword which hung from his neck. Attendant knights and ladies then clothed him in his armor. Kneeling at the feet of the lord, he received from him the accolade, three blows with the flat of the sword upon his shoulder, with the repetition of the formula, “In the name of God, St. Michael, and St. George, I make thee a knight.”

More impressive, because more unusual, was the ceremony of his degradation, if he broke his plighted faith or forfeited his honor. He was exposed on a platform, stripped of his armor, which was broken to pieces and thrown upon a dunghill. His shield was dragged in the dirt by a cart-horse, his own charger’s tail was cut off, while he was himself carried into a church on a litter, and forced to listen to the burial service, since he was now to move among men as one who was dead to the honor for which he had vowed to live.

The chief defect of Chivalry was that, while it displayed some of the finer sentiments of the soul in contrast with the general grossness of the age, it did not aspire to the highest motives as these were felt in the early days of Christianity and as they are again apprehended in modern times. Notwithstanding 30the vow of devotion, there was little that was altruistic about it. The thought of the devotee was ultimately upon himself, his renown and glory. His crested helmet, his gilded spurs, his horse in housing of gold, and the scarlet silk which marked him as apart from and above his fellows, were not promotive of that humility and self-forgetfulness from which all great moral actions spring. Our modern characterization of the proud man is borrowed from the knight’s leaving his palfrey and mounting his charger, or, as it was called, getting “on his high horse.” In battle the personality of the knight was not, as in the case of the modern soldier, merged in the autonomy of the brigade or squadron; he appeared singly against a selected antagonist of equal rank with his own, so that the field presented the appearance of a multitude of private combats. In the lull of regular warfare he sought solitary adventures for gaining renown, and often challenged his companions in arms to contest with him the palm of greater glory. Writers aptly liken the mediæval knights to the heroic chiefs of Arabia, and even of the American Indians, to whom personal prowess is more than patriotism. Hallam would choose as the finest representative of the chivalric spirit the Greek Achilles, who could fight valiantly, or sulk in his tent regardless of the cause, when his individual honor or right seemed to be menaced.

The association of Chivalry with gallantry, though prompted by the benevolent motive of helping the weak or paying homage to woman as the embodiment of the pure and beautiful, did not always serve these high purposes. The “love of God and the 31ladies,” enjoined as a single duty, was often to the detriment of the religious part of the obligation. The fair one who was championed in the tournament was apt to be sought beyond the lists. The poetry of the Troubadours shows how the purest and most delicate sentiment next to the religious, the love of man for woman, became debauched by a custom which flaunted amid the brutal scenes of the combat the name of her whose glory is her modesty, and often made her virtue the prize of the ring.

Doubtless the good knight felt that the altar of his consecration was not high enough. Even his vow to defend the faith had, within the bounds of Christendom, little field where it could be honored by exploit of arms. To take his part in the miserable quarrels that were chronic between rival popes, or in the wars of the imperial against the prelatic powers, both professedly Christian, could not satisfy any really religious desires he may have felt. The chivalric spirit thus kindled the aspiration for an ideal which it could not furnish. If the soldier of the cross must wear armor, he would find no satisfaction unless he sheathed his sword in the flesh of the Infidels, whose hordes were gathering beyond the borders of Christendom. The institution of Chivalry thus prepared the way for the crusades, which afforded a field for all its physical heroism, while at the same time these great movements stimulated and gratified what to this superstitious age was the deepest religious impulse.

In accounting for the crusades we must consider the governmental condition of Europe at the time. Under no other system than that of feudalism would it have been possible to unify and mobilize the masses for the great adventure. Had Europe then been dominated by several great rulers, each with a nation at his control, as the case has been in subsequent times, even the popes would have been unable to combine the various forces in any enterprise that was not purely spiritual. Just to the extent in which the separate nationalities have developed their autonomy has the secular influence of the Roman see been lessened. Kings and emperors, whenever they have felt themselves strong enough to do so, have resented the leadership of Rome in matters having temporal bearings.

Nor would the mutual jealousies of the rulers themselves have allowed them to unite in any movement for the common glory, since the most urgent calls have never been sufficient to unite them even 33for the common defence, as is shown by the supineness of Catholic Europe when, in the fifteenth century, the Turks crossed the Marmora and assailed Constantinople.

But in the eleventh century there was no strong national government in Europe; kingship and imperialism existed rather in name than in such power as we are accustomed to associate with the words. At the opening of the tenth century France was parcelled out into twenty-nine petty states, each controlled by its feudal lord. Hugh Capet (987-996) succeeded in temporarily combining under his sceptre these fragments of Charlemagne’s estate; but his successors were unable to perpetuate the common dominion. In the year 1000 there were fifty-five great Frankish lords who were independent of the nominal sovereign. Indeed, some of these nobles exercised authority more weighty than that of the throne. Louis VI. (1108) first succeeded in making his lordly vassals respect his kingship, but his domain was small. “Île de France, properly so called, and a part of Orléannais, pretty nearly the five departments of the Seine, French Vexin, half the countship of Sens, and the countship of Bourges—such was the whole of it. But this limited state was as liable to agitation, and often as troublous and toilsome to govern, as the very greatest of modern states. It was full of petty lords, almost sovereign in their own estates, and sufficiently strong to struggle against their kingly suzerain, who had, besides, all around his domains several neighbors more powerful than himself in the extent and population of their states” (Guizot).

34In Spain much of the land was still held by the Moors. That which had been wrested from them was divided among the Christian heroes who conquered it, and who, though feudal rules were not formally recognized, held it with an aristocratic pretension commensurate with the leagues they shadowed with their swords.

In Germany, though imperialism had been established firmly by Otho the Great, the throne was forced to continual compromise with the ambition of its chief vassals, like the dukes of Saxony, Bavaria, Swabia, and Franconia. A papal appeal to such magnates was sufficient at any time to paralyze, or at least to neutralize, the imperial authority.

The Norman holdings in the south of Italy, the independence of the cities of Lombardy in the north, the claims of the German emperor and of the popes to landed control, were typical of the divisions of that unhappy peninsula.

Later than the age we are studying, Frederick Barbarossa (1152-90) enjoined that “in every oath of fealty to an inferior lord the vassal’s duty to the emperor should be expressly reserved.” But it was not so elsewhere. When Henry II. (1154-89) and Richard I. (1189-99) claimed lands in France, their French vassals never hesitated to adhere to these English lords, nor “do they appear to have incurred any blame on that account. St. Louis (1226-70) declared in his laws that if ‘justice be refused by the king to one of his vassals, the vassal may summon his own tenants, under penalty of forfeiting their fiefs, to assist him in obtaining redress by arms’” (Hallam).

35The extent to which the French barons were independent of the throne will be evident from a glance at their privileges. They possessed unchallenged:

(1) The right of coining money. In Hugh Capet’s time there were one hundred and fifty independent mints in the realm.

(2) The right of waging private war. Every castle was a fortress, always equipped as in a state of siege.

(3) Immunity from taxation. Except that the king was provided with entertainment on his journeys, the crown had no revenue beyond that coming from the personal estates of its occupant.

(4) Freedom from all legislative control. Law-making ceased with the capitularies of Carloman in 882. The first renewal of the attempt at general legislation was not until the time of Louis VIII. in 1223. Even St. Louis declared in his establishments that the king could make no laws for the territories of the barons without their consent.

But if such was the independence of the feud-holder in his relations to the sovereign, those beneath him were in absolute dependence upon their lord. This is seen in the following obligations of feudal tenants to their superior:

(1) Reliefs: sums of money due from every one coming of age and taking a fief by inheritance; fines upon alienation or change of tenant ownership.

(2) Escheats: reversion to the lord of all property upon a tenant’s dying without natural heirs, or upon any delinquency of service.

(3) Aids: contributions levied in special emergency, 36as the lord’s expedition to the Holy Land, the marriage of his sister, eldest son, or daughter, his paying a “relief” to his overlord, making his son a knight, or redeeming his own person from captivity.

(4) Wardship of tenant during minority. This involved on the part of the lord the right to select a husband for a female dependent, which alliance could be declined only on payment of a fine equal to that which any one desiring the woman could be induced to offer for her.

If the feudal system pressed so harshly upon those who were themselves of high rank, it need not be said that the common people were utterly crushed by this accumulation of graded despotisms, whose whole weight rested ultimately on the lowest stratum. The mass of the lowly was divided into three orders:

(1) Freemen possessing small tracts of allodial land, so called because held by original occupancy and not yet merged in the larger holdings. There were many freemen in the fifth and sixth centuries, but in the tenth century nearly all the land of Europe had become feudal. The freemen, whose possessions were small, soon found it necessary to surrender land and liberty for the sake of protection by some neighboring lord.

(2) Villains or serfs, who were attached to the land and transferable with it on change of owners.

(3) Slaves. The degradation of the servile class was limitless, the master having the right of life and death, entire use of the property and wages of his people, and absolute disposal of them in marriage. Slavery was abolished in France by Louis the Gross 37(1108-37) so far as respected the inhabitants of cities; but it took nearly two centuries more to accomplish the abolition of servitude throughout the kingdom.

The cities were, indeed, rising to assert their communal, if not manhood, rights. The communes, as they were called, demanded and received privilege in certain places of electing any persons to membership as citizens who were guaranteed absolute ownership of property. But the communes were far from even suggesting anything like the modern democratic systems, and were opposed by clergy and nobility. “So that,” says Guizot, “security could hardly be purchased, save at the price of liberty. Liberty was then so stormy and so fearful that people conceived, if not a disgust for it, at any rate a horror of it.” Men had not evolved the morality which could make a commonwealth. Law was bound on men only by force. The wall of the castle, grand and impressive as wealth could build it, or only a rude addition to the natural rock, was the sole earthly object of reverence. To the strong man came the weak, saying, “Let me be yours; protect me and I will fight for you.”

It will be evident that under the feudal system patriotism, in the modern sense of attachment to one’s national domain, can scarcely be said to have existed. While we may not believe recent French writers who assert that the love of their country as such was born with the Revolution a hundred years ago, it is certain that the mediæval attachment was no wider than to one’s immediate neighborhood. The crusading Count of Flanders, on viewing the desolate hills about Jerusalem, 38exclaimed, “I am astonished that Jesus Christ could have lived in such a desert. I prefer my big castle in my district of Arras.” The love of the peasant seems to have been only for his familiar hills and vineyards, and his loyalty was limited by the protecting hand of his lord.

Yet generous spirits could not remain forever so narrowly bounded in their interests. Men were ready to hear the call to a wider range of sympathies and actions. The summons for the crusades thus furnished the lacking sentiment of patriotism; but it was a patriotism that could not be bounded by the Rhine or the Danube, by the Channel or the Pyrenees. Europe was country; Christendom was fatherland.

At the same time the compactness of each feud, the close interdependence of lord and vassal, furnished the condition for the organization of bands of fighting men, ready to move at once, and to continue the enterprise so long as the means of the superior should hold out. There was needed to start the crusading armies no council of parliament or alliance of nations, hazarded and delayed by the variant policies of different courts. If the baron was inclined to obey the call of his ghostly superior, the successor of St. Peter, his retainers were ready to march. And the most brawling of the barons was superstitious enough to think that the voice of the Pope might be the voice of God. If he did not, his retainers did, and disobedience to the papal will might cost him the obedience of those subject to him. Besides, many of the feudal lords were themselves in clerical orders, with their oath of fealty lying at the feet of the Holy Father.

39Thus Europe, though divided into many factions, and, indeed, because the factions were so many, was in a condition to be readily united. We shall see in a subsequent chapter that it was in the interest of the holy see to apply the spring which should combine and set in motion these various communities as but parts of that gigantic piece of ecclesiastical and military mechanism invented by Hildebrand.

The once luxuriant civilization of Rome had been swept away by the Northern invaders as completely as a freshet despoils the fields when it not only destroys standing vegetation, but carries with the débris the soil itself. The most primitive arts, those associated with agriculture, were forgotten, and the rudiments of modern industries were not thought of. Much of the once cultivated land had, as has elsewhere been noted, reverted to native forest and marsh, and in places was still being purchased by strangers on titles secured by occupancy and first improvement, as now in the new territories of America. But even nature’s pity for man was outraged; the bounty she gave from half-tilled acres was despoiled by men themselves, as hungry children snatch the morsels of charity from one another’s hands. What was hoarded for personal possession became the spoil of petty robbers, and what was left by the neighborhood marauder was destroyed in the incessant baronial strife. To these devouring forces must be added the desolating wars between the papal and imperial 41powers, the conquest and reconquest of Spain by Moors and Christians, and the despoiling of Saxon England by the Normans. Throughout Europe, fields, cottages, castles, oftentimes churches, were stripped by the vandalism which had seemingly become a racial disposition. To this ordinary impoverished condition was added the especial misery, about 1195, of several years’ failure of crops. Famine stalked through France and middle Europe; villages were depopulated. Cruel as they were, men grew weary of raiding one another’s possessions when there was nothing to bring back but wounds. Even hatred palled when unsupported by envy and cupidity.

The crusades gave promise of opening a new world to greed. The stories that were told of Eastern riches grew, as repeated from tongue to tongue, until fable seemed poor in comparison with what was believed to be fact. All the wealth of antiquity was presumed to be still stored in treasure-vaults, which the magic key of the cross would unlock. The impoverished baron might exchange his half-ruined castle for some splendid estate beyond the Ægean, and the vulgar crowd, if they did not find Jerusalem paved with gold like the heavenly city, would assuredly tread the veins of rich mines or rest among the flowers of an earthly paradise. The Mohammedan’s expectation of a sensual heaven after death was matched by the Christian’s anticipation of what awaited him while still in life.

They who were uninfluenced by this prospect may have seized the more warrantable hope of opening profitable traffic with the Orient. The maritime cities 42of Italy had for a long time harvested great gains in the eastern Mediterranean, in spite of the Moslem interruptions of commerce. Would not a tide of wealth pour westward if only the swords of the Christians could hew down its barriers?

The church piously, but none the less shrewdly, stimulated the sense of economy or greed by securing exemption from taxation to all who should enlist, and putting a corresponding burden of excise upon those who remained at home, whose estates were assessed to pay the expenses of the absent. The householder who found it difficult to save his possessions while keeping personal guard over them was assured that all his family and effects would be under the watchful protection of the church, with anathemas already forged against any who should molest them. If one were without means he might borrow to the limit of his zeal, with exemption from interest. It was understood that the Jews were still under necessity of paying back the thirty pieces of silver with which they had bought the Christians’ Lord, the interest on which, compounded through the centuries, was now equal in amount to all there might be in the vaults of this accursed race.

When we remember the wars of modern times which have originated in the cupidity of men, we are not surprised that the same disposition, inflamed by the sense of dire need at home and the vision of untold treasures outre mer, with heavenly rewards beyond the sky, should have led to the same result in an age that knew almost nothing of the arts of peace.

We shall fail to appreciate the inception of the crusades if we overlook the influence of the papal policy in the middle ages. These movements of Europe against Asia, being under the direct patronage of the popes, facilitated the plans of Rome to consolidate and universalize the ecclesiastical empire. To understand this policy we must recall the condition of the church in its relation to popular life and the secular powers.

We have referred to the fact that the year 1000 had been looked forward to as that which should mark the end of the world. So common was the expectation of this termination of human affairs that many charters, which have been preserved from this period, begin with the words, “As the world is now drawing to its close.” When, however, the fatal day passed without any perceptible shock to the universe, the popular credulity added the thirty-three years of the life of our Lord to the calculation, and prolonged 44the gruesome foreboding. But if the chronological interpretation of the prophecy of the Book of Revelation was a mistaken one, there was not wanting an apparent fulfilment of the descriptive prediction, “Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.” The falsity and viciousness of men certainly took on fiendish proportions.

The worst feature of the general demoralization was that the millennial fear had driven all sorts of men into church orders. The priesthood and monasteries were crowded with wretched characters, whose imagined immunity in their sacred refuges gave license to their carnal vices. The clergy were no longer the shepherds, but the bell-wethers of the wayward flock. Priests lived in open concubinage. When Hildebrand, previous to his elevation to the Papacy, took charge of the monastery of St. Paul in Rome, his first work was to drive out the cattle that were stabled in the basilica, and the prostitutes who served the tables of the monks. Courtesans reigned even in the palaces of the popes with more effrontery than in the courts of the secular princes. The offspring of such creatures as the infamous Theodora, and of her daughters Theodora and Marozia, had, in the tenth century, purchased the tiara with their vices. In those days the papal staff was wrenched by violence from the hands that held it with more frequency than the old Roman sceptre had been stolen in the worst days of the empire. It may well be credited that men began to pray again to pagan deities in sheer despondency under the darkness which veiled the Christian truth. The surviving 45religious sentiment was voiced in the solemn utterance of the Council of Rheims, which declared that the church was “ruled by monsters of iniquity, wanting in all culture, whether sacred or profane.”

If the tenth century closed with a gleam of hope in the elevation of Gregory V. (996-999) and Sylvester II. (999-1003), it was quickly remembered that the learning of the latter had been acquired among the Saracens; and his biographer attributed his attainments to magic and undue familiarity with the fiends in hell.

In the early part of the eleventh century the papal chair was filled with the nominees of politicians, and from 1033 to 1045 disgraced by Benedict IX., who at the age of twelve was selected to pose as the Vicegerent of God. The lowest vices and caprices of unconscionable youth were enthroned in the place that was most sacred in the thoughts of men. One of his successors, Victor III. (1086-87), said of Benedict that he led a life so shameful, so foul and execrable, that it made one shudder to describe it. A man of such grovelling appetites naturally wearied with even the slight usages of decency which had come to be regarded as necessary in the papal palace; and after twelve years of irksome attempt to support its lessened dignity, he sold his tiara to Gregory VI. An unknown writer, about the middle of the eleventh century, attempting a review of the passing age, exclaimed, “Everything is degenerate and all is lost. Faith has disappeared. The world has grown old and must soon cease altogether.”

As the debasement of the church could go no 46lower, a reaction was natural and inevitable, if virtue was not altogether decayed at the roots. The sentiment of human decency reasserted itself, and, since there was no power at Rome to inaugurate reform, an appeal was made to the German emperor. Henry III., in response to the call, deposed by force three rival claimants to the papal throne, and secured the ascendency of a line of German popes. It was not without the suspicion of poison that two of them died after brief power: Clement II. within the year, and Damasus II. in twenty-three days.

With Leo IX. (1049) came a better era. The year 1033, the ultimate date set by the prophecy-mongers for the end of the world, being clearly past, and men becoming again possessed of hope in the continuance of mundane affairs, the best spirits dared to labor for the renovation of society, that the earth thus saved as by fire might become indeed “a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”

From this time the commanding genius and pure purpose of Hildebrand guided, if he did not select, the occupants of the seat of St. Peter, until, in 1073, the great counsellor himself assumed the sacred sceptre. History, while it severely condemns the methods by which Hildebrand sought to attain his ends, credits him with rigid honesty and devotion to what he believed to be the will of Heaven. While it writes into his epitaph the charge of most inordinate ambition, it does not erase from it the record of his utterance as he lay dying, a fugitive at Salerno: “I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.”

47The religious degradation of Christendom afflicted the soul of this truly great man; but whence could come reform? The age was too far gone in its demoralization to wait for recuperation through the slow process of education. Society could not endure another generation of its own putridity. The secular powers were utterly impotent to cope with the gigantic evils that were abroad in every land. Even had they possessed the disposition to champion the virtues, such sovereigns as the King of France, the Emperor of Germany, the new Norman King of England, were altogether engrossed in holding their precarious crowns, surrounded as they were by a multitude of feudal lords, some of whom could collect in their own names a larger force than that which would rise to defend the throne.

To Hildebrand but one course seemed open, a desperate one, whose hazard showed the audacity of the genius that conceived it. It was nothing less than to declare the Papacy a world monarchy, and to force universal reform by the combined power of the secular and spiritual sceptre held in his own hand. In his bull against the Emperor Henry IV. he used these words: “Come now, I pray thee, O most holy Father, and ye princes [St. Peter and St. Paul], that all the world may know that if ye are able to bind and loose in heaven, ye are able on earth to take away, or to give to each according to his merits, empires, kingdoms, duchies, marquisates, counties, and the possessions of all men.... If ye judge in spiritual affairs, how great must be your power in secular! and if ye are to judge angels, who rule over 48proud princes, what may ye not do to these their servants! Let kings, then, and all the princes of the world learn what ye are and how great is your power, and fear to treat with disrespect the mandates of the church.”

To practicalize this enormous claim, the Pope made two demands, which threw Europe into a state of turmoil, (1) He ordered the renunciation of all investitures of religious office by secular potentates. The clergy held of the empire cities, duchies, entire provinces, rights of levying taxes, coinage, etc., amounting to one half of all property. The sees thus held Hildebrand declared to be vacated until their occupants should again receive them from his hand under pledge of absolute obedience to the papal, as opposed to the imperial, authority. By this stroke the Pope would gather to himself the practical control of all countries. (2) Hildebrand forbade the marriage of the clergy—a custom wide-spread at the time—and commanded those who had entered into matrimony, however innocently and legally, to forsake their wives, as having been but concubines, and their children, since logically they were but bastards. By enforcing the celibacy of the clergy, he would have at his call an army of men without domestic ties, care, or encumbrance, and, so far as possible to human nature, divested of individuality, and thus the pliant agents of his single will.

The audacity of Hildebrand’s scheme will be noted by comparing it with the attitude of the most devoted adherents to the papal authority previous to his time.

The capitularies of Charlemagne contain many rules for the regulation of religious duties. The emperor 49himself (794) presided at the Synod of Frankfort, though a papal legate was in attendance. While he brought the church all possible help as an ally, and yielded to it all obedience as a private Christian, he never allowed his imperial authority to be under so much as the shadow of control by the papal. He suffered but one religion in his domains, that which had the Pope for its chief administrator; but he held with equal strenuousness that the emperor was the vicar of God in things temporal.

From 964 to 1055 the popes had been the direct nominees of the emperor. In 1059 the papal election devolved for the first time upon the conclave of cardinals; but the Lateran Council decreed that the imperial confirmation must follow. Though in 1061 Alexander II. was chosen without imperial sanction, yet in 1073 Hildebrand himself, becoming Pope as Gregory VII., did not venture to discharge the duties of the office without first asking and obtaining the emperor’s assent.

But this outward deference to the secular power was only that he might grasp more securely the weapon with which he would beat that power to pieces. When the Emperor Henry IV. resented the sweeping claim of the Pope, Hildebrand launched against him all the terrors of the pontifical throne. His bull reads as follows: “Henry and all of his adherents I excommunicate and bind in the fetters of anathema; on the part of almighty God, I interdict him from the government of all Germany and Italy; I deprive him of all royal power and dignity; I prohibit every Christian from rendering him obedience 50as king; I absolve all who have sworn or shall swear allegiance to his sovereignty from their oaths.”

(For the details of this controversy and the general history of Hildebrand, the reader is referred to the previous volume in this series, Vincent’s “Age of Hildebrand.”)

This policy of the Papacy to make itself the world monarchy had a direct bearing upon the crusades and facilitated the enterprise. The astute mind of Hildebrand saw that a movement which should combine the Catholics of all countries in Europe under his command would immensely augment his prestige as their great overlord. During his pontificate there opportunely arrived at Rome messengers from the Greek emperor at Constantinople, beseeching the aid of Western Christendom in expelling the Turks, who were menacing the capital of the East. Hildebrand, consistently with his policy, prescribed as the condition of such aid the recognition on the part of the Greek Church of the headship of the Roman pontiff. But in this demand he overshot the mark, while at the same time the apathy of the Latin Christians towards their Greek brethren, and his own controversy with the German emperor, left him no opportunity to launch the movement. It was left to Urban II., his second successor in the pontificate, to undertake the great adventure. As Dean Milman remarks, “No event could be more favorable or more opportune for the advancement of the great papal object of ambition, the acknowledged supremacy over Latin Christendom, or for the elevation of Urban himself over the rival Pope [Guibert] and the temporal sovereign, his enemies.”

The rapid rise and wide-spread conquest of Mohammedanism make one of the most startling phenomena of history. If its story excites our wonder in these days, while we are watching its decadence, we may imagine the consternation wrought when its swarming hosts, with the prestige of having conquered all western Asia, were breaking through the barriers of Christendom.

We shall greatly mistake this movement if we regard it as a mere irruption of brute force such as characterized the assaults of the barbarians upon the Roman empire. The teachings of Mohammed, gross as they appear in contrast with either primitive or modern Christianity, contained elements which appealed to far nobler sentiments than those entertained by the pagans of northern Europe, or those current in the age of the Prophet among the people of his own race. Compared with these, Islamism was a reformation, and enthused its adherents with the belief that they fought for the advancement of civilization as well as for the rewards of paradise.

52The central thought of Islamism is the unity of the Godhead, and its first victory was the obliteration of polytheism among the tribes of Arabia.

It is true that, before the time of Mohammed, Allah had been accorded the first place in the speculative theology of the Arabs; yet gods many usurped their worship and were supposed to control their daily lives. Wise men, called hanifs, had protested against the prevailing superstition, and succeeded in spreading a healthful scepticism regarding the lesser divinities. Mohammed eagerly imbibed the better philosophy. Familiarity with the religion of the Jews, and some acquaintance with the doctrine of Jesus, whom he accepted as a true prophet, doubtless gave shape and vividness to his better faith. His meditations on the grand themes of religion were, to his excited imagination, rewarded by definite revelation. He rose inspired with the conviction,—which became the call for a new civilization in the Orient,—“Great is God, and Mohammed is His prophet!” Islam, or resignation to the sovereign will of Allah, became the title and spirit of the new religion.

But if a celestial ray had touched and stimulated the mind of Mohammed, no heavenly influence refined his heart and conscience. Sensuality and cruelty, racial qualities of the Arab, were not only unrestrained, but utilized as agencies for the spread of the faith. Ferocity wielded the sword, and its fury was to be rewarded by the gratification of lust in a paradise whose description surpassed the sensuous fancies of pagan poets and romancers. The spirit of the new propaganda is evinced in this sentence from the 53Koran: “The sword is the key of heaven and hell; a drop of blood shed in the cause of Allah, a night spent in arms, is of more avail than two months of fasting and prayer; whoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven, and at the day of judgment his limbs shall be supplied with the wings of angels and cherubim.”

It might seem that the Christian would be spared the vengeance of Mohammed, since he also taught the unity of the Godhead; but the Arabian misunderstood Christianity. To him the Trinity was essential polytheism. It must be confessed that such Christianity as the Arab saw very naturally suggested that false interpretation of the Bible doctrine. In some Eastern Christian sects Mariolatry had exalted the mother of Jesus to the third place in the Trinity, in horrid usurpation of the office of the Holy Ghost. The Koran expressly condemns the triform worship of Jehovah, Jesus, and Mary. The Prophet, while denying the divinity of Christ, regarded himself as an avenger of Jesus, the holy man, against the heresy of his professed followers. Mohammed’s last utterance is reported to have been, “The Lord destroy the Jews and Christians! Let His anger be kindled against all those that turn the tombs of their prophets into places of worship! Eternity in paradise!”

Not only was the doctrine of the Koran acceptable to the people to whom it was delivered; the organization of the Mohammedan system provided an efficient agency for its development and propagandism.

This organization was exceedingly simple. It had but one code for things religious and things secular. 54The Koran was at once the confession of faith and the national constitution. From the same pages the priest preached eternal life, caliph, emir, and sheik quoted the rules of government, the judge drew his decision in controversies, the soldier read his reward for valor and death on the field, and merchant and peasant found the regulations for their daily traffic. The one book destroyed the distinction between sacred and profane, since everything became thereby religious, while the duties and amenities of common life were surcharged with the bigotry of devoteeism.

The unity of Moslemism under the book was further intensified by the sole headship of the Prophet and his successors. The fondest dream of the popes of Rome, to blend spiritual and secular authority, was surpassed by the throne which actually arose in the Arabian desert. The opinion of the caliph was the final decision of all questions of dogma; ministers of state were his personal commissioners, and over them, as over the humblest subject, he exercised the power of life and death. One will was sovereign, responsible to none other, and actuated all things in church and state. One man’s word rallied tribes and sects, and hurled them en masse upon his enemies, or in more peaceful ways directed their seeming diversities to the accomplishment of a single purpose.

It must be acknowledged, however, that, while the Mohammedan system thus adapted it to the most deadly tyranny over thought and life, it was not always so wielded. The cause was advanced by the sagacity, if not the more humane inclinations, of many of the caliphs. Not a few of these were among 55the wisest men of their day, and adopted a policy of leniency in dealing with their submissive enemies, which facilitated the extension of their rule. The repetition of a single sentence, acknowledging the unity of God and the supremacy of the Prophet, transformed foe into friend. In many instances the tribute paid to the conqueror was far less than that which the former Christian rulers had been in the habit of exacting. Though, as a rule, Christian churches were ruthlessly despoiled of their symbolic ornaments and reduced to the barren simplicity of the mosque, yet they were frequently spared this sacrilege. When Jerusalem fell into the hands of Omar, the Christians were forbidden to call to worship by the sound of bell, to parade the streets in religious procession, to distinguish their sect by badge or dress, and were compelled to give up the temple site for the mosque of Omar; yet they were allowed freely to worship in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the caliph himself refusing to appear within those sacred precincts, saying, “Had I done so, future Mussulmans would infringe the treaty under cover of imitating my example.” Haroun-al-Raschid, in exchanging courtesies with Charlemagne, presented him with the keys of the Holy Sepulchre.

To this compact unity of Mohammedanism under Koran and caliph, and this wise blending of the terror of arms with peaceful patronage, was due the unparalleled progress of the religion of the Prophet. The Moslem conquests will appear in the story, first of the Saracen, and later that of the Turk.

The Saracens.—During Mohammed’s lifetime Arabia 56and Syria were beneath his hand. Within eight years following, Persia, parts of Asia Minor, Palestine, and Egypt submitted to him. Thirteen years more (653) saw the cimeter of the Saracens enclosing an area as large as the Roman empire under the Cæsars. In 668 they assaulted Constantinople. In 707 North Africa surrendered the treasures of its entire coast from the Nile to the Atlantic, and the home of Augustine, the father of Christian orthodoxy, was occupied by the Infidels. In 711 the Saracen general Tarik crossed the straits between the Mediterranean and Atlantic, and landed on the rock which has ever since borne his name—Jebel-Tarik, the “hill of Tarik,” or Gibraltar. By 717 Spain, from the Mediterranean to the Pyrenees, had become the proud conquest of the Moors. But for the timely victory of Charles Martel at Tours, in 732, they had surely subdued France and soon completed the circle of conquest by the desolation of Italy, Germany, and the lands bordering the Balkans. In 847 the Saracens were masters of Sicily, and besieged Rome itself, plundering the suburban churches of St. Peter and St. Paul. Thirty years later Pope John VIII. wrote to Charles the Bold: “If all the trees in the forests were turned into tongues, they could not describe the ravages of these impious pagans; the devout people of God is destroyed by a continual slaughter; he who escapes the fire and the sword is carried as a captive into exile. Cities, castles, and villages are utterly wasted and without an inhabitant. The Hagarenes [sons of fornication and wrath] have crossed the Tiber.” In 916 these persistent foes 57occupied a fortress on the Gangliano, between Naples and Rome, whence they held the papal domain at their mercy, and seizing the persons of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of the apostles, held them for heavy ransom. This stronghold was broken up only by the attack of a powerful confederacy of Italian dukes, aided by the emperors of the East and West. The exigency was so great that, in the estimate of papal apologists, it warranted the action of Pope John X., who arrayed himself in carnal armor and rode at the head of the attacking forces.

In 1016 a powerful armament of Saracens was landed at Luna in the territory of Pisa, but defeated by Pope Benedict VIII. This disaster did not diminish either the hauteur or expectancy of the invader, who sent to the Pope a huge bag of chestnuts with the message, “I will return with as many valiant Saracens to the conquest of Italy.” The Pope was not to be outdone in prowess of speech, and returned a bag of millet with the boast, “As many brave warriors as there are grains will appear at my bidding to defend their native land.”

In 1058 there occurred a wild outburst of Moslem bigotry, which sent a thrill of horror through Christian Europe. The charity of earlier rulers of Palestine towards Christian worshippers gave place to fiercest persecution by Mad Hakem, the Sultan of Egypt, who razed to the ground the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and slaughtered its devotees. He ultimately, however, commuted his rage into cupidity, and affixed a tax upon the worshippers. At the close of the eleventh century, the time of the first crusade, 58the Saracenic power, though steadily receding before the Christians, still menaced southern Europe. Trained bands of Moslems, when not in war on their own account with their common enemy, the Christians, joined themselves with one or another of the contending parties which rent the empire and the church. Thus in 1085, ten years before the first crusade, Pope Gregory rescued Rome from the hands of his imperial opponent, Henry of Germany, only with the assistance of Saracen soldiers, who thronged the ranks of the Pope’s Norman allies. Very naturally the joy of the papal victory was mingled with jealousy of the means by which it had been accomplished.

Not only were Moslem warriors often found in Christian ranks; frequently the valor of the Christian knight found freest exploit in the cause of the Moors. The adventures of the Cid, whom Philip II. wished Rome to canonize as an ideal saint, were for eight years performed in the service of the Arab king of Saragossa.

The Moslem became also the rival of the Christian in commerce. The ships which in the lull of hostilities sailed from the ports of France and Italy met the richly laden vessels of Egypt and Spain in exhausting competition for the trade of the Mediterranean. The coast of North Africa was the lurking-place of pirates, who darted over the Great Sea with the celerity of spiders along their web, and seized every craft that weakness or misfortune made their prey. With his wealth the Moslem often won his way to social position, and even invaded the family relations of his 59Christian neighbor. Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice, if not a real character, was at least one typical not only of the fifteenth, but of earlier centuries. The plot of this play was borrowed by the English dramatist from the Venetian romances. More than one Desdemona had braved the curses of her Christian kindred for the fascinations of the Infidel; many a renegade Iago was found in his service; and often the Christian dignitary, like Brabantis, was led by gold and political advantage to assent that his daughter should

Yet these misalliances did not destroy the common sentiment of the Christians against the Saracens. The foul sensuality allowed by the Koran as it thus touched the homes of Europe deepened the racial antipathy of the people who were still monogamic in their faith and customs.

The Mohammedan menace was further augmented in the superstitious notions of the age by the intellectual ascendency of the Saracens. Christendom did not discern that, in the mass of evils brought upon Europe by the invasions from the East, there were the germs of its own quickening, as the freshets of the Nile enrich the land of Egypt. If, in the first heat of his zealotry, the Saracen destroyed the library of Alexandria, regarding the Koran as compensation for all the books of Christian and pagan wisdom, yet in the light of the flames he saw his mistake, and became the most liberal patron of education. To the mosque he added the school. While the rest of 60Europe was in the density of the Dark Ages, the Moorish universities of Spain were the beacons of the revival of learning. The Christian teacher was still manipulating the bones of the saints when the Arab physician was making a materia medica and practising surgery. By the discovery of strong acids the Moor laid the basis of the science of chemistry; by the adoption of the Hindu numerals he improved arithmetic. He first practically used, if he did not invent, algebra; introduced astronomy to the European student; wrote on optics, the weight and height of the atmosphere, gravity, capillary attraction; applied the pendulum to the measurement of time, and guessed that the earth was round. In the superstition of Christian Europe these studies were regarded, if not as belonging to the magic arts, at least as threatening the faith by fostering undue independence of thought, and tempting to scepticism regarding the office of the church as universal teacher. The subsequent persecution of Galileo and Bruno was anticipated in the hatred and fear which were awakened by such names as Ben-Musa (ninth century), Avicenna (tenth century), Alhazan and Algazzali (eleventh century). The diverse spirits of the age are illustrated by the Giralda, the tower of Seville, which was built by the Moors for an observatory, but on the Catholic conquest was used only for a belfry.

The Turks.—The Saracenic conquests caused only a part of the Mohammedan menace in the eleventh century. A new power appeared, which has since dominated the middle Orient. For generations the Turks, or Tartars, had been steadily pressing southward and 61westward, from Turkestan and the borders of China towards the fertile plains and rich cities of the eastern Roman empire. Of nomadic habits, their entire property was in their camps and the driven herds that sustained them. They were skilled horsemen, cradled in the saddle, tireless on the march, loving the swift foray better than luxurious residence, inured to danger, and careless of blood. In the course of their migrations they came in contact with the followers of Mohammed. The Koran, with its celestial indorsement of sensuality, easily captivated in such a people that demand of common human nature for some religious faith and pursuit. They became the most enthusiastic devotees of the new faith, although in their deeper passion for selfish conquest they often slaughtered their fellow-religionists of other races.

Early in the eleventh century one division of this people—the Seljukian Turks, so named from their great chieftain, Seljuk—overran Armenia and conquered Persia. Togrul-Beg, the grandson of Seljuk, had been elected to the chieftaincy according to the ancient custom, the chance drawing, by the hand of a child, of an arrow inscribed with his name. He was further honored by being chosen a temporal vicar of the caliph of Bagdad, then the chief of Arabic Mohammedanism. In 1055 Togrul-Beg was proclaimed “Commander of the Faithful and Protector of Mussulmans.” He was clothed in the seven robes of honor, was presented with seven slaves born in the seven climates of Araby the Blest, was crowned with two crowns and girded with two cimeters, emblematic of dominion over both the West and the East.

62The successor of Togrul-Beg was Alp-Arslan, the “strong lion” (1063). He merited his title when, like a wild beast, he ravaged Armenia and Iberia, and then sprang upon Asia Minor. At the time, this peninsula between the Mediterranean and the Euxine was flourishing with proud cities and prolific fields, and occupied by an industrious, peace-loving population. The ruined amphitheatre and aqueduct which to-day oppress the curiosity of the traveller are the footprints of this Turkish invader, which the misgovernment of his successors has not permitted to be effaced. In the battle of Manzikert (1071) Alp-Arslan defeated and captured Romanus IV., the Greek emperor, and thus broke the only Eastern power that could dispute his sway. Finlay remarks: “History records few periods in which so large a portion of the human race was in so short a time reduced from an industrious and flourishing condition to degradation and serfage.”

Under Malek-Shah, son of Alp-Arslan (1073), the Turkish power, swollen by new hordes from the great central plains of Asia, occupied almost the entire territory now known as Turkey in Asia. They pressed to the walls of Constantinople. By threatening, and by intrigue with every insurgent against the throne, they kept the Greek empire in constant alarm.

In their peril the Greeks appealed for help to their Christian brethren of Europe. In spite of the scorn in which the Latins held the Greek Church for its antipapal heresies, the common danger led Pope Gregory VII. (Hildebrand) in 1074 to summon all Christian potentates to repel the Turks. He himself 63proposed to lead the avenging hosts, but was diverted from this generous purpose by the nearer ambition of crushing the enemies of the papal throne at home.

In 1079 the Emperor Michael saved his crown only by the assistance of the Turks against his Greek rival, for which aid he paid by surrendering to Solyman the government of the best part of the empire east of the Bosporus.

In 1093 Europe was startled by the news of the fall of Jerusalem. After incredible slaughter, not only of Christians, but of Arabic Moslems as well, the black flag of Ortuk floated from the tower of David. All privileges which had been granted to followers of Jesus by the comparative humanity of the Arab were now withdrawn by the Turk. To bow in worship at the Holy Sepulchre was to bend the neck beneath the cimeter.

Europe was thrown into a state of terrorism. Moslem irruption into the West seemed imminent. Kings trembled on their thrones, and peasant mothers hushed their crying babes with stories which transformed every spectre into the shape of the turbaned invader.

In 1093, on the death of Malek-Shah, the Turkish power was weakened by divisions; this gave Christendom heart. The statesmen at the Vatican saw the opportunity, and Pope Urban’s appeal for the crusades met the quick response both of the powers and the people. One of the divisions of Malek-Shah’s empire was that of Solyman, Sultan of Roum, or Iconium. From this power sprang the Ottomans, who for eight hundred years have held an unbroken dynasty, and for four hundred years have occupied the city of Constantine for their capital.

Old Testament religion made much of sacred places. In the early occupancy of Palestine, Hebron, Bethel, Shiloh, and Shechem were the resorts of the faithful; in later ages Jerusalem became the shrine “whither the tribes went up” by divine command. For this localized devotion there was an evident reason in the purpose of Providence to localize a “peculiar people” for religious training, such as they could not obtain if scattered among the nations. The sacredness was not in the site, but in its living associations, as the rendezvous of wise and holy men. Christianity had no such necessity, and reversed this narrower policy with our Lord’s command, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” Therefore, in the ruling of Providence, the places most closely associated with the life of the Son of God were either unknown, as the spot of the temptation in the wilderness and the mountain where He retired for prayer; or these spots were left unmarked by the first disciples, as “a high mountain” on which He 65was transfigured, the room of the Last Supper, the site of the crucifixion and of the tomb which witnessed His resurrection. This was a commentary of Providence on Jesus’ words, “The hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father; ... when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.”

This relic of the Jewish custom, together with the universal pagan practice of venerating shrines and consulting local oracles, became an ever-pressing temptation to the early Christian church. It was difficult for either Jewish or heathen converts not to regard the land trodden by the feet of Jesus as peculiarly a holy land, and not to imagine that the celestial interest that once centred upon the scenes of His death and resurrection made “heaven always to hang lowest” over these spots. There was nothing in the teaching or practice of the apostles and early fathers of the church to suggest or approve these notions. They were willing exiles from the home of the faith; unlike the patriarch Joseph, they gave no “commandment concerning their bones” being interred in the dust of Palestine.

The conversion of Constantine to Christianity may have been genuine, but it did not completely exorcise the paganism to which he had been habituated. The pilgrimage of his mother, Helena, to Palestine, the alleged reidentification of sacred sites and relics by miraculous agencies, and their adornment with lavish magnificence, were the natural efflorescence of the hybrid religion that sprang up. Multitudes imitated the example of emperors and princes in the show of 66devotion. The new glory which Constantine gave to Jerusalem engaged their reverence, as his new capital on the Bosporus gratified their pride.

St. Jerome (345-420) wrote to Paulinus: “The court of heaven is as open in Britain as at Jerusalem.” Nevertheless the saint took up his abode in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. Paula, his companion, wrote: “Here the foremost of the world are gathered together.” St. Augustine (354-430), oppressed by the fact that the beauty of the heavenly city was shadowed by men’s reverence for the earthly Jerusalem, wrote: “Take no thought for long voyages; it is not by ship, but by love, that we go to Him who is everywhere.”

But the enthusiasm for pilgrimage could be checked neither by the voice of saint nor by common sense. From the depths of the German forests, from the banks of the Seine and the bleak shores of Britain, as well as from the cities of southern Europe, poured the incessant streams of humanity, to bathe in the waters of the Jordan where their Lord was baptized, or perchance to die at the tomb which witnessed his resurrection.

As early as the fourth century itineraries were published to guide the feet of the pious across the countries of Europe and Asia Minor; hospitals were also established along the road, the support of which by those who stayed at home was regarded as specially meritorious in the sight of Heaven.

In 611 Chosroes the Persian and Zoroastrian captured Jerusalem, slaughtered ninety thousand Christian residents and pilgrims, and, more lamentable in 67the estimate of that age, carried off the wood of the true cross. But Heraclius, the Greek emperor, after a ten years’ war triumphed over the Persian power. Neither conquered lands nor the spoils of princely tents compared in stirring enthusiasm with the recapture of this relic. With great pomp the emperor left a part of the cross to glorify his capital, Constantinople. On September 14, 629, Heraclius entered Jerusalem, bearing, like Simon the Cyrenian, the remainder of the sacred beams upon his back. With bare feet and in ragged garments he traversed the city and re-erected the symbol of the world’s faith upon the assumed site of Calvary. This event is still commemorated throughout the Roman Catholic world by the annual festival of the “exaltation of the holy cross.”

Marvellous stories, the innocent exaggerations of weak minds or the designed invention of less conscionable shrewdness, fed the credulity of the people. Bishop Arculf told of having seen the three tabernacles still standing upon the Mount of Transfiguration. Bernard of Brittany as an eye-witness described the angel who came from heaven each Easter morn to light the lamp above the Holy Sepulchre.

At the opening of the ninth century the friendship of Haroun-al-Raschid, King of Persia, for Charlemagne extended the privileges of pilgrims. The keys of the sepulchre of Jesus were sent by him as a royal gift to the Emperor of the West. Charlemagne’s capitularies contain references to “alms sent to Jerusalem to repair the churches of God,” and to provide lodging, with fire and water, to pilgrims en route.

68The cruel persecution by Mad Hakem, the caliph of Egypt (see p. 57), made scarcely an eddy in the current of humanity moving eastward. Counts and dukes vied with prelates in the multitude of their companions. In 1054 the Bishop of Cambray started with a band of three thousand fellow-pilgrims. In 1064 the Archbishop of Mayence followed with ten thousand, nearly half of whom perished by the way.

In the latter part of the eleventh century, as has been related, the strong hand of the Turk first effectually checked the pilgrims. The horrors of the atrocities perpetrated by this new Mohammedan power afflicted Europe less than the cessation of the popular movement. The evil was twofold, secular and spiritual.

Pilgrimage was often a lucrative business as well as a pious performance. In the intervals of his visits to the sacred places the European sojourner plied his calling as a tradesman; the Franks held a market before the Church of St. Mary; the Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans had stores in Jerusalem and the coast cities of Phenicia. The courtiers of Europe dressed in the rich stuffs sent from Asia, and drank the wine of Gaza. A great traffic was done in relics. The pilgrim returned having in his wallet the credited bones of martyrs, bits of stone from sacred sites, splinters from furniture and shreds of garments made holy by association with the saints. These were sold to the wealthy and to churches, and their value augmented from year to year by reason of the fables which grew about them.

In more generous minds the passion for pilgrimage 69was fed by the desire for increased knowledge. Travel was the only compensation for the lack of books. One became measurably learned by visiting, while going to and returning from Palestine, such cities as Constantinople or Alexandria, to say nothing of the enlightening intercourse with one’s fellow-Europeans while passing through their lands.

Mere love of change and adventure also led many to take the staff. If in our advanced civilization men cannot entirely divest themselves of the nomadic habit, but tramp and tourist are everywhere, we need not be surprised at the numbers of those who indulged this passion in days when home life was exceedingly monotonous and its entertainment as meagre.

But the chief incentive to pilgrimage was doubtless the supposed merit of treading the very footprints of our Lord. Not only was forgiveness of sins secured by kneeling on the site of Calvary, but to die en route was to fall in the open gateway of heaven, one’s travel-soiled shirt becoming a shroud which would honor the hands of angels convoying the redeemed soul to the blissful abodes. Great criminals thus penanced their crimes. Frotmonde, the murderer, his brow marked with ashes and his clothes cut after the fashion of a winding-sheet, tramped the streets of Jerusalem, the desert of Arabia, and homeward along the North African coast, only to be commanded by Pope Benedict III. to repeat his penance on even a larger scale, after which he was received as a saint. Foulques of Anjou, who had brought his brother to death in a dungeon, found that three such journeys were necessary to wear away the guilt-mark from his 70conscience. Robert of Normandy, the father of William the Conqueror, as penance for crime walked barefoot the entire distance, accompanied by many knights and barons. When Cencius assaulted Pope Hildebrand, the pontiff uttered these words: “Thy injuries against myself I freely pardon. Thy sins against God, against His mother, His apostles, and His whole church, must be expiated. Go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.”

We are thus prepared to appreciate the incentive to the crusades which men of all classes found in the speech of Pope Urban at Clermont, in inaugurating the movement: “Take ye, then, the road to Jerusalem for the remission of sins, and depart assured of the imperishable glory which awaits you in the kingdom of heaven.”

Othman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty of Turks, once had a dream in which he saw all the leaves of the world-shading tree shaped like cimeters and turning their points towards Constantinople. This he interpreted into a prophecy and command for the capture of that city. Similarly we may conceive the various conditions and sentiments of Europe in the eleventh century, which have been described in our previous chapters, as directing the way to Jerusalem. Subsequent events, however, prove that, unlike Othman’s leaves, the Christian incentives to the crusades were not directed by the breath of Heaven.

CHAPTER IX.
THE SUMMONS—PETER THE HERMIT—POPE URBAN—POPULAR EXCITEMENT.

It has been customary to attribute the actual initiation of the crusades to the fiery eloquence of Peter the Hermit. This man was a native of Picardy, and was possessed of a spirit as restless as the seas that washed the shores of that northern province of France. He at one time seems to have followed the life of a soldier, but his ardent mind demanded higher entertainment than the gossip of camps and exploits of the field. The pursuit of letters, in an age so barren of literary resources, soon wearied him. Ecclesiastical duties seemed also a dreary routine. Like many of the nobler spirits of his day, he deserted the world and in the seclusion of his own thoughts sought communion with Heaven. His mind, unfurnished with information of the actual world, filled itself 72with visions. From ecstatic solitude he emerged at times to sway the masses with the eloquence of a second John the Baptist. According to tradition, he made the pilgrimage to Palestine, the sight of whose holy places inflamed his spiritual zeal, while the atrocities perpetrated upon his fellow-Christians by the Turks rent his heart. Together with Simeon, the venerable Patriarch of Jerusalem, he wept over the desolation of Zion. He there conceived the sublime purpose of rousing all Europe to take up arms against the common enemy. One day, while praying before the Holy Sepulchre, he heard the voice of Christ saying, “Peter, arise! hasten to proclaim the tribulations of My people.” Bearing a letter from the patriarch, he went to Rome and summoned Pope Urban II., as the Vicegerent of Jesus, to listen to this new evangel from the ascended Lord. Urban perceived in the monk’s fervor the signs of the will of Heaven, and commissioned him to proclaim it to the nations of Europe.

It is unfortunate for the romance of this part of Peter’s life that it is unconfirmed by any contemporary records. Anna Comnena, the Greek annalist, who lived in Peter’s day, declares that, while he started upon the pilgrimage, he did not reach Jerusalem.

It is best to regard Peter’s career as having been inspired by the crusading project already determined upon by others. His eloquence was like the first rush of steam from a newly opened volcano; it could not have generated the mighty force that upheaved Europe and “hurled it against Asia.”

But there can be no doubt of the personality of 73Peter, and of his tremendous influence in exciting the populace to engage in the crusades after they were decreed in the councils of Rome. His labors in the great cause seem to have been limited to certain districts of France, for it is scarcely credible that a man of strange language could have thrown the spell of his rhapsodies over people living beyond the Rhine. Peter the Hermit was of small stature, with long beard prematurely whitened by the rigors of his life,—for he was not yet fifty years of age,—with deep and penetrating eyes, fired by the enthusiasm that filled his soul. He travelled from place to place with uncovered head and bare feet, mounted upon a mule. The churches proving too small, the people thronged about him in the market-places and fields, where they drank from his lips wrath for the Moslem, pity for the Christian martyrs, whose blood he painted as flowing in the streets of Jerusalem, and hope of eternal reward if they should take the cross and sword. In the frenzy of speaking he wept, wounded his own flesh with the violence of his gesticulation, and exhausted his physical strength in the rhapsody of speech, as he called upon the saints in heaven and the inanimate rock of Calvary to cry out against the apathy of the Christian world. The people were readily persuaded, and attributed the response of their own passion, already inflamed by alarming events, to the preacher’s miraculous gifts. They pressed about him that they might receive some heavenly grace from touching his person, and preserved as sacred relics the hairs they pulled from the tail of his mule.

74Very opportunely there arrived at Rome in the year 1095 an embassy from Alexius, the Greek emperor at Constantinople, begging assistance against the Turks, who were threatening the shores of the Bosporus. In his fright, or in the disingenuous diplomacy for which the Greeks were noted, Alexius offered to reward the Western warriors with the treasure of his capital, and even suggested that the empire they saved from the Mussulman might one day become the prize of the Latin. Urban summoned a synod at Piacenza, where the Greek messengers addressed in the open fields the crowd of ecclesiastics and laymen, which was so vast that neither the plazas nor churches of the city could contain them.

A second council, more imposing on account of the dignitaries present, was held at Clermont in November of the same year. In his speech Urban wrought the assembly to a fury of enthusiasm as he cried, “Exterminate this vile race [Turks and Arabs] from the land ruled by our brethren.... It is Christ who commands.... If any lose your lives on the journey by land or sea or in fighting against the heathen, their sins shall be remitted in that hour. This I grant through the power of God vested in me.... Let those who have hitherto been robbers now become soldiers. Let those who have formerly been mercenaries at low wages now gain eternal rewards. Let those who have been exhausting themselves to the detriment both of body and soul now strive for a twofold reward, on earth and in heaven.” This impassioned appeal was answered by the cry of bishop and lord and knight, and was reëchoed by the assembled 75populace, “Deus vult! Deus vult!” (“God wills it!”) “Deus vult! let that be your watch-cry,” responded the pontiff.

All ranks and conditions of men thronged to receive the cross, if possible from the hands of the Holy Father himself. This was a strip of red cloth given with the assuring words, “Wear it upon your shoulders and your breasts; it will be either the surety of victory or the palm of martyrdom.” All priests throughout Europe were authorized to give the sacred symbol, with the full papal benediction, to the people in their parishes. Many, in their infatuation, burned the cross-mark into their quivering flesh; others, grown insane through zealotry, imagined the stigmata—as these signs were called—to have been produced by miraculous process. An impostor was readily credited with having received the mark on his forehead by the hand of an angel, and confessed the fraud, but not until after he had been invested with the archbishopric of Cæsarea in Palestine.

Preachers of the holy war went everywhere. Over western Europe the enthusiasm passed like a forest fire. During the winter of 1095 there seemed to be but one occupation of men in palace, monastery, and cottage throughout northern France and along the Lower Rhine—that of preparing arms and enrolling bands for the mighty exodus, which should take place as soon as the roads became passable in the spring. The rich sold or mortgaged their estates to raise the means of fitting out themselves and their retainers. Knights and esquires drilled incessantly for feats of arms against a foe whom they honored for his rumored 76prowess in fight as much as they detested him for impiety. Recluses left their religious retreats, their minds overwrought with anticipations of miracles to be performed as in old Bible days, when waters divided and city walls fell down at the approach of God’s people. Robbers emerged from their hiding-places or were delivered from jails, that they might expiate the crimes already committed against their fellow-Christians by atrocities to be practised upon the unbeliever. Doubtless many were influenced by a genuine religious emotion, as the proclamation of the crusade was accompanied by the preaching of the “terrors of the Lord” against the prevalent sins of the people. To the persuasion of Peter the Hermit many of the most notorious sinners attributed their reformation. Young men who were inclined to the monastic habit to escape the temptations of the world were easily led to substitute the helmet for the cowl, as offering a life more congenial to youthful enterprise and at the same time more acceptable to God. Multitudes of the ignorant were animated by the new and popular enthusiasm without understanding its motive, and were drawn as by a freshet into the common channel. That no one might be deterred by domestic anxieties from engaging in the crusades, the church guaranteed the protection of the families and property of absentees; and that no one might be tempted, in the subsidence of the first fervor, to reconsider his purpose, excommunication was threatened on those who did not fulfil their vows.

Thus western Europe in the spring of 1096 was not unlike a beehive, on the outside of which the insects 77are gathered preparatory to swarming. Guibert, a contemporary, says: “Although the French alone had heard the preaching of the crusade, what Christian people did not supply soldiers as well?... You might have seen the Scotch [who represented to the continental mind the ends of the earth], covered with shaggy cloaks, hasten from the heart of their marshes.... I take God to witness that there landed in our ports barbarians from nations I wist not of; no one understood their tongues, but placing their fingers in the form of a cross, they made sign that they desired to proceed to the defence of the Christian faith.”

The flight of these swarms of humanity eastward had three consecutive features which should be noted. First, it was a crusade of the crowd, which began in March, 1096; secondly came the more orderly military movement, under the great feudal chieftains, which began in the subsequent autumn; and thirdly, the enterprise became consolidated on national lines, under the kings, who gradually acquired power and took command of their various peoples. This last feature, however, did not appear until the second crusade, nearly half a century later.

CHAPTER X.
THE CRUSADE OF THE CROWD.

The eloquence of Peter served him in the stead of more orderly methods of enlisting the people. Untrained masses of men, women, and children followed him from place to place, and about Easter to the number of upward of sixty thousand crossed the Rhine. Walter, surnamed the Penniless, assumed the leadership of the advance portion of this impatient throng. The people, however, cared little for any authority save that of the imagined divine presence, which would appear through pillars of cloud and fire to direct them in emergency. The fears of the more cautious were silenced by a saying of Solomon, “The grasshoppers have no king, yet they go forth in companies.” A goose and a goat were led at the head of the motley procession, under the fanatical delusion that in these creatures resided some super-human wisdom. It has been suggested that this superstition was due to the importation of Manichean notions, since the goose was the Egyptian symbol for 79the divine sonship, and the goat represented the devil—the opposing principles of good and evil as conceived by this Eastern sect.

The first vengeance of the marching crowd was inflicted upon the Jews, whose historic infidelity excited the wrath, or whose accumulated wealth tempted the cupidity, of the ill-provided host. In the cities of what is now western Germany this unfortunate people were pillaged and massacred to such an extent that, says Gibbon, “they had felt no more bloody stroke since the persecution of Hadrian.” The crusaders’ appetite for plunder thus whetted, they passed on to the ruder countries of Hungary and Bulgaria, where they took a forceful revenge upon a people of kindred Christian faith for refusing to supply them with provisions. This provoked a bloody retaliation, under which the advanced crusaders were scattered, more than two thirds of their number perishing in the defiles of the Thracian mountains.

Peter, who had delayed at Cologne, with a new German contingent followed the desolate track of his forerunners. He propitiated Coloman, the Hungarian king; but at Semlin, enraged at the marks of the discomfiture of Walter, he looted the town. At Nisch his army abused the hospitality of the Bulgarian prince, Nichita, who had given them the freedom of the market. The outraged people took terrible vengeance, and Peter’s host was driven out. At length, in sorry remnants, they reached Constantinople August (30, 1096). With the permission of the Emperor Alexius, they pitched their camp outside the city gates to wait for the new bands of crusaders.

80A third horde pressed upon the footsteps of Walter and Peter, led by Gottschalk, a German priest. Reaching Hungary in the midst of the late summer harvest, they forgot their religious vows in the abundance which surrounded them, and gave themselves up to every form of debauchery. King Coloman lulled the invaders into a feeling of security until, taking advantage of a time when they were unarmed, he gave orders for their extirpation. This was not difficult to accomplish, as the followers of Gottschalk were of a lower class than even those who had preceded them, largely vagabonds and brigands, ferocious only in crime, and without the spirit of noble and sustained adventure.

A still more unconscionable crowd had in the meantime gathered on the banks of the Rhine and Moselle. A bigoted priest, Volkman, and a reprobate count, Emico, were chosen leaders. These men hoped to atone for the crimes of youth by excesses of cruelty wrought under the name of religion. This band met with terrible chastisement from the Hungarians at Merseburg. The walls of the town, which they had undermined, gave way under their assault and buried multitudes of the assailants in the falling débris. In the words of William of Tyre, the panegyrist of the later crusades, “God Himself spread terror through their ranks to punish their crimes and to fulfil the words of the Wise Man, ‘The wicked flee when no man pursueth.’” Through Bulgaria their advance was of the nature of flight to gain the sheltering walls of Constantinople.

Here, about the Greek capital, were collected the 81wrecks of various expeditions. If the memory of their misfortunes, augmented by their different stories of the journey, depressed and solemnized the crusaders, idleness and the sight of the riches of Constantinople inflamed their natural thirst for spoil. Homes and even churches in the suburbs were looted. The Emperor Alexius induced his unwelcome guests to cross the Bosporus into Nicomedia, where for two months he supplied their wants, as men feed wild beasts that they may not themselves fall prey to their rapacity.

The impetuosity of the crusaders was soon stirred again by their proximity to the Turks. They refortified the deserted fortress of Exerogorgo; but scarcely were they within its walls when Kilidge-Arslan (“sword of the lion”), the Sultan of Roum, laid siege to and captured the place. He then surprised the town of Civitat, outside of which the crusaders had made their chief camp. A terrible massacre ensued. Out of a numberless multitude, but three thousand remained to contemplate, instead of proud cities they had hoped to wrest from the Infidel, the piles of bones which strewed the plains of Nicæa. Walter was slain, and the town into which the miserable remnant was huddled would have fallen into the hands of the Turks but for the opportune relief afforded by the imperial troops from Constantinople. It is estimated by Gibbon that not less than three hundred thousand lives were lost in these preliminary excursions before the more orderly hosts started from western Europe.

The age, though degenerate, had nourished an order of men of far loftier type than those we have described. Godfrey of Bouillon was the most prominent figure. The chivalric spirit of the middle ages enrolled him among the nine greatest heroes of mankind—Joshua, David, Judas Maccabæus, Hector, Alexander, Cæsar, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey. He was of noblest lineage. His father was brother-in-law to Edward the Confessor of England, and through his mother, the beautiful and saintly Ida of Lorraine, he inherited the blood of Charlemagne. He was short of stature, but of such prodigious strength that he is reputed to have divided an opponent from helmet to saddle with one blow of his sword. He was equally endowed with courage and sagacity. In his war against the rival emperor, Rudolph, Henry IV. committed the imperial standard to Godfrey, who, though but a youth of eighteen, honored this charge by penetrating to the presence of Rudolph in the thick of the battle, plunging the spear of the standard through his heart, and bearing it aloft with the blood 83of victory. Yet such a deed in that age did not lessen his repute for gentleness and piety. Two ancestral spirits alternated their control of him, if we are to credit the praise given him by an old chronicle of the time: “For zeal in war, behold his father; for serving God, behold his mother.” When Rome was besieged by his imperial patron, Godfrey signalized his prowess by being the first to mount the walls. This exploit, however, troubled his tender conscience as a devout Catholic, and when the crusade was proclaimed he sold his lands and devoted himself to the holy war, in attempted expiation of what he had come to regard as his former impious deeds. At the head of ten thousand horse and seventy thousand foot, he set out for the Holy Land. He was accompanied by his two brothers, Baldwin and Eustace.

Raymond of Toulouse led a second army composed of the men of Languedoc. He was the most opulent and haughty of the chieftains, as well as the most experienced in years and war. He had fought by the side of the Cid in Spain, and was haloed in popular estimate with some of the glory of that great knight. Alfonso VI. of Castile had not hesitated to bestow upon him his daughter Elvira, who shared with her husband the hazard of the expedition. One hundred thousand warriors followed in Raymond’s train as he took the cross. With him went Bishop Adhemar of Puy, the papal legate, who, in the name of the Holy Father, was the spiritual head of the combined expeditions.

Bohemond of Taranto marshalled another host. He was son of the famous Robert Guiscard, founder of the Norman kingdom of Naples. Anna Comnena 84thus describes him: “He was taller than the tallest by a cubit. There was an agreeability in his appearance, but the agreeability was destroyed by terror. There was something not human in that stature and look of his. His smile seemed to me alive with threat.” The fair annalist recognized Bohemond’s inheritance of his great father’s prestige and ability, and at the same time of his disposition “to regard as foes all whose dominions and riches he coveted; and was not restrained by fear of God, by man’s opinions, or by his own oaths.” Robert Guiscard had died while preparing for an attempt to capture Constantinople. With filial pride, his son Bohemond had also “sworn eternal enmity to the Greek emperors. He smiled at the idea of traversing their empire at the head of an army, and, full of confidence in his fortunes, he hoped to make for himself a kingdom before arriving at Jerusalem.” When the march of the other crusaders was reported to him, with an ostentation of piety which his subsequent career scarcely justified, Bohemond tore his own elegant mantle into tiny crosses and distributed them to his soldiers, who were at the time engaged in the less glorious attempt of reducing the Christian town of Amalfi.

Tancred de Hauteville by his splendid character amply compensated the defects of Bohemond, his kinsman. In history and romance he is celebrated as the type of the perfect soldier:

85Dissatisfied with even the ideals of Chivalry, Tancred hailed the new lustre that might be given to arms when wielded only in the cause of justice, mercy, and faith, which, perhaps too sanguinely, he foresaw in the crusade. Thus nobly seconded by Tancred, Bohemond took the field with one hundred thousand horse and twenty thousand foot.

Hugh of Vermandois, brother of Philip I. of France, led the host of Langue d’Oil, as Raymond that of Languedoc.

Robert of Normandy, son of William the Conqueror, set out with nearly all his nobles. To raise money for the expedition, he mortgaged his duchy to his brother, William Rufus of England, for ten thousand silver marks, a sum which that impious monarch raised by stripping the churches of their plate and taxing their clergy. Robert was companioned by Stephen of Blois, whose castles were “as many as the days of the year,” and by Robert of Flanders, “the lance and sword of the Christians.”

These leaders, deterred by the difficulty of obtaining sustenance for such multitudes as followed them, agreed to take separate routes, which should converge at Constantinople. Count Hugh was the first afield. He crossed the Adriatic, and after much beating by tempest gathered his men at Durazzo. Here he experienced what his comrades were continually to meet, the treachery of the Greek emperor, Alexius. Being the brother of the French king, Hugh would be a valuable possession of the Greeks, as hostage for the good behavior of his brethren. By Alexius’s order he was seized and sent without his army to Constantinople.

86Godfrey’s band took the road through Hungary, already marked by the bones of the crusaders under Peter and Walter. The ghastly warnings everywhere about him encouraged him to treat with justice and kindness his coreligionists through whose lands he was journeying. He enforced strict military discipline against pillage, and appeased the wrath of the Hungarians by leaving his brother Baldwin in their hands as hostage for his good faith. But beneath the gentleness of Godfrey smouldered fiery indignation against all forms of injustice. When, therefore, he heard of the capture of Count Hugh he demanded of the emperor instant reparation, failing to receive which, he took summary revenge by laying waste the country about Adrianople. The emperor reluctantly pledged the release of Count Hugh. When the crusaders camped before Constantinople, Alexius refused to sell them provisions except on condition of their rendering homage to his throne. Several leaders had in their extremity yielded this point, but Godfrey replied by letting loose his soldiers to gather as they might; this brought Alexius to better terms.

Bohemond and Tancred crossed the sea to Durazzo and thence took the route eastward through Macedonia and Thrace. Hearing of the duplicity of Alexius, Bohemond urged Godfrey to seize upon Constantinople. Though Godfrey declined to divert his sword from the Infidels, the rumor of Bohemond’s proposal led the haughty Greek to seek closer alliance with his unwelcome guests. With stately parade, he adopted Godfrey as a son, and, in return for the formal bending of the knee at his throne, intrusted to him 87the defence of the empire. When Bohemond reached the Eastern court he was received with flattering protestations of friendship, which he repaid with equal adulation and as unblushing deceit. These two men at least understood each other, perhaps by that subtle instinct which leads serpents of a kind to come together.

Count Raymond had greater difficulties in leading his forces from northern Italy around the head of the Adriatic and over the mountains of Dalmatia, whose semi-savage inhabitants menaced his march. From Durazzo, he says, “right and left did the emperor’s Turks and Comans, his Pincenati and Bulgarians, lie in wait for us; and this though in his letters he spoke to us of peace and brotherhood.” The stern warrior inflicted cruel retaliation upon his assailants by cutting off the noses and ears of those he captured. On arriving at Constantinople, the irate veteran proposed to his brother chieftains to immediately sack the city. But, in spite of his severity, the blunt honesty of Raymond eventually won from Alexius more praise than did the apparent compliance of his brethren; for, says Anna Comnena, “My father knew that he [Raymond] preferred honor and truth above all things.”

The expedition of Robert of Normandy gave no credit to the crusading zeal. That chief, surnamed “Short-hose” and “the Fat,” chose the route through Italy, and justified his repute for indolence by spending the entire winter in that genial climate. Robert of Flanders and a few resolute kindred spirits shamed the lethargy of their brethren, and crossed the Adriatic in spite of wintry storms. Many others, disgusted with 88the general conduct of affairs, returned to their homes. It was not until after Easter in 1097 that Duke Robert and Count Stephen embarked at Brindisi.

All these armies were encumbered by the presence of women and children, since the crusading scheme proposed not only war against the Mussulman, but settlement in the lands that should be conquered. In some cases the entire population of villages and sections of cities tramped eastward, so that the movement took the character of a migration rather than that of a campaign.

The dealings of the Greek emperor with the crusaders were characteristic of the man. Alexius Comnenus had secured the throne in 1081 by successful rebellion and the capture through treachery of the capital, which he gave over to license and rapine. His subsequent policy as a ruler was in keeping with its beginning. The intrigues by which he acquired power were matched by the despotic cruelty with which he held it. His career has been depicted for us by the partial pen of his daughter Anna. Through her fulsome coloring we can detect the contemptible disposition of Alexius, and in her unblushing admissions, while purposing only to praise, we can also see much of the prevailing degeneracy of the Greek mind and conscience. Sir Walter Scott would temper our contempt for the man by the consideration that “if Alexius commonly employed cunning and dissimulation instead of wisdom, and perfidy instead of courage, his expedients were the disgrace of the age rather than his own.” But his wife, the Empress Irene, without doubt correctly summarized his personal 89character when, watching by his death-bed, she exclaimed, “You die as you have lived, a hypocrite.”

No doubt Alexius had reason to fear the proximity of the crusaders. In the strong figure of Gibbon, he was like the Hindu shepherd who prayed for water. Heaven turned the Ganges into his grounds and swept away his flocks and cottage in the inundation. Alexius was aware of the ambition of Bohemond to harm the Greek empire, and suspected all his comrades of similar designs. The rude manners of the invaders were also such as not to ingratiate them with the sycophancy of the court. Once, while the Franks were paying homage to the emperor, one of them unceremoniously placed himself beside his Majesty, remarking, “It is shocking that this jackanapes should be seated, while so many noble captains are standing yonder.”

Alexius was doubtless right in exacting from his visitors an oath of loyalty while within his dominions, and a pledge to turn over to him any Greek cities and fortresses they might recapture from the Turks. This was agreed to by all except Count Raymond, who declared that he would have no oath but to Christ, and invited the emperor to share with the crusaders the marches and battles against the Turks if he would divide the spoil. The ambition and cupidity of Bohemond were stayed with bribes. Thus Alexius one day introduced the Norman leader into a roomful of treasures. “Ah, here is wherewith to conquer kingdoms!” exclaimed Bohemond. The next day the treasures were transferred to his tent. The amazing request of Bohemond to be appointed Grand Domestic, 90or general of the Greek empire, was declined by Alexius, who had himself held that office and found it a convenient step to the throne. He, however, promised Bohemond the rule of the principality of Antioch in the event of his conquering it with his sword. Tancred, with a delicate sense of honor that shamed the truculency of his kinsman, fled the imperial lures by avoiding the city and keeping himself in disguise on the Asiatic side of the Bosporus. His example was not lost upon his fellow-chieftains, who felt the enervating influence of the daily vision of palaces, villas, gorgeous equipages, and, as the historian has fondly noted, the beauty of the women of the capital.

Alexius encouraged the virtuous purpose of the Latins to resume the crusade, from considerations of their menace to his own domain while encamped within it. With apparent magnanimity, he facilitated their crossing the Bosporus, and applauded the heroism of their start through the plains of Bithynia. In every way he fanned their enthusiasm against the Turk; but at the same time he informed the enemy of the movement of his allies, that their victories might not diminish his own prestige, and that, in the event of their discomfiture, he might profit by the friendship of the Infidel.

The first objective chosen by the crusaders was Nicæa, a city sacred with the memories of the first great ecumenical council of the Christian church, in the time of Constantine. On their march the soldiers of the cross were saddened by the continual sight of the decayed bodies of those who had fallen in the ill-advised expedition of Peter and Walter. A few survivors of this calamity, in rags and semi-starvation, came from their hiding-places to welcome their brethren. Among them was the Hermit himself. His tale of woe sharpened their zeal and encouraged their caution against the skill and bravery of the enemy.

The Infidels were under the command of Kilidge-Arslan, Sultan of Roum, still flushed with his slaughter of the first crusaders. He had fortified Nicæa, and had gathered within and about its walls sixty thousand men, drawn from all the provinces of Asia Minor and from distant Persia. May 15, 1097, the Christians sat down before the place and began the siege.

The crusading knights were clad in the hauberk, a coat of mail made of rings of steel; all wore the 92casque, covered with iron for common soldiers, with steel for untitled knights, and with silver to denote the princely rank. Horsemen carried round, square, or kite-shaped shields; footmen longer ones, made ordinarily of elm, which protected the entire body. Helmets of steel or chain hoods covered the head. The weapons of offence were the lance of ash tipped with steel, the sword, often of enormous length and weight, to be wielded with both hands, the axe, the mace, the poniard, the club, the sling, and, what at that time was a novelty to the Turks and Greeks, the crossbow of steel, which Anna Comnena called a “thoroughly diabolical device.” The knight’s horse was usually a heavy beast, whose tough muscles were needed to carry the weighty armament mounted upon his back, together with his own housings, which consisted of a saddle plated with steel, gathered as a breastplate in front and projecting backward so as to protect the flanks and loins. The horse’s head was likewise hooded with metal, ornamented between the eyes with a short, sharp pike like the horn of the unicorn. But, notwithstanding the burden he carried, the knight acquired by discipline a marvellous celerity of movement, often baffling the anticipation of the most wary antagonist, while in the crash of conflict he bore down his foe with superior weight. In the train of the crusading knight were carried the materials for the erection of rams with which to batter down walls, catapults to hurl huge rocks, and siege-castles, or movable towers, which overtopped the opposing defences and were provided with bridges to let down upon the walls.

93The Turkish or Saracen soldier was more lightly accoutred. His horse was of more slender mould, deep-winded, and fleet of limb. In the encounter the rider depended upon the momentum acquired by celerity rather than that of weight. The long but light spear, brandished rather than couched, the crescent-shaped, slender, but well-tempered cimeter, the shield of leather, made, where attainable, of rhinoceros’s hide rather than of metal, the light bow, the quiver filled with nicely balanced arrows, the many folds of the muslin turban which protected the head from the Eastern sun—these made an almost ideal contrast with the appearance of his Western antagonist when upon the march. The armor of Christian and Moslem, so diverse, necessitated manœuvres in the battle which in their first encounters were almost equally bewildering to both contestants.

In the assault upon Nicæa the Christians numbered upward of a quarter of a million men. Against them Kilidge-Arslan had at least one hundred thousand and the advantage of the city fortifications. The place was encircled with a double line of walls, surmounted by three hundred and seventy towers, and guarded from approach by a deep canal or moat. On the east high mountains obstructed the way; on the west and south the Lake of Ascanius prevented attack, while it gave the besieged an outlet to the sea, through which they could replenish their provisions and ranks in spite of their foes.

The Christians were divided into nineteen different camps, representing as many different nations. Their habit of fighting, not on extensive battle lines, but in 94groups about the standards of their special leaders, gave plausibility to the declaration of Kilidge-Arslan, as he viewed the invaders from his mountain outlook, that “disorder reigned in their army” and that their very numbers insured their defeat. With tremendous vigor, he hurled his forces in two divisions upon the camps of Godfrey and Raymond. The Christians were dislodged from their defences as bowlders from their places by a spring freshet. It seemed that they must be swept away in the impetuous torrent, but quickly the tide of battle turned, and the Turks were driven back to their mountain fortresses. Again they descended, but only to cover the field with their dead, as the exhausted freshet leaves upon the ground it has inundated the débris it brought down from the hills, while the rocks it assailed still lie near the position where they sustained the assault. The brutality that distempered the age was illustrated by the Christian victors, who severed many heads from the bodies of the slain and slung them as trophies from their saddle-bows. With ghoulish pride, they hurled a thousand of them from their catapults into the city. One of these “soldiers of the cross,” Anselme of Ribemont, wrote to the Archbishop of Rheims: “Our men, returning in victory and bearing many heads fixed upon pikes, furnished a joyful spectacle for the people of God.”

One line of walls soon fell beneath the rams of the besiegers, but it only revealed another within. The Christians dragged vessels overland from Civitat (the modern Guemlik), and by night launched them upon the Lake of Ascanius, thus cutting off reinforcement 95for the garrison within the city. After seven weeks of almost incredible effort, Nicæa was about to fall to the reward of its Latin conquerors, when suddenly there appeared upon the ramparts numerous strange standards. To the amazement of the Christians, these proved to be not those of the Turk, but of the Greek. Alexius, conniving with the enemy, had surreptitiously introduced into Nicæa a detachment of his own troops, and thus secured the surrender to himself of what had been won by others. The rage of the crusaders knew no bounds. With the price of their blood they had gained nothing but the honor of their valor. Only the utmost discretion on the part of the chieftains prevented the army from declaring war upon Alexius and marching back to the capture of Constantinople. It afterwards transpired that Alexius’s movement had been encouraged by some of the leaders of the crusade, that their armies might not be weakened by leaving garrisons to hold the captured places.

From Nicæa the Christians advanced (June 29, 1097) through Asia Minor towards the Holy Land. Their march was over a roadless country, threading the ravines and climbing the precipices of mountains, across plains desolated by the retreating foe, under the burning heat of the midsummer sun, and exposed to the guerilla attacks of a half-beaten enemy, whose main army was rapidly recruiting and waiting with double its former numbers to renew the battle.

In order to procure provisions, the crusaders divided their forces—one band under Bohemond, Tancred, Count Hugh, and Robert of Normandy, the other under Godfrey, Raymond, Adhemar, and Robert of Flanders. The former had camped with confident security in a little valley near Dorylæum in Phrygia. On the morning of July 1st sudden clouds of dust appeared on the height above, and a storm of arrows and missiles announced the attack of Kilidge-Arslan. Bohemond had scarcely arranged his people for battle when the Turks were upon him. With their lighter 97armor and swifter steeds, they circled about the Christians, delivering volleys of arrows, and escaping before the assault could be returned, as hawks might assail a lion. If a valiant band of Christians pursued them they dispersed in every direction, only to form again in a circle and repeat their murderous attack. Many of the most valiant Christian knights fell without being able to return a stroke. The Turkish numbers were being constantly augmented by new arrivals. Kilidge-Arslan, at the head of a body of his braves, made a sudden raid upon the Christian camp, massacring the men and children and carrying off the women for his seraglios.

But a bitter vengeance was taken. Robert of Normandy, snatching his white banner, drove through the densest ranks of the foe with the watchword of “Deus vult!” followed by Tancred, who was made doubly valiant by having seen his brother William fall, pierced with arrows. The captives were rescued, but the crusaders were exhausted, and retired in despair behind the stockade of their camp. At noon, however, the air was rent with new trumpet-calls. The hilltop shone with the armor of the knights under Godfrey. The charge of this redoubtable warrior and fifty chosen comrades broke upon the Turks like a thunderbolt. The opportune arrival of Raymond gave the crusaders fifty thousand fresh horsemen, who pursued the now panic-stricken enemy over the mountain. Three thousand Turkish officers and a measureless multitude of men were slain. The camp of Kilidge-Arslan was taken, and the crusaders pursued their way, laden with provision and treasures. 98Mounted on the horses of their foes, they pursued the flying remnant. To complete the enthusiasm of victory, it was alleged that St. George and St. Demetrius had been seen fighting in the Christian ranks. For many generations the peasants of that neighborhood believed that once a year St. George, on horseback, with lance in hand, could be seen by the worshippers in the little church which was erected on the spot to commemorate his timely apparition.

The crusaders marched from the field of Dorylæum to new terrors, against which it was not the province of sword or lance to contend. The scattered Turks devastated the country along the line of march. Neither field nor bin was left to be plundered. The roots of wild plants were at times the only food of the pursuers. The July sun, always terrific in what the ancients called “burning Phrygia,” beat upon them with unusual balefulness. Falcons, which the knights had brought along to relieve the tedium of the journey, fell dead from their masters’ arms. Many women gave untimely birth to offspring, which perished in their first efforts to inhale the hot atmosphere. Five hundred of the hapless multitude died between a sunrise and sunset. One day some dogs, which had wandered off, returned with moist sand upon their paw’s and coats; they had found water. Following the trail of the brutes, the soldiers discovered a mountain stream. The men plunged into it and drank so abundantly that the multitude became water drunk; thus three hundred perished with the fever flush of new-found life.

Passing through Cilicia, the advance under Tancred 99captured Tarsus, the birthplace of St. Paul. But Baldwin, brother of Godfrey, contested with Tancred the honor of its possession and a share of its spoil. Tancred refused to allow either his own men or those of Baldwin to loot the place, saying that he had not taken arms to pillage Christians. His flag was torn from the ramparts and flung into the ditch. By a display of moral courage equal to his physical prowess, Tancred restrained his resentment, that the Christian host might not be divided. Baldwin, left in possession of a part of the town, refused admission to a company of crusaders, who, thus left exposed without the walls, were massacred by the Turks. Popular indignation ran high against Baldwin, which he ultimately assuaged by taking a horrible vengeance upon the Turks remaining in Tarsus, not one of whom he left alive.

The crusaders at Tarsus received reinforcements by the arrival of a fleet of Flemish and Dutch pirates, who, by the bribe of expected spoil, were induced to sew the cross upon their garments.

Leaving a garrison in this city, Baldwin followed eastward in the track of Tancred, whom he overtook at Malmistra. The rage of the soldiers of Tancred against him could not be checked by the mild counsel of their leader, whom they taunted with weakness. For once the self-restraint of Tancred gave way. He led his men against Baldwin. A pitched battle ensued, followed on the morrow by the embrace of the leaders in the presence of their troops, and vows to expiate their mutual offences in fresh blood of the common enemy.

100The popularity of Tancred ill suited the ambition of his rival. Baldwin, seemingly stung by the withdrawal of the confidence of his brethren, nursed the project of leaving the crusading army and setting up a kingdom for himself. He offered his aid to Thoros, the Armenian Prince of Edessa, in Mesopotamia, who was at that time warring on his own account against the Turks beyond the Euphrates. None of the crusading chiefs seconded Baldwin’s project. With eighty knights and one thousand foot-soldiers, he traversed the deserts. Upon his arrival at Edessa, in the strange custom of the country the aged Thoros and his wife pressed the count to their naked breasts, thus acknowledging him as son by adoption. The fable of him who had warmed a serpent in his bosom only to feel its sting was repeated in this case. With Baldwin’s knowledge, if not with his connivance, an insurrection was stirred against Thoros, which resulted in his being flung from the wall of his own castle.

Baldwin, thus installed in chief authority, confirmed his hold upon the people by marrying an Armenian princess. All Mesopotamia acknowledged him, and a Frankish knight was seen reigning on the Euphrates over the richest part of ancient Assyria.

The defection of Baldwin was not ultimately detrimental to the crusades, since his kingdom made a barrier on the north and east against the Turkish and Saracenic hordes, and prevented their interfering more readily with the Christians’ march upon Jerusalem, of which Baldwin himself was one day to be king.

The crusading hosts passed, with incredible toil and suffering, through the remainder of Asia Minor. The perils of the Taurus chain of mountains nearly brought them to despair. Borne down with their heavy arms, encumbered with thousands of women and children, they passed along paths which the practised feet of mountaineers were alone fitted to tread. In the defiles were left many who could not climb the precipitous rocks, which thus became the walls of their tomb. At the base of the palisades were heaps of armor, which their wearers were too spiritless to recover. But in spite of the despair of many, the leaders evidently did not leave the spoil of war to rust or decay in the cañons of the Taurus. Stephen of Blois wrote to his wife a few weeks later than the events we are describing: “You may know for certain, my beloved, that of gold, silver, and many other kinds of riches I now have twice as much as your love had assigned to me when I left you.”

At length the survivors emerged to look down from the mountains upon the borders of Syria. The sight 102inspired them as that from Pisgah did the invader of old. Courage revived, and with joy they hastened southward. Hard by was the battle-field of Issus, where Alexander the Great, the man from the West, had broken the power of the East under Xerxes—an omen of its repetition. Soon Antioch, the city built to commemorate the fame of Antiochus, one of Alexander’s generals, stood before them. The rumor of their invincibility had served the crusaders in the stead of battles, and October 21, 1097, they sat down unmolested for the siege of the Syrian capital.

This city, where a thousand years before believers were first called Christians, still wore in the reverence of all the world the honor of that initial christening. It was called the “Eldest Daughter of Sion,” and was the seat of one of the original patriarchates into which the early church was divided. It had been the third city of the Roman world, and those who were unimpressed with its sacred story could imagine its splendor when it was called the “Queen of the East.” Paganism once worshipped obscene divinities in its famous groves of Daphne. About it still stood the enormous wall built by the Emperor Justinian five hundred years before, on every tower of which were mementos of sieges when it had been captured alternately by Saracen and Greek, and now, but thirteen years before the crusaders’ coming, by Solyman, the Turk.

The natural defences of Antioch, supplemented by those of art, made it impregnable, except to the enthusiastic faith of such men as now essayed its capture. On the north it was guarded by the river 103Orontes, on the south by natural heights of several hundred feet, on the west by the great citadel, and on the east by a castle. The wall which bound together the various fortifications was nine miles in extent, strengthened by three hundred and sixty towers. A deep cleft in the southern height poured a mountain torrent through the city to the Orontes. Accian, grandson of Malek-Shah, had twenty thousand Turks within the walls, who behind such battlements were presumably the match for the three hundred thousand crusaders who are said to have been without.

To the sanguine enthusiasm of the Christians the city seemed like a ripened fruit ready to fall into the hand at a touch. Guards appeared upon the walls, but the challenge of their camps provoked no response. This the Christians interpreted as a sign of the feebleness and dismay of the garrison. They were disposed to wait for the fruit to fall of itself. The genial influence of the climate soon wrought its softness into nerve and spirit. Discipline was relaxed; knights whose shields showed many a dent of conflict spent the hours among the vineyards, where the luscious clusters still hung upon their stems. Adventure found its pastime in discovering the vaults in which the peasants had hidden their grain. If we could believe the theory that good and evil people leave in the places they frequent an atmosphere of virtue or vice, to invigorate or infect the souls of those who come after them, we might think that the soldiers of the cross had succumbed to the influence of the votaries of Venus and Adonis, who anciently revelled in the grove of Daphne; for the Christian host became 104infatuated with unseemly pleasures; they were given over to intemperance and debauchery. An arch-deacon was not ashamed to be seen in dalliance with a Syrian nymph.

If the leaders did not yield to the prevalent vice, they seem to have been infected with that intellectual dulness and lethargy of purpose which follows license. They neglected to prepare their siege machinery, and when a momentary enthusiasm led them to attack the walls they paid for their temerity with failure. The enemy became correspondingly emboldened, and retaliated with fearful forays through the Christian lines. With the approach of winter the crusaders had exhausted their provisions, and the country about furnished no more. Heavy rainfalls reduced their camps to swamps, in which the bow lost its stiffness, and the body its vigor, making the men the prey of diseases which kept them busy burying their dead.

Stories of disasters to the cause elsewhere floated to them, until the air seemed laden with evil omens. Sweno, Prince of Denmark, had advanced through Cappadocia. At his side was Florine, daughter of Count Eudes of Burgundy, his affianced bride. Together they fought their way through countless swarms of Turks, until, with all their attendant knights, they were slain. The body of this heroic woman showed that seven arrows had penetrated her armor. News also came that fleets of Pisans and Genoese, their allies, had withdrawn from the coast, lured by better prospects of gain than in bringing succor to what seemed a ruined cause.

Such was the moral depression that Robert of Normandy 105deserted for a while, until shame brought him back. His example was followed even by Peter the Hermit, “a star fallen from heaven,” says Guibert, the eye-witness and chronicler. Peter, however, returned at the entreaty of Tancred, whose heart was as true in trouble as his eye was keen in the mêlée. The Hermit was made to take oath never again to desert the cause he had once so eloquently proclaimed. The piety of Adhemar, Bishop of Puy, instituted fasts and penitential processions around the camp, to purge it of iniquity and to avert the wrath of Heaven. The practical judgment of the chieftains enacted terrible punishments to curb the unreasoning debauchery. The drunkard was cropped of his hair, the gambler branded with a hot iron, the adulterer stripped naked and beaten in the presence of the camp. The Syrian spies who were caught were, by order of Bohemond, spitted and roasted, and this proclamation was posted over them: “In this manner all spies shall make meat for us with their bodies.”

About this time there arrived in the camp an embassy from the caliph of Egypt. The race of Ali hated the Turks as the usurpers of the headship of their faith, and proposed alliance with the Christians to expel them from Jerusalem. They stipulated for themselves the sovereignty of Palestine, and would grant to the disciples of Jesus perpetual privilege of pilgrimage to the sacred places. If this offer of the caliph was declined, the ambassadors presented the alternative of war, not only with the Turks, but with the combined Saracen world from Gibraltar to Bagdad. The Christian reply was bold. Their orators 106taunted the Egyptians with the diabolical cruelty they had once practised when Jerusalem was under Hakim, and declared that they would brave the wrath of the Moslem world rather than permit a stone of the sacred city to be possessed by an enemy of their faith. This reply was saved from seeming bravado by an opportune victory. Bohemond and Raymond met and cut to pieces a Moslem force of twenty thousand horsemen, who were advancing from the north for the relief of Antioch. As the ambassadors of Egypt were embarking, they were presented with four camel-loads of human heads, to impress their master with the sincerity of the Christian boast, while hundreds more of these ghastly tokens were stuck upon pikes before the walls or flung by the ballistæ into the city to terrorize the defendants.

The fearfulness of their extremity animated the courage of the Turks as it had often done that of the Christians; for brave hearts are the same, under whatever faith and culture. They sallied from the gates, which by the orders of Accian were closed behind them until they should return as victors. At nightfall, however, but few lived to seek the entrance.

Their valor was doubtless as fine as that of the Christians, the exploits of whose leaders have come to us in story and song. Tancred’s deeds were so great that, either from excessive modesty or the fear that nobody would believe such wonders, he exacted a promise of his squire never to tell what his master had wrought. If his great actions were like most reported of his comrades, we can admire his wisdom as well as his humility; for the legends of the battle 107tell, among other wonders, of a monster Turk who was cloven in twain by the sword of Godfrey, and one half of whose lifeless body rode his charger back to the gate. A less glorious exploit is mentioned. The Christians rifled by night the new-made graves of the Moslems, and paraded the next day in the clothes of the fallen braves, carrying upon their pikes instead of garlands fifteen hundred heads they had severed from the corpses. A more romantic scene makes a pleasant foil to this: the children of either side, drilled by their seniors, engaged in battle in presence of both armies. Hands that could not use the sword thrust with the dagger, and the poisoned tip of the arrow was not less deadly because it was sent from a tiny bow.

After seven months of valorous assault and defence, Antioch at length was gained. It fell, however, not as the prize of honorable conquest, but as the price of treachery, disgraceful to both those within and those without the walls. Phirous, an Armenian Christian, had abjured his faith in order to secure promotion in the Turkish service. In reward he was given position, and now commanded three of the principal towers. Divining a similar, if not equal, unconscionableness in Bohemond, Phirous made known to him his willingness to recant his new vows as a Moslem and again betray his trust for larger reward in the Christian ranks. Bohemond announced to the other chiefs his possession of a secret by which Antioch might easily be taken, but refused to reveal it except upon their agreement to assign to him the independent sovereignty of the Syrian capital. The proposal at first met with the contempt and rage of his fellow-leaders, which were expressed to his face in the hot words of Raymond, who declared that Bohemond proposed to “repay with the conquests 109of valor some shameful artifice worthy of women.” Bohemond was as brazen as he was brave, and endured this insult. Reports became rife that Kerbogha, Sultan of Mosul, was advancing to the relief of his coreligionists. Bohemond, through his emissaries, magnified the alarm until the besiegers anticipated the attack of an army of two hundred thousand, whose cimeters were dripping with the blood of victory over all the peoples west of the Euphrates. Under this menace the chiefs chose the valor of discretion, and, not without lamentation at the shameful necessity, yielded to the ambition of their comrade.

The scheme of Phirous came near miscarriage at the very moment of execution. Accian, the commandant at Antioch, suspicious of treachery, ordered all the Christians in the city to be seized and massacred that very night. Summoning Phirous, he subjected him to severest examination, but the shrewdness of the wretch completely veiled his duplicity. Phirous tried to induce his own brother to join him in his treachery. The man refused, and, lest he should reveal the plot, Phirous plunged his dagger to his heart.

A comet, which had appeared in the early evening sky, was regarded as an omen favorable to the scheme. The subsequent dense darkness of the night and the roar of sudden storm shielded the forms and drowned the footfalls of the plotters. At a given signal Phirous dropped from the wall a ladder of leather, which was quickly mounted by one of Bohemond’s men. As the traitor Phirous stood by the parapet conversing with the intruders, he was startled by the glare of a 110lantern in the hand of an officer making his round of inspection, but his ready tact diverted suspicion. The agent of Bohemond descended the ladder and reported all in readiness for the assault; but the Christians were held back by a strange spell. Men who were accustomed to brave death without a question at the command of their princes, could not be prevailed upon by either threatening or promise to venture into this unknown danger. Moral courage is the strongest stimulus to physical daring, and this treacherous project failed to supply the heroic incentive. Bohemond himself was compelled to set the perilous example; but no one followed until he descended to assure them by his presence that he had not fallen into some deadly trap. Then one by one the bravest knights, such as Foulcher of Chartres and the Count of Flanders, emulated Bohemond’s bravery. The parapet was overweighted by the assailants, who were massed upon its edge, and gave way, precipitating many upon the lance-points of those below them. But the thunders of the storm drowned the crash of the falling masonry. Securing the three towers of Phirous’s command, the crusaders opened the city gates to the dense ranks that waited without.

With the cry of “Deus vult! Deus vult!” the infuriated multitude poured into the city. The Moslems, as they came from their homes and barracks at the rude awakening, were slaughtered without having time for resistance. Through all houses not marked by some symbol of the Christian faith the crusaders raged; cruelty and lust knew no restraint. The dawn revealed over six thousand corpses in the 111streets. Accian escaped the Christian soldiers, only to meet a less honorable death at the hands of a woodman while in flight through the forest. Phirous was abundantly rewarded for his treachery, but two years later he reëmbraced Moslemism in expectation of larger gains. In the anathemas of Christian and paynim he was consigned to the hell in which both believed.

The elation of the crusaders over the possession of Antioch was of briefest duration. Their three days’ license, in the enjoyment of what they had so ingloriously won, was terminated on the fourth day by fearful menace. Kerbogha was really coming. To his own veteran experience he added the wisdom of the most redoubtable sultans and emirs of Syria, Asia Minor, and Persia, who commanded an army of one hundred thousand horse and three hundred thousand foot. So stealthily had they approached that the news was conveyed to the Christians only by their observing from the walls the advance of the mighty host as it dashed through the camps but recently consecrated to the cross. Quickly the Moslems completed their investment of the city. The Christians could make no foray over the fields, and no provisions were allowed to reach them from the port. To add to their fears, the citadel of Antioch had not fallen into their hands with the rest of the city, and was still occupied by watchful foes. They were thus assailed from without and from within the walls.

113The gay robes, costly gems, and arms which the Christians had taken were no compensation for the lack of provisions. Godfrey paid fifteen silver marks for the flesh of a half-starved camel. Knights killed for meat the proud chargers they loved oftentimes more than they did their companions in arms, who were now their greedy contestants for what scanty provision remained. Common soldiers gnawed the leather off shoes and shields, and some dug from the graves and devoured the putrid flesh of the Turks they had slain. We might doubt this horrible deed were not similar acts of cannibalism confessed by Godfrey and Raymond in a letter to the Pope, written a year later. Every morning revealed the numbers of those who had deserted during the night, among whom were some of the most famous warriors, such as the counts of Melun and Blois and Chartres. In the general despair even faith gave way. Men cursed the God who had deserted them while they were defending His cause, and the priests hesitated to perform the rites of religion among a people who had become as infidel as the foe they sought to destroy.

The Greek emperor, Alexius, started out from Constantinople with an army, but upon hearing of the desperate straits of the Latins returned, leaving them to their fate. The Christians, it is said, offered to capitulate to Kerbogha upon condition of being permitted to return to Europe in abandonment of the crusades. Godfrey and Adhemar, the one in the name of all that was valiant among men, the other as the representative of the Pope, presumably speaking for Heaven, remonstrated in vain. The refusal of even 114so much mercy by the Moslems alone prevented the consummation of this disgrace. The warriors who had won the applause of Europe then sat sullenly in their houses and could not be prevailed upon to fight along the walls, believing that additional wounds would only protract their woe without averting the final catastrophe.

In this hour of abject despair the besieged were reinspirited by an occasion which is as much the marvel of the psychologist as of the historian. In the prostration of bodily nature through hunger and disease, imagination often tyrannizes the faculties. Man becomes the prey of unrealities; his dreams create a new world, generally of terror, but often of hope. Then it is that the demons and angels of theory materialize into seeming facts. Thus the emaciated men in the beleaguered camp were ready to believe the story of a priest, who related that Christ had appeared to him, denouncing destruction upon His faithless followers, but that at the intercession of the Virgin Mary the Lord was appeased, and promised immediate victory if the soldiers of His cross would once more valiantly endeavor to merit it. At the same time two deserters returned to the camp, relating how the Saviour had met them and turned them back from flight. But the crowning miracle was revealed to the priest, Peter Barthelemi. St. Andrew appeared to him and said, “Go to the church of my brother St. Peter in Antioch. Near the principal altar you will find, by digging into the earth, the iron head of the lance which pierced the side of our Redeemer. Within three days this instrument of 115salvation shall be manifested to His disciples. This mystical iron, borne at the head of the army, shall effect the deliverance of the Christians and shall pierce the hearts of the Infidels.” For two days the people fasted; on the morning of the third day twelve trusty knights and ecclesiastics dug at the appointed spot, while the multitude remained in silence and prayer about the church. All day long they waited. At midnight there was no response to their expectation. As the twelve ceased their labors, and were bowed in renewed petition around the excavation, Peter Barthelemi suddenly leaped into the hole. In a moment he reappeared bearing a lance-head in his hands. The news spread through the city as if shouted by angels. The effect upon the desponding minds of the soldiers was like the revival of life in the dead bodies of Ezekiel’s valley of vision. Some, it is true, shook their heads, or, like Foulcher of Chartres, declared that the lance had been concealed by Barthelemi in the designated place. Whether really credulous, or shrewd enough to try any new expedient, the leaders were loudest in heralding the discovery as miraculous.

Peter the Hermit was sent to announce to the Moslems the decree of Heaven for their immediate overthrow. Sultan Kerbogha, however, proved a match for the zealot in vituperative bravado and religious devotion. He haughtily declared but one condition of his raising the siege, namely, the acknowledgment by the Christians that “Allah is great, and Mohammed is His prophet.” “Bid thy companions,” said he to Peter, “take advantage of my 116clemency; to-morrow they shall leave Antioch only under the sword. They will then see if their crucified God, who could not save Himself from the cross, can save them from the fate I have prepared for them.” With that he drove Peter and his band of deputies back to their walls.

The Christians ate that night what they deliberately called their last supper in Antioch. With the remnant of bread and wine they celebrated mass. At dawn the city gates were thrown open, and in twelve divisions the host marched out, following the standard of the Holy Lance. The clergy went first, as in the days of Jehoshaphat, singing their faith in coming victory. The words of the psalm, “Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered,” seemed to be answered by invisible hosts on the mountains, who took up the crusaders’ war-cry of “Deus vult!” Excited imaginations saw the mountains filled with the chariots of the Lord, as in the days of Elisha. But to the eye of flesh the Christian host presented a sorry spectacle. Many limped with wounds or trudged slowly from weakness; most were in rags, many were stark naked. The prancing charger had been changed for a camel or ass, and many a knight was reduced to the condition of a foot-soldier, and shouldered his spear.

Sultan Kerbogha haughtily refused to leave a game of chess he was playing, to listen to what he supposed would be an entreaty for mercy from the entire Christian army, that was coming to throw itself at his feet; but he was soon undeceived. With sudden dash, Count Hugh attacked and cut to pieces two thousand of the enemy who guarded the bridge before 117the city. The main body of Christians formed against the mountains and, thus shielded from a rear attack, advanced steadily upon the foe. The surprise of Kerbogha did not prevent that experienced soldier from seeing the advantage gained by his assailants. Under flag of truce he proposed to decide the issue by battle between an equal number of braves selected from either side. The enthusiasm of the Christian host forbade such a limitation of the honor of attaining what seemed to all a certain victory. Heaven gave manifest token of favor in a strong wind, that sped the missiles of the crusaders, while it retarded those of their foes. In vain did Kerbogha storm them in front, while Kilidge-Arslan, having climbed the mountain, attacked their rear. The Turks had fired the bushes to bewilder the Christians, but through a dense smoke there appeared a squadron descending the mountains, led by three horsemen in white and lustrous armor. These were recognized as St. George, St. Demetrius, and St. Theodore, the same materialized spirits that had been seen upon the plains of Nicæa. With a superhuman fury and strength, the Christians broke upon the Moslems as a tornado upon a forest, making through the opposing ranks a path of utter destruction. When this breath of heaven had passed one hundred thousand Infidels lay dead upon the field. Fifteen thousand camels, a proportionate number of horses, immense stores of provisions, and priceless treasures enriched the victors. The tent of Kerbogha, capable of covering over two thousand persons, glowing like a vast gem with jewels and tapestries, was taken and sent to Italy, where the 118sight of it inflamed the greed of new bands of crusaders.

Those who are disinclined to believe in the heavenly portents that aided the Christians may content themselves with the explanation which the Moslem writers give of their defeat. They relate that the Arabs had quarrelled with the Turks, and retired from the field before the battle; that the latter pursued their coreligionists more bitterly than they fought the common enemy. The credulity of the Christians also abated when they discovered that the camps of Kerbogha were more adorned than fortified. Then, too, they recalled the skill and courage of their own assault, and listened to the thousand stories of the Christians’ exploit from the lips of the performers. Pride, if not reason, triumphed over superstition, and the Holy Lance fell into disparagement. A letter from the leaders to Pope Urban, written from Antioch just after this battle acknowledged that the divine weapon “restored our strength and courage”; but the writers are more particular to tell how “we had learned the tactics of the foe” and, “by the grace and mercy of God, succeeded in making them unite at one point.” Later the Christian host was divided into two parties, who contended violently for and against the credibility of the miracle. Normans and the crusaders from the north of France were rationalistically inclined, while the men from the south adhered to the story as told by their geographical representative, Peter Barthelemi, the priest from Marseilles, who had discovered the sacred symbol. The veracity of Peter was finally subjected to trial 119by Ordeal. A vast pile of olive-branches was erected. A passage several feet in width was left through the middle of the heap. When the wood had been fired, Peter appeared, bearing the Holy Lance. As he faced the flames a herald cried, “If this man has seen Jesus Christ face to face, and if the Apostle Andrew did reveal to him the divine lance, may he pass safe and sound through the flames; but if, on the contrary, he be guilty of falsehood, may he be burned.” The assembled host bowed and answered, “Amen.” Peter ran with his best speed down the fiery aisle. The furious heat impeded him. He seemed to have fallen, and disappeared amid the crackling branches and smoke. At length, however, he emerged at the other end of the flaming avenue amid the cries of his partisans, “A miracle! a miracle!” Yet the test was indecisive, for, while Peter succeeded in running the gantlet, he was terribly burned, and was carried in mortal agony to the tent of Raymond, where a few days later he expired. It is to be noted that from that time the Holy Lance wrought no more miracles, even in the credulity of its most reverent adorers.

The zeal of the mass of crusaders urged them to an immediate advance upon Jerusalem. This, however, was opposed by the discretion of Godfrey, who predicted the hardship of the campaign in a Syrian midsummer. The evident dissensions among the Moslems and their apathy in further warfare, if they gave opportunity for rapid conquest by the Christians, at the same time allayed the feeling of necessity for immediate advance. It was therefore resolved to postpone the enterprise southward until November.

While waiting for the order to march, an epidemic broke out in the camps, which was more fatal than would have been any perils of the journey. Upward of fifty thousand perished in a month, among them Adhemar, Bishop of Puy, the special representative of the Holy Father, and the spiritual head of the crusade. Idleness also engendered strife among brethren. Bohemond and Raymond threatened each other with the sword. Common soldiers fought in opposing bands for the possession of the booty captured in their raids. Restless spirits, disgusted with the general apathy, joined Baldwin, now the master 121of Edessa. Some made alliance with such Moslems as were at war with their fellow-Moslems. Even Godfrey fought for the emir of Hezas against Redowan, Sultan of Aleppo.

Heaven also seemed to have become impatient at the inaction of the crusaders. A luminous mass, as if all the stars had combined their fires, like a suspended thunderbolt, glared down from the sky upon the quiet ramparts of Antioch. Suddenly it burst and scattered in sparks through the air. Did it mean that God was about to thus disperse the Christians, or that He would scatter their enemies? The omen, though not clearly interpreted, sufficed to rouse the indolent host.

Raymond and Bohemond, with worthy compeers, assaulted Maarah, between Hamath and Aleppo. A novelty of the defence of this place was the hurling upon the assailants of hives filled with stinging bees. The resistance of the inhabitants, however, proved unavailing, and was punished by their indiscriminate massacre when the city had been gained. A dispute between Raymond and Bohemond for sole possession of what they had jointly conquered delayed further operations, until the soldiers who were left in Maarah with their own hands destroyed the fortifications, and thus rendered it useless to the ambition of either of the leaders.

It was not until far into the year that the united host took up the march southward. Everywhere they were lured from their grand objective, the sacred city, by the sight of goodly lands and strong towers, the spoil or possession of which might compensate 122the sacrifices of the campaign. Raymond laid siege to Arkas, at the foot of the Lebanons; others captured Tortosa.

While detained before the walls of Arkas they were met by an embassy from the caliph of Egypt, composed of the same persons that had previously visited the camp at Antioch. They narrated how they had been thrown into prison because of the failure of their former mission, when their master heard of the straits of the Christians; and how they had been liberated and sent back upon his hearing of the subsequent triumph of the Latins. They announced that Jerusalem had recently come into the hands of the Egyptians, and as its new possessors, proposed peace and privilege of pilgrimage to all who should enter the city without arms. They offered splendid bribes to the chieftains in person; but these worthies rejected the proposal.

The fame of the Christians’ victory at Antioch brought new crusaders from Europe, among them Edgar Atheling, the last Saxon claimant of the crown of England against its possession by William the Conqueror.

On the way southward the hosts harvested the groves of olives and oranges, and the waving fields which have always enriched the western slopes of Lebanon. They discovered a rare plant, juicy and sweet, refreshing like wine and nourishing as corn. The inhabitants called it zucra. The later crusaders introduced it as the sugar-cane into Italy. Proceeding along or near to the coast, that they might be able to receive succor from over the sea, they traversed 123the plain of Berytus (Beirut) and the territory of Tyre and Sidon. Many pilgrims, whose zealotry had led them to settle in the Holy Land notwithstanding its hostile possession, hailed their brethren with benedictions and provisions. On the bank of the river Eleuctra their camp was invaded by hosts of serpents, whose bite was followed by violent and often mortal pains. At Ptolemaïs (Jean d’Acre) the commanding emir averted assault by pledging himself to surrender the place as soon as he should learn that the Christians had taken Jerusalem. His pretence of peaceableness was singularly exposed. A hawk was seen to fly aloft with a dove in its talons. By strange chance the lifeless bird fell amid a group of crusaders. It proved to be a carrier-pigeon, whose peculiar instinct was then unknown to Europeans. Under its wing was a letter written by the emir of Ptolemaïs to the emir of Cæsarea, containing the words: “The cursed race of Christians has just passed through my territories and will soon cross yours. Let all our chiefs be warned and prepare to crush them.” This timely revelation of the treachery of their assumed ally, coming literally down from the sky, was regarded as a special sign of Heaven’s favor.

Pressing still southward, they captured Lydda and Ramleh, on the road between Jaffa and Jerusalem. Here the enthusiasm of the Christians blinded their judgment. It was with difficulty that the more cautious leaders restrained the multitude from moving against Egypt, in the vain expectation of conquering not only Jerusalem, but the ancient empire of the Pharaohs, at a single swoop. The credulity as to 124Heaven’s favor was matched by an equal display of very earthly motives. The crusaders devised a system for dividing the spoil. Whatever leader first planted his standard upon a city, or his mark upon the door of a house, was to be regarded as its legitimate owner. This appeal to human greed led many to leave the direct march upon Jerusalem, which was but sixteen miles away, and to expend in petty conquests or robberies the ardor which for weary months had been augmenting as they approached the grand object of the crusades. A faithful multitude, however, pushed on. They took off their shoes as they realized that they were on holy ground. Tancred, with a band of three hundred, making a circuit southward by night, set the standard of the cross on the walls of Bethlehem, to signal the birth of the kingdom in the birthplace of its King.

On the morning of June 10, 1099, the sight of the Holy City broke upon the view. The shout of the host, “Deus vult! Deus vult!” rolled over the intervening hills like the “noise of many waters.” Had a host of angels filled the sky, it would have seemed to their enthusiastic souls but a fitting concomitant of their approach. The joy of the apparent accomplishment of their purpose was, however, followed by the affliction of their souls, as the most devout among them reminded the others of the spiritual significance of the scene before them. Jerusalem had witnessed the death of their Lord. For a while the soldier remembered only that he was a pilgrim; knight and pikeman knelt together and laid their faces in the dust.

The Egyptian commandant of Jerusalem had not idly awaited the slow approach of its assailants. He had stored it abundantly with provisions, strengthened the walls with masonry and defensive machines, and by appeals to Moslems everywhere had completed its garrison. The suburban country was reduced to a desert, stripped of all vegetation which could furnish food for man or beast; all standing trees, and the timber in houses that might be wrought into machinery of assault, were destroyed. The wells in the valleys were filled with stones, and poison thrown into the cisterns where water had been stored.

Possibly the knowledge that the district about Jerusalem could furnish them no help led the leaders to listen to the counsel of a solitary hermit who dwelt on the Mount of Olives, and who promised in Christ’s name a successful assault if undertaken at once. It does not seem clear how an army without siege apparatus could take a place so strongly fortified. On the east the vast walls, rising from the valley of Jehoshaphat, 126were too lofty to tempt the most daring. Those on the south, overlooking the Kidron, were not less impregnable. The crusading army took every possibility of approach into consideration, and in imitation of Vespasian and Titus a thousand years before, stretched their lines on the north and west of the city. But only a blind faith in divine assistance could have led to the assault, even on these sides, without battering-rams or scaling-ladders. Yet at the trumpet’s call the Christians advanced. They joined their shields into a roof, which was a poor defence against the stones and boiling oil that descended upon them. Still the front ranks dug into the walls with pikes and axes, while the rear ranks of archers and slingers endeavored to drive the foe from the ramparts above. A few, finding a solitary ladder, mounted the walls, but were unable to withstand the crowd of Infidels who met them. In deep discouragement, they abandoned the assault, having learned the lesson that, even at Jerusalem, Heaven assures no enterprise which is conceived regardless of human discretion.

Events soon occurred which turned this distrust of miraculous intervention into a belief that Heaven was actually fighting against the Christians. It was a summer of fearful heat even for that land. Tasso’s description of those fiery days is as truthful as it is poetic:

To avoid the burning atmosphere which drained their blood, men buried themselves naked in the ground. At night they sought to gather the dew, with which to moisten their lips. Those who found some tiny pool fought among themselves for the possession of its foul water. It seemed that the very “stars fought in their courses” against the people of God, as once against Sisera. The occasional raids of Moslems upon defenceless bands of Christians, as they wandered in search of relief, were magnified by general fear into the approach of vast armies. It was rumored that Egypt had massed its power and was approaching from the south.

But for opportune relief it is probable that the crusaders would have been compelled to raise the siege. At the most critical moment some Genoese ships entered Jaffa. Three hundred of the bravest knights fought their way through the Moslems who obstructed the road to the coast, and succeeded in bringing to the camp before Jerusalem a quantity of provisions and material for siege machinery, as well as a number of skilled engineers and artisans. They were unable to prevent the ships being destroyed by the enemy. Gathering new courage from this reinforcement, a band penetrated to the forests of Samaria, full thirty miles distant, and cut timber, which, with 128incredible toil, they brought back for the construction of battering-rams, catapults, and strong roofs under which to conduct their renewed operations. Among the most formidable contrivances was the movable tower, three stories high, within the base of which men worked with levers to move the structure close to the walls, while on the upper floors soldiers were massed, who at the lowering of the drawbridge descended upon the ramparts.

Encouraged by this material aid, the crusaders again sought the heavenly succor. They remembered that Joshua combined faith with valor, and that, having invested Jericho with prayers and psalms, its walls fell down. They would now repeat the experiment. For three days they held a solemn fast. On the fourth, preceded by the priests bearing images of the saints, with song and cymbals and trumpet, and burnished arms flashing in the hot air, they set out for the mystic investment of the frowning walls of Jerusalem. Beginning on the west, the procession moved northward. The entire army worshipped prostrate at the tombs of St. Mary and St. Stephen. Bending their course to the southeast, they wept at the reputed garden of Gethsemane. They then went up the Mount of Olives, and there, on the spot whence Christ had ascended, held a grand convocation. At their feet lay the landscape, hallowed by the exploits of Hebrew patriots and prophets, but chiefly by the footprints of the Son of God. On the one hand gleamed the Jordan and the Dead Sea; on the other was Jerusalem, like an altar overturned and desecrated by the presence of the heathen. Their most eloquent 129orator, Arnold de Rohes, harangued them as he pointed to the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the grand objective of all their toil, heroism, and piety. Chieftains who had long cherished mutual animosity, like Tancred and Raymond, stood together in the embrace of forgiveness and the pledge to forget all their differences, while their hearts were reunited as in a celestial flame.

The Moslems themselves added fuel to the fire of Christian enthusiasm by parading on the walls of the city with crosses, which they saluted with blasphemous gestures and cries. Peter the Hermit voiced the fresh fury which swayed all breasts. He cried, “Ye see, ye hear, the blasphemies of the enemies of God. Swear to defend the Christ, a second time a prisoner, crucified afresh. I swear by your faith, I swear by your arms, that these mosques shall again serve for temples of the true God.”

Descending from the Mount of Olives, the procession moved southward, paying reverence at the Pool of Siloam and the tomb of David. As the red sun was setting in the white gleam of the Mediterranean, the host returned to their camps on the west of the city, chanting the words of Isaiah: “So shall they fear the name of the Lord from the west, and His glory from the rising of the sun.” In strange attestation of the unity of religious sentiment in antagonistic faiths, the songs of the Christians were echoed from the city by the voices of the muezzins, who, from the minarets of mosques, called their faithful to prayer.

During the night Godfrey made a rapid change in 130his point of attack, so that in the morning the bewildered Moslems saw the walls threatened where they had made little preparation for defence. A great ravine which thwarted the operations of Raymond was quickly filled by the multitude, who rushed amid the thick rain of arrows, carrying stones, which they threw into it.

At daybreak, July 14, 1099, as from a single impulse, the rams began their blows; the catapults and ballistæ filled the air with flying stones and blazing combustibles, and a storm of arrows swept the walls. The assault was met with equal skill and courage, and night fell upon an indecisive engagement. Raymond’s tower had been destroyed, and those of Godfrey and Tancred were injured so that they could not be moved.

The 15th of July witnessed a repetition of the carnage. The priests kept up an unceasing procession of prayer around the city, a pious exhibition, which was matched by the appearance on the walls of two Moslem sorceresses, who, as the Christians said, invoked the aid of nature and demons. In vain was the heroism and sacrifices of the crusaders. Their towers were burned and fell, burying their defenders beneath the blazing fagots. The host was beginning to withdraw from the seemingly useless slaughter. Suddenly the cry, “Look! look!” directed all eyes towards the Mount of Olives. The imagination of some one had seen—or his shrewdness, recalling the ruse of the Holy Lance at Antioch, had invented—the apparition of a gigantic knight on the sacred mount, waving his shield. The cry of “St. George! St. 131George!” rent the air. A timely change in the wind blew the flames and smoke of the Christians’ remaining towers towards the walls. The Moslems were blinded and choked as by the breath of unearthly spirits. Godfrey’s men rushed upon them, drove them from their defences, and, climbing over the wall, pursued them down through the streets of the city. Tancred obtained a similar advantage, and in another torrent poured his contingent over the northern end of the ramparts. The Christians within the city opened the gates, and new tides of slaughter and victory rolled among the houses. Last of all, Raymond carried the battlements which opposed him; thus the various bands met within the city. One rally of the Moslems checked but for an instant the inevitable result.

The valor of this last effort of the defendants might have elicited the magnanimity of the victors for so worthy a foe, but it only enraged their brutality. They who paused long enough in the carnage to remember that it was Friday, and the very hour when Christ died in love for all men, did not remember the simplest precepts of their holy religion, and visited their now unresisting enemies with slaughter unsurpassed in the annals of cruelty. Neither age nor sex was spared. Children’s brains were dashed out against the stones, or their living bodies were whirled in demoniacal sport from the walls. Women were outraged. Men were prodded with spears over the battlements upon other spears below, or were reserved to be roasted by slow fires amid the mockeries of their captors. In the letter sent by Godfrey and others to the Pope occur these words: “If you desire 132to know what was done with the enemy who were found there, know that in Solomon’s porch and in his temple our men rode in the blood of the Saracen up to the knees of their horses.”

Both Latin and Oriental historians give seventy thousand as the number of Mussulmans who were massacred after the capture, besides those who fell in the fight. It is certain that the entire population that did not escape from the city were intended for death, for such was the deliberate decree of the council of chiefs. The blood-crazed soldiers extended the scope of this outrageous mandate to include the Jews, who perished in the flames of their synagogue. From their hiding-places in mosques, homes, and the vast underground vaults, the citizens were plucked out by the point of the lance and sword. Thus many a Moslem died in the confirmed belief of the superior humanity of his own religion, though it was called the religion of the sword.

The only apology for this cruelty that can be given is the brutality of manhood in these dark ages. The gentler Christianity of earlier days had been sadly changed by the propensities of the semi-barbaric Northern conquerors who embraced it. The church had as yet been able to affect the masses with only its dogmas and ritual, not with its deeper and more truly religious influence for the restraint of passion and the tuition of the sentiment of love. The military spirit, too, had allied itself with the ecclesiastical; as Milman says, “The knight before the battle was as devout as the bishop; the bishop in the battle no less ferocious than the knight.” The truth of this is evident 133from the fact that contemporary writers do not attempt to excuse it, but glory in sights the imagination of which appals our modern sensibilities. Raymond d’Agiles, an eye-witness, speaks with pleasantry of the headless trunks and bodies dancing on ropes from the turrets. The ghost of the dead Adhemar was seen in his ecclesiastical robes partaking of the triumph, but those who describe the vision report no rebuke from his lips for the carnage. Tancred and Raymond of Toulouse alone seem to have raised any voice of mercy, and they suffered the imputation of mercenary motives for their clemency.

Jerusalem was given over to the Christian spoilers. Every man secured possession of the dwelling upon which he first set his mark or name. To Tancred’s share fell the entire furniture of the mosque of Omar, six chariot-loads of gold and silver candelabra and other ornaments. With characteristic generosity, he divided the booty with Godfrey and many private soldiers, reserving fifty marks of gold for the redecoration of the Christian churches. But most precious to their credulity was the True Cross, alleged to have been miraculously discovered by Helena, the mother of Constantine, in the fourth century, which, having been stolen by Chosroes the Persian, had been restored to the sacred city by Heraclius.

When wearied with gathering the spoil the crusaders deliberated how best to secure their possessions. This could be done only by maintaining peace within the city and adequate defence against the armies of the Infidels, who would undoubtedly rise to assail them from without.

Their first business was the selection of a king of Jerusalem. The popularity of Godfrey, merited by his genius, bravery, and devotion, readily suggested his name to the ten electors who were chosen to voice the suffrage of the host. To secure his enthusiastic reception by the people, he did not need additional arguments drawn from imagined revelations of the will of Heaven. Yet visions were invoked to confirm the judgment of human discretion. One reported that he had seen Godfrey enthroned in the sun, while numberless flocks of birds from all lands came and nestled at his feet. This was interpreted to mean the coming glory of Jerusalem and the crowds 135of pilgrims who should be safe beneath his sway. Godfrey modestly declined the royal title, accepting only that of Defender and Baron of the Holy Sepulchre, saying that he would not wear a crown of gold in the city where Christ had worn only a crown of thorns (July 22, 1099).

With less unanimity and only after unseemly brawls, which were in strange contrast with the orderly arrangement of their secular affairs, Arnold de Rohes, the eloquent but dissolute ecclesiastic, was selected by the priests as Patriarch of Jerusalem.

With true statesmanlike purpose, Godfrey addressed himself to the organization of the political and military government of his new dominion. He had, however, little time to devote to the peaceful progress of his kingdom. Raymond diverted his chief’s attention more by plots of ambition and jealousy than he aided him by wisdom of counsel. Multitudes of Christians resident in the East, excited to become such by the fame of the conquests of the crusaders, poured into the city and vicinage, and thus added to the governor’s cares.

At the same time the Mussulmans, quickly recuperating from their despair, inaugurated new campaigns. The Turks and Persians laid aside their jealousy of the Egyptians, and poured southward and westward to join the army of the caliph of Cairo. Afdhal, already famous for having wrested Jerusalem from the Turks, gathered the warriors of Islam of all tribes and races, from the Nile to the Tigris. His advancing army was supported by a vast fleet, which had been laden at Alexandria and Damietta with provisions 136and siege apparatus for a second capture of what to them, as well as to the Christians, was the sacred city.

Learning that the Moslems had reached Gaza, Godfrey set forth to meet them, with Tancred as his most worthy coadjutant. Raymond, having quarrelled with Godfrey about the independent possession of the tower of David, sulked in his house, and Robert of Normandy also refused to march to the aid of Godfrey. These leaders were, however, at length driven from the city by the taunts of the priests and the women. Their martial pride was also stirred by the message of Godfrey that a battle was imminent. The crusaders made their camp at Ramleh, and August 11th advanced towards Ascalon. By the banks of the wadi Surak they captured immense herds of camels, oxen, and sheep, which encouraged them as much, doubtless, as did the wood of the True Cross that was carried through the ranks. The herds also seemed to be marshalled by a special providence as their rearward. We must describe this in the words of Godfrey: “When we advanced to battle, wonderful to relate, the camels formed in many squadrons, and the sheep and oxen did the same. Moreover, these animals accompanied us, halting when we halted, advancing when we advanced, and charging when we charged.” The enormous dust-clouds raised by the herds led the Moslems to take them for a contingent of the Christian force, which imagination magnified to many times its real numbers. A paralysis of fear fell upon the Infidels. Most of them, being fresh troops, had never met the crusaders in battle, 137and had dared the issue, relying upon their own superiority in numbers. Now that this dependence seemingly failed them, they anticipated defeat at the hands of the heroes of Nicæa and Antioch and Jerusalem, and stood nerveless before the attack. The Christians, coming near, fell every man upon his knees in prayer, then rose to make the charge. Raymond struck the column of Turks and Persians; Tancred led his braves through the Moors and Egyptians; Godfrey crushed the Ethiopians, who resisted him but for an instant with their long flails armed with balls of iron; Robert of Normandy wrested the standard from the hands of Afdhal himself. As the Moslems cast away their bows and javelins to hasten their flight, the Christians cast away theirs that they might speed the pursuit with the sword. Back they drove the Infidels against the walls of Ascalon. Two thousand were trampled or suffocated in the crowd that choked the gate; multitudes, avoiding the city, were driven into the sea and were drowned. The panic communicated itself to the Egyptian sailors on the fleet, who spread their sails and disappeared over the sea, leaving the Moslem soldiers no opportunity of escape. Godfrey says: “There were not in our army more than five thousand horsemen and fifteen thousand foot-soldiers, and there were probably of the enemy one hundred thousand horsemen and four hundred thousand foot-soldiers.... More than one hundred thousand perished by the sword; and if many of ours had not been detained plundering the camp, few of the great multitude would have escaped.”

Raymond claimed the city of Ascalon for his own 138possession. Godfrey declared that all conquests belonged to their common kingdom of Jerusalem. Raymond, in mean revenge, encouraged the Moslems not to surrender their stronghold, which still resisted. By similar counsel he prevailed upon the Saracen garrison of Arsuf to hold out. Godfrey could not restrain his anger at this treachery, and turned his arms upon his old comrade. Tancred and Robert of Normandy threw themselves between the swords of the combatants and effected their reconciliation.

With the victory at Ascalon (August 19, 1099) the first crusade may be said to have terminated. The events of the subsequent year relate to the history of the new kingdom of Jerusalem. The closing months of the eleventh century witnessed the return of the mass of crusaders to their European homes. In almost every castle and hamlet of France the thrilling events of three years were narrated by those whose scars corroborated the story of their valor and sufferings. Nearly every family remembered a father, a brother, or a son as a martyr, or rejoiced in his return renowned as a hero or revered as a saint.

Few of the leaders enlarged their repute by any subsequent actions. Peter the Hermit ended his days at advanced age in the monastery of Huy, which his renown for sanctity had enabled him to found. Robert of Normandy seems to have exhausted all the manliness of his nature in his Eastern adventures. He allowed an amour to detain him in Italy for more than a year, during which time his brother Henry took the throne of England on the death of William Rufus, a reward which might easily have come to 139Robert, had he shown disposition to defend his right of inheritance. Henry wrested from him even his duchy of Normandy, and confined him in the castle of Cardiff, where he died after twenty-eight years of captivity.

Raymond retired to Laodicea, the government of which he had secured. From this place he was summoned to command new bands of crusaders. Multitudes set out under him. Some followed Stephen of Blois, brother to the French king, whose desertion of the crusaders brought upon him such dishonor that he was eager to restore his repute by a second enlistment. William, Count of Poitiers, Lord of France, reputed as the first of the Troubadours, departed with a retinue of soldiers and girls. A German horde was led by Conrad, the marshal of the empire. Italians followed Anselm, Archbishop of Milan, in whose train were lords, knights, and noble ladies, among them the Princess Ida of Austria.

These various bands, like the earlier crusaders, met at Constantinople, repeating the annoyance to the Emperor Alexius, who begged Raymond to relieve him of their presence. This veteran accepted the duty, bearing with him the Holy Lance that had wrought wonders at Antioch, and which Raymond regarded as a match for the arm of St. Ambrose that the Archbishop of Milan had brought from his cathedral.

This march eastward was without discipline, monks and women often filling the places of soldiers. Kilidge-Arslan, the Sultan of Iconium, burned with desire to avenge his defeat three years before at Nicæa. Kerbogha, 140Sultan of Mosul, was equally inflamed to wipe out his disgrace at Antioch. These joined their forces and overwhelmed the Christians at the river Halys. The massacre almost amounted to extermination. Raymond fled with the other leaders. The Turks repeated their assault upon a second army, under the Count de Nevers, at Ancyra, with similar results. And again they administered their terrible vengeance upon a third army, under the Count of Poitiers, the Duke of Bavaria, and Count Hugh of Vermandois, of whose reputed one hundred and fifty thousand scarcely one thousand escaped. The leaders found a sorry refuge in rags and wounds at Tarsus and Antioch. The women, among them the Princess Ida, disappeared within the curtains of numberless harems. A forlorn remnant reached Jerusalem, to add, perhaps, more to the care than to the assistance of Godfrey.

The rule of Godfrey as Baron of the Holy Sepulchre was brief, but such as to promise, had his career been extended to even the age of most of his companions, a record worthy of the greatest of kings. Despising the mere gilding of a throne, he sought to strengthen his government by the best laws known to Europe, as well as to guard and extend his power by the sword.

The latter was, however, the first and pressing necessity. The departure of the crusading hosts left him but three hundred knights with their retainers, out of six hundred thousand who during three years had taken the cross. His strongholds were, besides Jerusalem, a score of towns scattered over the vicinage 141of the capital, in many cases antagonized by the still remaining fortresses of the Infidels. The country between these towns was open to the passage of his foes. The land was untilled, and offered scanty provision for his people. To prevent a further exodus of Christians, it was enacted that land could be acquired in ownership only after a year’s continuous occupancy, and would be alienated by a year’s absence.

Tancred was as Godfrey’s right hand. These two men stand out together as preëminent for their moral qualities among many as brave as they in merely physical prowess. To Tancred was assigned the principality of Tiberias, the possession of which he quickly acquired with his sword. Godfrey at the same time forced the acknowledgment of his government by exacting tribute from the Arabs west of the Jordan, and from the emirs along the coast of the Mediterranean. One city, Asur (Arsuf), refused submission and maintained its independence in spite of siege. The spirit of Godfrey was strangely tried here by an incident. Gerard of Avernes had been given up by Godfrey as a hostage for his clemency and justice in dealing with the people of the town. While the arrows of the Christians were sweeping the walls, Gerard was placed unshielded at a point where they were falling thickest, that his danger might divert the assault. Godfrey, coming near, cried aloud to him, “If my own brother were in your place I could not cease my attack; die, then, as a brave knight.” Gerard accepted his martyrdom, and fell beneath the missiles of his friends.

142To Jerusalem came a multitude of pilgrims, among them Dagobert (Daimbert) as special legate from the Pope. By virtue of his high office he claimed for himself the patriarchate of Jerusalem, together with the secular sovereignty of Jaffa and the section of the sacred city in which was located the Holy Sepulchre. Following further the policy of the popes to make their dominion a world monarchy, secular as well as spiritual, Dagobert required Godfrey to acknowledge himself a temporal vassal of the pontiff, and to pledge to the patriarch the sovereignty of the kingdom in the event of Godfrey dying without children. Bohemond, as Prince of Antioch, and Baldwin, Prince of Edessa, brother of Godfrey, and Raymond, now of Laodicea, were at the time visiting Jerusalem. These also made their submission, and received their governments anew from the Holy Father.

With the counsel of these and others, his wisest advisers, Godfrey inaugurated the system of laws afterwards known as the Assizes of Jerusalem. They were not completed until a subsequent century, but their inception belongs to his statesmanship. These regulations are interesting as reflecting in brief compass the best customs of Europe. Their study may, therefore, be on that wider field. The Assizes were a sort of written constitution, and when prepared the original document was placed with solemn pomp in the archives of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

But the reign begun under such favorable auspices was suddenly terminated. Returning from an expedition for the succor of Tancred, Godfrey accepted the hospitality of the emir of Cæsarea, and immediately 143falling ill, his sickness was accredited to poisoned fruit. He died soon after reaching his capital (June 18, 1100), at the early age of thirty-eight. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is still to be seen his tomb, near by that of his Lord, which he had given his brief but brave life to rescue and defend.

Godfrey’s preëminence among the original crusader chieftains was due not so much to any single virtue in which he was their superior as to a rare combination of many excellent qualities. It was said of him that he was the peer of Raymond in counsel and of Tancred in the field. To this we may add that for piety he outshone Adhemar the priest. In the midst of the fight he would pause for prayer to the God of battles; and his meditation on sacred themes was ordinarily prolonged far beyond the hours prescribed for devotion by the church. His nature was gentler and more just than that of his companions. If at times his actions were cruel, they might be attributed rather to the habit of the age than to his own inclination. Since he surpassed his generation in so many respects, it would be neither just nor generous to criticise his defects. In him we see the budding of a better type of humanity amid the prevailing grossness of animalism and superstition.

In strange contrast with Godfrey was his brother Baldwin, the Prince of Edessa, whom the necessities of the infant kingdom, rather than his own merits, now called to the vacant throne. Baldwin had already shown himself as unscrupulous as he was alert, and as covetous as he was bold. With undoubted adroitness and courage, he had acquired and held his principality of Edessa. Here he reigned with Oriental pomp, wore long robes and flowing beard, sat cross-legged on rugs, and compelled all suppliants for his favor to approach with the salaam of profoundest homage. This ostentation was apparently more from policy among a people familiar with such customs than from love of display or any despotic instinct.

Dagobert, the papal legate, opposed the suggestion of Baldwin’s kingship of Jerusalem, and claimed that honor for himself. He might have obtained it had not Garnier, the agent of Baldwin, seized upon the tower of David and the other fortresses in the name of his absent master. The baffled prelate called upon Bohemond, now Prince of Antioch, to come and 145avenge this insult offered to the Holy Father in the person of his legate; but the Turks, by capturing Bohemond, interfered with this plan. The activity shown by the common enemy decided the popular voice for Baldwin as king. The dangers which threatened forbade that the government of Jerusalem should be left in the hands of a priest untrained in war. The soldier seemed pointed out by Providence for the kingship, although the hand of the Pope was stretched out to anoint another.

Baldwin, learning of the death of Godfrey, immediately turned over the government of Edessa to his cousin, Baldwin du Bourg, and with fourteen hundred men marched for Jerusalem. On the way he gave new proof of his puissance by first outwitting and then utterly routing vastly superior numbers, with which the emirs of Damascus and Emesa endeavored to block his way. Pausing at the sacred city only long enough to assure himself of the applause of the entire population, he gave another exhibition of his merit of the crown before wearing it. With a sudden swoop he devastated the enemy’s country from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, and, laden with booty, demanded and received from the hands of the unwilling prelate the crown and blessing in the name of the Pope. Quickly following the coronation services at Bethlehem, he captured Arsuf and Cæsarea. An Egyptian army had advanced as far as Ramleh, but Baldwin, with a white kerchief tied to his lance’s point as his oriflamme, led his braves again and again through this host, until they were routed, leaving five thousand dead on the field. Amid the shrieks of the 146dying the king caught the subdued cry of a woman. She was the wife of a Moslem, who had accompanied her husband to the war, and had been taken with the pains of childbirth. By the conqueror’s order she was tenderly cared for, placed upon the rug from his own tent, covered with his own mantle, and later conducted with her new-born babe to the arms of her husband. His compassion soon received its reward. The rallying Mussulmans surrounded his band not only with swords, but with fire, having ignited the long, dried grass. With difficulty the king escaped to Ramleh, which the enemy completely invested. During the night, while anticipating the fateful assault of the morrow, he was secretly approached by a Moslem officer. This man proved to be the husband of the woman whom Baldwin had befriended. Led by his gratitude, he had put his own life in jeopardy in order to reveal to his benefactor a secret path to safety. The Moslem assault carried the town; they put to death all Christians found within it. In Jerusalem the great bell tolled, while the people crowded the churches or marched in procession, mourning the supposed death of their king, when suddenly came the news of Baldwin’s safety. In the rhetoric of the chronicle, it was “like the morning star out of the night’s blackness.”

The capture of Ramleh by the enemy endangered Jaffa, the real port of Jerusalem, at which the kingdom was in touch with Europe. Baldwin made his way in disguise to Arsuf. Embarking with Godric, an English pirate, he sailed straight through the Egyptian galleys that guarded the harbor of Jaffa. In 147June, 1102, with forces augmented from an English fleet under Harding, he assailed the enemy. The Patriarch of Jerusalem carried the wood of the True Cross. With the cry, “Christus regnat! Vincet! Imperat!” which subsequently appeared as the legend on the gold coins of France, the besieged became the victors. But the joy of the triumph when the king returned to Jerusalem was marred by the memory of the many slain; Stephen of Blois and Stephen of Burgundy, with a great number of the bravest knights, had fallen.

The Greek emperor, Alexius, while sending congratulation to the Christians, could not repress his jealousy of their victories. He prepared to assail Antioch; he negotiated with the captors of Bohemond for his ransom, that he might secure from his gratitude the title to the city which that chieftain held. Bohemond, however, ransomed himself by pledges to the emir who held him, and, after having endured a captivity of four years, defended his city in battles by sea and land from the treachery of the Greeks. At the same time, with other chieftains, he carried arms into Mesopotamia. At Charan he barely escaped in company with Tancred, while their companions, Josselin de Courtenay and Baldwin du Bourg, were dungeoned at Mosul.

In view of his exhausted resources, Bohemond attempted a vast and romantic scheme for their recuperation. Having floated a report of his death, he concealed himself in a coffin and passed through the watchful fleet of the Greeks, who cursed his imagined corpse. Arriving in Italy, he secured a new commission 148from the Pope. In France he so ingratiated himself with King Philip I. as to secure that monarch’s daughter, the Princess Constance, to wife. He then raised a new army of crusaders. In Spain and Italy he augmented this force, and embarking at Bari, he attempted to take a bitter retaliation on the empire of the Greeks. His expedition against Durazzo failed of success. Bohemond, at the moment when his ambition was at the point of its extremest satisfaction, returned to die in his own Italian dominion of Taranto.

The kingdom of Jerusalem was reduced to all sorts of expedients to raise the means of its support and extension. King Baldwin recouped his treasury by marriage with Adela, widow of Count Roger of Sicily. Her vast wealth was heralded by the vessel in which she sailed, whose mast was incased in gold and whose hold was laden with gems and coin. A thousand trained warriors followed, at her expense. Either the drain upon her purse or the incompatibility of her relations with the king led her to leave him after three years and return to Italy.

With the assistance of Genoese fleets, Ptolemaïs was captured. The mutual jealousies between the Turks and the Egyptians enabled the Christians to secure the southern coast of Palestine. Raymond having died before the walls of Tripoli, his son Bertrand captured that city, which from that time became the titular possession of his family. An immense library of Persian, Arabic, and Egyptian manuscripts was by the illiterate Christians given to the flames. Biblus and Beirut also fell before the standard of the cross. With the aid of a fleet and ten thousand 149men, under Sigur of Norway, Sidon was quickly acquired.

But in the midst of these triumphs came an irreparable loss. Tancred, the ideal of knighthood, died (December 12, 1112). His genius and sword had conquered widely in northern Syria. His memory has been embalmed, while his real virtues, which needed no untruthful praises, have been exaggerated in poetry and romance since Chaucer sang of him as “a very parfite, gentil knight.”

The loss of Tancred was felt especially in the north, where the Christians soon after met a fearful defeat at Mount Tabor. In extremity they made alliance with the Saracens of Damascus and Mesopotamia, under the Sultan of Bagdad.

The jealousy among the Moslems giving him seeming security from attack on the north, King Baldwin planned the invasion of Egypt. He crossed the desert and appeared within three days’ journey of Cairo. While returning from a raid, laden with spoil and flushed with the anticipation of soon adding the land of the Nile to his possessions, the king fell sick. Nominating Baldwin du Bourg for his successor, he died at the edge of the desert (1118). His body was brought, in obedience to his dying request, and deposited beside that of Godfrey, near to the Holy Sepulchre.

Baldwin du Bourg was elected to the vacant throne of Jerusalem, Eustace, brother of Godfrey, having declined to contest it, magnanimously saying to his partisans, “Not by me shall a stumbling-block enter into the Lord’s kingdom.” Baldwin II. was well advanced in years, experienced in council and in field, having been one of the companions of Godfrey in the first crusade, and during the reign of Baldwin I. having held the government of Edessa. In contrast with his predecessor, he was painstaking in planning, cautious in executing, and withal a man of deep religious devotion.

In April, 1123, while attempting the relief of Count Josselin, who had been taken prisoner at Khartpert by Balek the Turkoman, King Baldwin II. was captured and confined in the same city. A devoted band of Armenians entered Khartpert in the disguise of merchants, and succeeded in liberating Josselin, but the king was carried away to Harran for safer keeping.

151The absence of Baldwin II. was measurably compensated by the vigor and astuteness of Eustace Grenier, who was elected to the regency. The Egyptians had massed themselves in the plains of Ascalon for an advance against Jerusalem. After a fast, which was so rigorously enforced that mothers did not suckle their babes, and cattle were driven to sterile places beyond their pasturage, the army of Christians marched from the city at the sound of the great bell. The patriarch carried the wood of the True Cross, another dignitary bore the Holy Lance, another a vase containing milk from the breast of the Virgin Mary. The credulity which devised these expedients of victory might readily see, as reported, a celestial thunderbolt fall upon the army of the Infidels. It is enough for history to record that the Christians were triumphant.

The Genoese and Pisans had often brought assistance to the crusaders and great gain to themselves by the part they took in these holy wars. The Venetians, however, having profitable commerce with the Saracens, were not at first tempted to hazard a rupture with them. At length they too sought the new adventure. In the warlike temper of the age, the Venetian fleet, in command of the doge, Domenicho Michaeli, did not hesitate to attack a returning Genoese fleet for the sake of its plunder. Having robbed and murdered their coreligionists, they repeated the raid upon an Egyptian fleet which was leaving the mouth of the Nile. With appetites thus whetted, they proposed to the regency at Jerusalem to sell themselves to the service of God for one third 152the territory they might acquire conjointly with the crusaders. The terms being accepted, an innocent child drew the lot which should show the will of Heaven as to whether Ascalon or Tyre were the better prize. Tyre was indicated, and six months after (July 7, 1124) fell to gratify the greed of Venice and the pride of the people of Jerusalem.

A month later King Baldwin II. secured his liberation. In 1129 he strengthened his throne by the marriage of his daughter, Melisende, to Foulque of Anjou, son of the notorious Bertrade, who had deserted her legitimate husband for the embrace of King Philip of France. This monarch had put away his wife Bertha for this new union. Thus was brought upon Philip the famous excommunication of the Pope. Two years later (August 13, 1131) Baldwin II. died and was buried with Godfrey and Baldwin I. in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Foulque ascended the throne. His first work was to settle a dispute for the lordship of Antioch, which was accomplished only after bloodshed between brethren. Next he baffled the Greek emperor, John Comnenus, who attempted to gain for himself the kingdom of Jerusalem. Later he made alliance with the Mussulman Prince of Damascus and fought against Zenghi, Prince of Mosul. His queen, Melisende, by her rumored amours brought him additional perplexity. King Foulque died from an injury while hunting (November 13, 1143), leaving two children, Baldwin and Amalric.

Baldwin III. succeeded his father at the age of thirteen, with Melisende as regent. Effeminacy 153not only marked the government, but infected the spirit of the people. The heroism of the founders of the kingdom seemed to die in the blood of their successors, or, if danger fired the ancient valor, it was without the light of discretion.

Young Baldwin III. inaugurated his reign by a foolish expedition to take Bozrah, which had been offered in surrender by its traitorous commandant. To accomplish this it was necessary to break a fair and useful alliance which the Christians had made with the Sultan of Damascus, the rightful lord of Bozrah. On reaching Bozrah, instead of the keys of the city, there was placed in the hands of the king an announcement from the wife of the treacherous governor that she herself would defend the walls. The perplexity of the king and his equally callow advisers was followed by an ignoble retreat. The enemy pursued not only with sword, but with fire. The wind, which seemed to the retreating army to be the breath of God’s wrath, covered them with smoke and cinders, while the flames of the burning grass chased their fleeing feet. The Christians would have perished had not, say the chronicles, the wood of the True Cross, raised with prayer, changed the direction of the breeze and beaten back the pursuers.

At this time there was felt the need of an astute mind at the head of the kingdom. Christian progress had been arrested, and events of evil omen were thickening.

The star of Zenghi, the ruler of Mosul, the father of Nourredin, and the forerunner of Saladin, had arisen. This redoubtable warrior had conquered all 154his Moslem rivals on the Euphrates; he had swept with resistless fury westward, capturing Aleppo (1128), Hamah (1129), and Athareb (1130). Though the Moslems had been assisted by Baldwin II., yet the Oriental writers sang of how the “swords of Allah found their scabbards in the neck of His foes.” In 1144, one year from young Baldwin’s coronation, Zenghi appeared before the walls of Edessa, which since the early days of the crusades had been in the possession of the Christians. This city was the bulwark of the Christian kingdom in the East; it is thus described in the florid language of the place and time: “I was as a queen in the midst of her court; sixty towns standing around me formed my train; my altars, loaded with treasure, shed their splendor afar and appeared to be the abode of angels. I surpassed in magnificence the proudest cities of Asia, and I was as a celestial ornament raised upon the bosom of the earth.”

Had old Josselin de Courtenay been living, Edessa would have given a stubborn and possibly a successful defence, for the terror of his name had long held the Moslems at bay. Once, while lying on what he thought to be his death-bed, this veteran heard that the enemy had laid siege to one of his strong towers, and commanded his son to go to its rescue. The younger Josselin delayed on account of the few troops he could take with him. Old Josselin ordered the soldiers to carry him to the front on his litter. The news of his approach was sufficient to cause the quick withdrawal of the Moslems; but an invincible foe was upon the warrior, for, with hand raised in gratitude to Heaven, he expired.

155Josselin II. of Edessa was unworthy of such a sire. His weakness being known, he inspired neither terror in his foes nor respect among his own people. Zenghi surprised Edessa with a host of Kurds and Turkomans. To Oriental daring he added the careful engineering learned from his Western antagonists. Quickly the walls were surrounded by movable towers higher than the ramparts; battering-rams beat against the foundation, and storms of stones, javelins, and combustibles swept away the defenders. In vain the city held out for a while in expectancy of aid from Jerusalem. On the twenty-eighth day (December 14, 1144) it fell. The news spread a dismay which could have been surpassed only by the capture of Jerusalem itself.

The report of Zenghi’s death two years later gave to the Christians a ray of hope for at least fewer disasters. That hope was quickly extinguished by the exploits of Nourredin, his son, whose deeds stirred the prophetic spirit of Moslem imams to foretell the speedy fall of the Holy City. At the same time they excited the superstitious fears of the Christians, who saw in comets, as well as in the flash of Nourredin’s cimeters, the signs of Heaven’s displeasure, and interpreted the very thunders of the sky as the celestial echo of his tramping squadrons.

The tidings of the fall of Edessa was the immediate occasion of the second crusade.

Before considering this, let us note briefly the influence upon Europe of the first crusade and of the kingdom of Jerusalem which it had established.

One of the most significant fruits of the first crusade was the creation and growth of the military orders—the Hospitallers, or Knights of St. John, the Templars, and the Teutonic Knights.

The Hospitallers, or Knights of St. John.—This famous organization, which was for centuries a bulwark of Christendom and which still exists, originated earlier than the crusades, but first attained power and repute in those exciting days. In the year 1023 the Egyptian caliph, who held possession of Jerusalem, was induced by the entreaty of the merchants of Amalfi to allow them to found in the sacred city a hospital for the care of poor and sick Latin pilgrims. A building near the Holy Sepulchre was secured for the purpose and dedicated to the Virgin, with the title of “Santa Maria de Latina.” As the multitude of pilgrims and their needs increased, a more commodious hospitium was erected. This was named after the sainted Patriarch of Alexandria, 157John Eleemon (the Compassionate). St. John the Baptist seems, however, to have secured the honor of becoming the ultimate titular patron of this order of nurses and almoners. When Jerusalem fell into the possession of the crusaders in 1099, Gerard, the hospital Master, endeared himself and his little band of helpers to the multitude of wounded. Godfrey de Bouillon endowed them with the revenues of his estates in Brabant. His example was followed by others. Many with spirits chastened by their own sufferings gave themselves personally to the work of the Hospitallers. Gerard, the Master, organized the brethren into a religious order, exacting from them the triple vow of poverty, obedience, and chastity. Each member wore a black robe, and upon his breast an eight-pointed white cross. Anticipating our history, in 1113 the order was dignified by the special sanction of Pope Paschal II. Raymond du Puy, a noble knight of Dauphine, became Master in 1118, and enlarged the function of members by requiring of them, in addition to the triple vow, an oath of military service. The order was then divided into (1) knights, whose special work was in the camp and field; (2) clergy; (3) serving brethren, or hospital attendants. Later it was necessary to subdivide its numerous adherents into seven classes, according to the language they spoke. The order was a republic, whose officers were elected by the suffrage of all, but who, once installed, wielded an autocratic power. Its fame spread throughout all countries. Multitudes enlisted under its auspices for service in the Holy Land; it became possessed of enormous property 158throughout Europe; its agents were at all courts, and its Briarean hands were felt at every centre of power throughout Christendom.

The Templars.—In the year 1114, four years before the Hospitallers had enlarged their function to include military duties, a Burgundian knight, Hugh de Payen, and eight comrades bound themselves by oath to guard the public roads about Jerusalem, which were continually menaced by Moslems and freebooters. King Baldwin II. assigned these good men quarters on the temple site of Mount Moriah, whence their title, “Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici.” At first the Templars seem to have gloried in their poverty, as indicated by the original seal of the order, which represents two knights mounted on a single horse. Their members augmented until they shared with the Hospitallers the glory of being the chief defenders of the new kingdom of Jerusalem. Hugh de Payen was sent by Baldwin II. as one of his ambassadors to secure help from European powers. The Grand Master, appearing before the Council of Noyes, January, 1128, obtained for his order the formal approval of the church. He returned to Palestine with three hundred knights, representing the noblest families of Europe. Among them was Foulque of Anjou, afterwards the King of Jerusalem. Brotherhoods of Templars were founded in Spain by 1129, in France by 1131, and in Rome by 1138. The mantle of the Knight Templar was white with a plain red cross on the left breast. The clerical members wore black. Their banner bore 159the inscription, “Not unto us, O Lord, but unto Thy name be glory!”

The history of the Hospitallers and the Templars until the fall of the sacred city is that of the kingdom itself. In all battles these knights of the white and the red cross were conspicuous for bravery, and by the unity and discipline of their organizations gave steadiness to the progress of the cause, or at least retarded other disasters which finally befell it.

Teutonic Order.—The Order of Teutonic Knights of St. Mary’s Hospital at Jerusalem was founded in 1128. During its earlier history its members limited their endeavors to religious and charitable work. It was not until 1190, during a later crusade than that we have been narrating, that it acquired military organization. From that time, as a purely German order, it shared with the Hospitallers and Templars the charters bestowed by the Pope and emperors, and contested with them the palm of heroism and power. Its peculiar badge was a black cross on a white mantle.

During the fifty years (1096-1146) which had elapsed since the exodus of the first crusaders a new generation had grown up in Europe. Vast changes had taken place everywhere, in every grade of society, in popular habits, and in conditions of thought. The crisis of the Dark Ages had passed; new light was breaking upon problems of government, the relation of classes, and even upon religious doctrine and discipline. These changes were largely due to the crusade itself and to the continuous intercourse between the East and the West which it inaugurated. The full development of these new sentiments and movements was due to the influence of subsequent crusades. We may, therefore, reserve their consideration until we shall have completed the story of these various expeditions, the tramp of which was yet to resound for a hundred and fifty years. Two results were, however, so intimately connected with the 161close of the first and the projection of the second crusade as to call for notice in passing. These were the strengthening of the kingship in France and the increased prestige of the Papacy.

The kingship in France during this period became consolidated and rapidly advanced. So many of the more potent and adventurous barons being engaged in foreign parts, the crown had little competition, and feudal privileges were steadily merged in the royal prerogatives. In the words of Michelet, “Ponderous feudalism had begun to move, and to uproot itself from the soil. It went and came, and lived upon the beaten highway of the crusade between France and Jerusalem.” France under Louis IV. (the Fat) (1108-37) became a nation, and was less jealous of restless chieftains at home than of the newly risen kingdom of the Normans in England, the long rivalry with which may be dated from this reign. When the German emperor, Henry V., in 1124 prepared to invade France, the counts of Flanders, Brittany, Aquitaine, and Anjou rallied against him under the lead of the French king, whose authority they had previously menaced.

The gathering of the forces of the Frankish peoples under a single sceptre marks a new era in the history of Europe. We shall observe especially its influence upon the organization of the coming crusades, whose leaders were no longer feudal chieftains, like Godfrey, Raymond, Bohemond, and Tancred, but royal personages supported by the compact power of the new nationality.

The chief advantage from the first crusade fell to 162the Papacy, which gathered to itself the prestige of the power it had evoked; and rightly, if great prevision ever merits the fruit of the policy it dares to inaugurate. Paschal II., who followed Urban II. in the papal chair (1099-1118), was too weak to uphold the daring projects of his predecessor; but Calixtus II. (1119-24) and Innocent II. (1130-43) showed the genuine Hildebrandian spirit. Although the Concordat of Worms (1123) modified somewhat the claims of the Papacy as against the German empire, the church steadily compacted its power about thrones and people.

The authority of the Papacy was especially augmented in this period by its temporary success against a movement whose ultimate triumph was destined to cost the Roman Church its dominance of Christendom, viz., the impulse towards liberal thought. The standard-bearer of this essential Protestantism was Abélard. This astute reasoner placed the human judgment, when guided by correct scholarship, above all traditional authority. The popularity of his teaching was a serious menace to the doctrines of the church, so far as these rested upon the dictation of the popes. The consternation of ecclesiastics was voiced by Bernard, the Abbot of Clairvaux, who declared in his appeal to Pope Innocent II.: “These books of Abélard are flying abroad over all the world; they no longer shun the light; they find their way into castles and cities; they pass from land to land, from one people to another. A new gospel is promulgated, a new faith is preached. Disputations are held on virtue and vice not according to Christian 163morality, on the sacraments of the church not according to the rule of faith, on the mystery of the Trinity not with simplicity and soberness. This huge Goliath, with his armor-bearer, Arnold of Brescia, defies the armies of the Lord to battle.”

The Goliath fell, but by no pebble from the sling of a David. Bernard was justly reputed the greatest mind of the age. He hesitated to enter into a learned controversy with Abélard, but smote him with a thunderbolt of excommunication, which he secured from the hands of the occupant of the Vatican throne.

Another movement against the papal power was even more threatening and, during the period we are describing, caused the throne of Peter to tremble. As Abélard assailed the current thought, so Arnold of Brescia proposed to revolutionize the secular power of the Papacy. He denied its right to temporal dominion in Italy, to dominate as it was doing the councils of other kingdoms, to interfere with judicial functions or to conduct military operations. He would sweep away all this outward estate as unbecoming the representative of Jesus of Nazareth. The clergy must be reduced to apostolic poverty; their glory should be only their good works; their maintenance the voluntary offerings, or at most the tithings, of the people. Even the empire of Germany and the French kingdom should be converted into republics.

Arnold’s views made rapid headway. Brescia declared itself a republic. The Swiss valleys were full of liberal sympathizers. A commonwealth sprang up in Rome, which announced to the Pope its recognition of only his spiritual headship. The people 164defeated and slew one Pope, who was clad in armor and marched at the head of his soldiers; another they expelled.

It was while the papal territory in Italy was thus occupied by the adherents of Arnold that the second crusade was inaugurated.

Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, was its chief inspirer, both in counsel with the leaders of Europe and with his voice as its popular herald. High above generals and scholars, beyond kings, emperors, and popes, this man stands in the gaze of history. His repute for wisdom and sanctity was extended by miracles accredited to his converse with Heaven. Believed to be above earthly ambition, he commanded and rebuked with a celestial authority. Papal electors came to consult the monk before they announced their judgment as to who should be Pope, and when on the throne the Pope consulted the monk before he ventured to set the seal of his infallibility to his own utterances. Bernard’s humility may have been great Godward, but it was not of the sort to lead him to decline the solemn sovereignty of men’s minds and wills. When Henry I. of England hesitated to acknowledge Innocent II., Bernard’s choice for Pope, on the ground that he was not the rightful occupant of the holy see, the monk exclaimed, “Answer thou for thy other sins; let this be on my head.” When Lothaire of Germany demanded of the Holy Father the renewal of the right of imperial investitures, the saint threw his spell about the emperor and left him submissive at the feet of the pontiff. When Louis VII. of France, in his rage against Thibaut, Count 165of Champagne, carried devastation through the count’s domains and burned the church of Vitry, with thirteen hundred of its citizens who had there taken refuge against his vengeance, Bernard openly rebuked the king, and with such effect that the monarch proposed, as a self-inflicted penance, a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, there to wipe out his guilt in the blood of Moslems.

CHAPTER XXIV.
BERNARD—CONRAD III.—LOUIS VII.—SUGER—SIEGE OF DAMASCUS.

Pope Honorius delegated Bernard to preach throughout France and Germany the renewal of the holy war. Drawn as much by the fame of the monk as by the mandates of the king and the Pope, a vast assembly of prelates and nobles gathered at Vezelay in Burgundy. A large platform was erected on a hill outside the city. King and monk stood together, representing the combined will of earth and heaven. The enthusiasm of the assembly of Clermont in 1095, when Peter the Hermit and Urban II. launched the first crusade, was matched by the holy fervor inspired by Bernard as he cried, “O ye who listen to me! hasten to appease the anger of heaven, but no longer implore its goodness by vain complaints. Clothe yourselves in sackcloth, but also cover yourselves with your impenetrable bucklers. The din of arms, 167the danger, the labors, the fatigues of war, are the penances that God now imposes upon you. Hasten then to expiate your sins by victories over the Infidels, and let the deliverance of the holy places be the reward of your repentance.” As in the olden scene, the cry “Deus vult! Deus vult!” rolled over the fields, and was echoed by the voice of the orator: “Cursed be he who does not stain his sword with blood.”

The king set the example by prostrating himself at the feet of the monk and receiving from his hands the badge of the cross. “The cross! the cross!” was the response of thousands who crowded about the platform. Queen Eleanor imitated her husband, and was followed by such a host of nobles, bishops, and knights that Bernard tore his garments into strips to supply the enthusiasts with the insignia of their new devotion. Similar scenes were enacted throughout France wherever the saint appeared. Eye-witnesses do not hesitate to tell of miracles wrought by his hands, emblazoning his mission with the seals of heaven.

The enlistments were so many that Bernard wrote to the Pope, “The villages and castles are deserted, and there are none left but widows and orphans, whose husbands and parents are still living.”

The orator visited Germany. A diet of the empire was at the time of his arrival convened at Spires. The new emperor, Conrad III., at first refused to heed the more private counsel of Bernard to join the crusade, urging in return the need of the imperial hand upon the helm of state. One day Bernard was 168saying mass, when suddenly he stopped and pictured Jesus Christ, armed with the cross and accompanied by angels, reproaching the emperor for his indifference. Conrad was as impotent to resist this eloquence and assumption of divine authority as his predecessor had been. He burst into tears and exclaimed, “I, too, swear to go wherever Christ shall call me.” With many of his lords and knights, he received the cross from Bernard’s hand.

From the Rhine to the Danube the enthusiasm spread like an epidemic. No class had immunity from it. Even thieves and cutthroats were so far converted as to swear to rob and murder only Infidels. Bernard’s gift of persuasion was unsurpassed since the days of Pentecost, for men and races that could not understand a word he said were as readily persuaded as those who spoke the Frankish tongue.

Roger of Sicily offered to convey the new armies to Palestine in his fleets, urging the hereditary treachery of the Greeks; for, though Alexius had “gone to his own place” below, his grandson Manuel occupied his place at Constantinople. The leaders, however, preferred the perils of the land route to the uncertainties of the deep.

The government of France during the absence of Louis VII. was committed to the hands of Suger, Abbot of St. Denis. A wiser choice could not have been made. He had been the adviser of Louis the Fat, and to his astuteness rather than to that of the king were due the consolidation and development of French autonomy, which made that reign notable. An evidence of Suger’s foresight, as well as of his 169independence and courage, is the fact that he, almost alone of men, opposed the crusading scheme and predicted its fatality. Only at the command of the Pope did Suger assume the guardianship of the kingdom.

Not distrustful of the king, but credulous of the heavenly mission of Bernard, the multitude, including the most noted warriors, called for the monk to become their military leader. Only the intervention of the Holy Father, who declared that it was sufficient for the saint to be the trumpet of Heaven without wielding the sword, allayed the universal demand. Thus at Whitsuntide, 1167, a hundred thousand Frenchmen set out for their rendezvous at Metz. Their monarch bore at their head the sacred banner of St. Denis, an oriflamme under which, at even that early day, the kings of France believed themselves invincible.

But though royally commanded, the army was somewhat a motley array. Troubadours joined the host to relieve the tedium of the camp with their songs of expected triumph. Ladies of the court and soldiers’ wives graced and encumbered the enterprise. One troop of female combatants was commanded by an Amazon, whose gilded boots made her known as “the lady with the legs of gold.” Old men and children were carried along with the baggage. By the side of the saint trudged the libertine and the criminal, whose remorse had been kindled by the preaching of Bernard, and whose search for the remission of sins at Jerusalem was to poorly compensate the dissolute outbursts of their unchanged natures along the way.

170The enthusiasm of the crusaders was not maintained by those who remained at home, since upon them fell the unromantic burden of providing money for the army’s sustenance. The Jews were openly robbed, the Abbot of Cluny declaring it a righteous thing to despoil them of wealth acquired by usury and sacrilege. Monasteries were bled of their long-accumulated treasure. Churches sold their ornaments and mortgaged their lands to supply the enormous demand. Thus the huzzas of the departing were echoed by the suppressed groans of those who were left behind.

The Germans under Conrad III. had preceded the French. Before they reached Constantinople they had more than once to punish with violence the chronic perfidy of the Greeks. The Germans burned the monastery at Adrianople to avenge the assassination of one of their comrades. Beyond the Bosporus Conrad’s soldiers were incessantly picked off and slain by skulking Greeks. The flour they purchased from the merchants of Constantinople they found mixed with lime. The Greek guides were in alliance with the Turks, and led the Christians into ambuscades among the defiles of the Taurus. Conrad himself was twice wounded by treacherous arrows, and his host, reduced to one tenth of its original numbers, was forced to painfully retrace the way to Nicæa.

The French were at first more cordially received by the Greeks than had been their German allies; but they soon learned that the Emperor Manuel was in collusion with the Sultan of Iconium. Louis hardly 171restrained his people from taking vengeance by assaulting the Greek capital, and forced them onward to the relief of the Germans. Conrad did not await their coming, but returned to Constantinople and made temporary fellowship with his betrayer. The French, thus deserted, continued their route alone. The Moslems massed against them on the bank of the Meander, only to be scattered by the fury of the French onset, or, if we may believe some of the spectators, by the appearance of the familiar celestial knight clad in white armor, who headed the Christian army.

Flushed with victory, Louis hastened onward two days’ march beyond Laodicea. Here he divided his force into two bands for the safer passage of a mountain ridge. The vanguard was ordered to encamp upon the heights until joined by their comrades, that they might make descent in full force upon the farther plains. But the impatience of the soldiers in the advance, encouraged by Queen Eleanor, could not brook the cautionary command; they descended the other side of the ridge. The wary Turks quietly took the ground thus unwisely abandoned. The second division of the French, mistaking them for friends, climbed the ascent without regard to orderly array, and were welcomed by a murderous assault. The king barely escaped after witnessing the slaughter of thirty of his chief nobles at his side. Alone upon a rock which he had climbed, he kept his assailants at bay until they, mistaking him for a common soldier, withdrew for some worthier prize. The heavy arms of the Franks were worse than useless against the 172storm of rocks and arrows which the Turks rained upon them, and the morning that dawned after a night of unparalleled terror revealed a miserable remnant of the French force fighting or stealing its way to the vanguard.

Placing the command in the hands of the veteran Gilbert, and Evrard des Barras, Grand Master of the Templars, who had marched from the East to assist the new crusaders, Louis pressed on. Winter fell with unwonted severity upon his ragged and starving retainers. The Greeks held Attalia and refused to allow the Franks to enter that city. At length Louis accepted their offer to transport a portion of his army by sea to Syria. Leaving a large proportion of his camp, the king set sail, and arrived at Antioch in March, 1148. Less than one quarter of his followers met him on the Syrian soil.

The Franks, thus abandoned by their king, had incessantly to fight with the swarming Turks, until human nature succumbed. Their leaders, Archambaud and Thierri, deserted them and followed the king over the sea. Seven thousand essayed to pursue their journey overland, and were massacred, or perished amid the dangers of the way. The old chronicle says, “God alone knows the number of the martyrs whose blood flowed beneath the blade of the Turks and even under the sword of the Greeks.” Three thousand are said to have lost their faith in the protection of Christ and sought the pity of the Moslems by confessing the Prophet.

Raymond of Poitiers was at this time lord and commandant at Antioch, and welcomed the King of 173France with the expectation of receiving his help in the conquest of Aleppo and Cæsarea, but as much, say the chronicles, for the sake of the ladies who accompanied him as for his military aid. Queen Eleanor was Raymond’s niece, and with her suite were several of the most celebrated beauties from the courts of Europe. Their presence promised to make Antioch again the brilliant and voluptuous city it had been of old. When the king proposed to move southward to Jerusalem his queen refused to accompany him. Some secret ambition, or a motive less creditable to her virtue, led her to such disregard for the king that she announced her rejection of her marriage vows, alleging as her reason some newly awakened scruples of conscience on the ground of premarital kinship with Louis. Her husband was compelled to kidnap his wife and carry her by force from the palace to the camp. This estrangement was the beginning of the rupture of relations between the King and Queen of France, that led to his ultimate repudiation of her and to her subsequent marriage with Henry II. of England, by whom she became the mother of Richard Cœur de Lion.

At Jerusalem Louis and Conrad finally met, the latter without soldiers, having reached the city in the disguise of a pilgrim. After paying the proper tribute of devotion at the sacred shrines, the two Western sovereigns, with Baldwin III., King of Jerusalem, and their chief barons, gathered at St. Jean d’Acre to determine upon the coming campaign. The assembly was graced by the presence of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem and many ladies from the courts 174of Europe; but there came neither the Queen of France nor her advisers, Raymond of Antioch and the counts of Edessa and Tripoli.

The conference determined to attempt the capture of Damascus. The Christians quickly invested that place. It was defended on the east and south by high walls, but was more exposed on the north and west. Here the richness of the Syrian oasis burst into a vast garden, watered by crystal streams from the Antilibanus. The extended plain was divided into numerous private possessions by walls of baked earth, between which a dense growth of trees left scarcely more than foot-paths. In spite of the showers of arrows that greeted them at every dividing wall, the Christians steadily made their way. In the front ranks was the young King of Jerusalem, with his redoubtable Knights of St. John and Knights Templars. The King of France pressed next with his braves, eager to redeem by splendid victory the disaster of their coming. The German emperor, with such meagre remnant of his army as he could muster, protected the rear. At the little river which flows beneath the western wall of the city the invaders met their first check. Here Conrad performed the one deed creditable to his career since leaving Germany. With his little band he passed through the forward ranks and fell upon the enemy. The Saracens, seeing that the day was lost if the fight continued general, sent a gigantic warrior to challenge the German hero to single combat. The two armies watched the fight. Conrad unhorsed and slew his antagonist. The Saracens then prepared to abandon their city. Arabic 175chroniclers describe the humiliation of their brethren as they prostrated themselves upon heaps of ashes, and in the great mosque of Damascus sat round Omar’s copy of the Koran, invoking the help of their Prophet.

The Christians, confident of the issue, fell to disputing the sovereignty of the as yet unconquered city. It was awarded to Thierri of Alsace, Count of Flanders. This decision instantly produced jealousy, and all concert of action was at an end. The warriors of Syria hated the Germans and Franks, who had come to eat the fruit of victory as well as to help gather it. At once the assault ceased. The wily Saracen commander, familiar with the divisions in the Christian camp, took advantage of them. He declared that in the event of the siege being pressed he would turn over the city to Nourredin of Mosul, an enemy whose power and daring would make the occupancy of Damascus fatal to the existence of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem. Mussulman writers aver that King Baldwin was also directly bribed by the people of Damascus; Latin writers accuse the Templars of perfidy. It is evident that none of the leaders cared to conquer Damascus if its possession was not to be his portion.

In the dilemma the Syrians advised a change of base. The rage and cupidity of the various parties blinded all to the stupidity of this plan. The army swung round from the gardens they had conquered, and faced the impregnable walls that rose from the desert side. With neither water nor natural protection, they camped in the open, arid plain. At this 176juncture twenty thousand Turkomans and Kurds arrived and joined the defenders. Among the Saracens was Ayoub, the founder of the dynasty of Ayoubites, and with him his son Saladin, afterwards to become the most famous of Moslem leaders, then a lad of thirteen years, who was here to receive his first baptism of blood as he saw his eldest brother slain in a sortie.

The succor received by the enemy led the Christians to raise the siege as ignominiously as they had bravely begun it. Conrad in disgust returned to Germany. Louis remained a year longer, vainly seeking some enterprise in which to brighten his sword. It was not until his barons and knights had deserted him, and his minister, Suger, in the name of the French nation, had urged his return, that in July, 1149, he sailed from St. Jean d’Acre.

Europe felt the shame of the ill-advised second crusade. The discredit fell sorely upon its chief advocate. Bernard was compelled to lead Christendom in the Miserere rather than the Te Deum. “We have fallen on evil days,” he exclaimed, “in which the Lord, provoked by our sins, has judged the world with justice, indeed, but not with His wonted mercy.” The saint seems almost to have lost his faith. “Why,” he cried, “has not God regarded our fasts, and appeared to know nothing of our humiliations? With what patience is He now listening to the sacrilegious and blasphemous voices of the nations of Arabia, who accuse Him of having led His people into the desert that they might perish! All the world knows that the judgments of the Lord are just, but this is so 177profound an abyss that he is happy who has not been disgraced by it.”

The only one who benefited by the movement was Suger, whose repute for wisdom was exalted not only by the fact that he had uttered his warning against the undertaking, but more by the skill with which he had conducted the affairs of the kingdom during the absence of its nominal head. He died not long after the disasters he predicted, leaving France more prosperous than before. Of him it is significantly said that “he served faithfully a young king without losing his friendship.” Foreign visitors to Paris called him the “Solomon of his age.” Louis VII. paid him a filial compliment by naming him the “father of his country.” His friend Bernard soon followed him to the grave, having won the honorable distinction of the “last father of the church.”

The return of the two royal crusaders was not so much of an affliction to the kingdom of Jerusalem as it was felt to be a disgrace to their own nations. Relieved of their rivalry, King Baldwin III. took counsel of his own ambition to avenge the recent disasters. He found himself pitted against the most astute leader the Moslem cause had yet produced. Nourredin had swept like a cyclone over Mesopotamia and northern Syria, had conquered all his competitors, and established his throne at Damascus. Leaving Ayoub, the father of Saladin, as governor, he was pouring his invincible warriors southward.

Nourredin was more than a soldier; he had mastered much of the science of the age, and displayed a statesman’s clemency and justice in administration. As a thorough religionist he held his power in stewardship of his cause and refused all personal emolument from his position. His wife once complained of the trivial value of his gifts to her; he replied, “I have naught else, for all I have I hold only as treasure 179for the faithful.” He treated his soldiers as his children; if any of them fell in battle he made their families his care, anticipating thus the modern system of army pensions.

Baldwin III., undeterred by the greatness of his rival, besieged and captured Ascalon, whose wealth suggested the Arabic title of the “Spouse of Syria” (August 12, 1153). Four years later he assaulted Cæsarea on the Orontes, and would have gained the place but for the outburst of the chronic jealousy among the Christians. In 1159 he obtained for wife Theodora, niece of the Emperor Manuel of Constantinople, and with her munificent dowry the alliance of the Greeks. Manuel appeared in Syria with an enormous army, which, however, accomplished little and withdrew, having been quickly appeased by the shrewdness of Nourredin, or, as some say, having been frightened by news of insurrection in Constantinople.

Nourredin then extended his ravages, avoiding direct encounter with Baldwin, who died February 10, 1163, and is said to have been poisoned by the court physician at Antioch. The magnanimity of Nourredin and his appreciation of the character of young Baldwin were illustrated by his reply to those who urged this as an opportune time for assault upon Jerusalem: “No; we should pity this people’s sorrow, for they have lost a prince whose like is not now left in the world.”

Amaury (Amalric) succeeded his brother, Baldwin III., on the throne. Had his gains equalled his ambition, his power would have dominated far beyond 180any boundaries the Christian sword had as yet set to the kingdom of Jerusalem.

The Moslem world was nominally divided between the Syrian caliph of Bagdad and the Egyptian caliph of Cairo. Egypt was wretchedly governed. The caliph of Cairo was but a creature of his viziers. Amaury, seeing the possibility of extending his domains to the Nile, took arms against him. In 1163 he sent an army which might have held the country, had it not been driven out by the enemy’s flooding the valley of the Nile. One party in Egypt invoked the assistance of Nourredin, who sent as his general Shirkuh the Kurd, uncle of Saladin. Amaury accomplished against him the capture of Pelusium in 1164. In 1167 he took Alexandria, commanded at the time by young Saladin. He later penetrated to Cairo and laid El Fostat in ashes. In 1168 Shirkuh renewed the war. Amaury, marching from Egypt to meet his antagonist in the desert, was flanked by that general, who suddenly occupied the land left undefended. Amaury, who had married a niece of the Emperor Manuel, made with the Greeks an unsuccessful attack upon Damietta. Here the Christians felt the hand of one who was destined ultimately to overthrow all their power in the East. Saladin was in command. On the death of Shirkuh he had been appointed vizier by the caliph of Cairo. The caliph, wearied of being controlled by designing and capable men who absorbed in their own interests the power they defended, selected Saladin, thinking that the young man’s inexperience would be less of a menace to the caliphate.

181Nourredin, however, divined the genius of the young vizier and assigned to him the supreme command in Egypt. He then deposed the caliph, and with his reign brought to an end the dynasty of the Fatimites, which for two hundred years had held the land of the Nile. Thus Nourredin ruled supreme from Babylonia to the desert of Libya. Only the kingdom of Jerusalem marred the map of his dominion. To reconquer this for Islam was his incessant purpose. With his own hands he made a pulpit, from which he promised the faithful one day to preach in the mosque of Omar on the temple site.

But the Moslem world was already attached to one destined to be greater than Nourredin. The youth of Saladin had been one of apparent indolence and dissipation, but he veiled beneath his indifference the finest genius and most unbounded ambition. As soon as he felt the possession of power he assumed a corresponding dignity, and men recognized him as one appointed of Heaven. Turbulent emirs, who had ignored him as a chance holder of position, now sat reverently before him. Even the priests were struck with the sincere austerity of his devotion. The caliph of Bagdad bestowed upon him the distinguished dignity of the vest of honor. Poets began to mingle his name with those of heroes as the rising star. The pious included it in their prayers as the hope of Islam.

Knowing that experience is often wiser than genius, Saladin judiciously guarded himself from the errors of youth by associating his father, Ayoub, with him in the government of Egypt. Nourredin, whose successful career had allowed him no jealousy of ordinary 182men, showed that he was restless at the popularity and ability displayed by his young subaltern, and was preparing to take Egypt under his own immediate government when death, his first vanquisher, came upon the veteran (May, 1174). Saladin immediately proclaimed himself Sultan of Egypt, and hastened to secure the succession of Nourredin’s power as Sultan of Damascus.

Two months later (July, 1174) Amaury followed his great competitor to the grave, and the kingdom of Jerusalem fell to his son, Baldwin IV., a leprous lad of thirteen years. The personal contrast of this sovereign with Saladin was ominous of the contrast between the coming history of the two powers they respectively led. The education of Baldwin was conducted by William of Tyre, the chief historian of this period. The regency of the kingdom was disputed by Milo de Plausy and Raymond, Count of Tripoli. Raymond was great-grandson of Raymond of Toulouse, the renowned leader of the first crusade, and inherited, together with his ancestor’s bravery, his impatience and passion for personal precedence. He deemed that he had a right to the highest emoluments of the kingdom as compensation for having suffered eight years’ imprisonment among the Infidels. Milo was elected regent by the barons, but was shortly afterwards assassinated by unknown hands on the street. Raymond succeeded to the regency. The suspicion of having instigated the murder of his rival was supplemented by a later suspicion that he secretly betrayed the Christian cause in the interest of Saladin. It is not necessary to believe this, as the prowess of 183the new ruler of Egypt is sufficient to account for his successes. Raymond was unwise in his movements; he busied himself with a wretched attempt upon Alexandria, and then made truce with Saladin in the north just at a moment when peace enabled the young Saracen to strengthen his power over his Mohammedan neighbors.

In time Baldwin IV. took the reins into his own hands. Saladin was pouring his forces over the Holy Land. His newly organized troop of Mamelukes formed his body-guard. Baldwin shut himself up in Ascalon, but soon the general devastation of his kingdom maddened the Christians to desperation. They issued from Ascalon with such fury that the Egyptian army was swept from the field and but few of Saladin’s soldiers lived to accompany their young leader back to Cairo.

This defeat, far from depressing the courage of Saladin, only taught him new lessons of caution. Little by little his sword carved away the Christian kingdom, until Baldwin was forced to sign a truce. Renaud, Lord of Carac, broke this compact, and with the aid of an army of Templars plundered the Moslem caravans, massacring defenceless men and capturing the women. He made an incursion as far as Arabia, and announced his purpose of going to Mecca to plunder the tomb of the Prophet. But the swift riders of Saladin were upon his track. Renaud barely escaped, many of his troops being captured. Most of these were put to death in Egypt, a few being reserved as victims in the annual sacrifice at Mecca. Saladin was infuriated by Renaud’s breach 184of faith, and won the title of “Scourge of God,” even among the Christians, by the swift and fearful retaliation which he took upon the cities of northern Palestine.

The increasing leprosy of Baldwin rendered him incapable of discharging his royal duties. A sort of political leprosy or dry-rot seemed to infect the state. The crown retained its shape, but not its lustre, for it could not control the internecine strife of the Christian barons, who waged war upon one another from their mountain fastnesses. The Hospitallers and Templars, too, combined against the priesthood, and hooted and shot at them as they went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The priests retaliated by gathering the arrows and placing them on the Mount of Olives, calling heaven to avenge the insult offered to its ministers. The various nations represented by the influx of pilgrims added to the confusion by reviving in Palestine the prejudices of sections of Europe. Vice everywhere had open license. William of Tyre, in describing the condition of affairs, drops his pen, lest his readers should accuse him of defaming human nature by his recital. Agents were sent to the courts of Europe, appealing for succor to the kingdom, which was falling to pieces in punishment of its own demerits. The piety of Christendom made no response except in pity for a government which they called “Christ’s Second Crown of Thorns.”

Baldwin IV. died in 1185. Baldwin V., a child, had been crowned as his successor two years before. This prince was the child of Sibylla by her first husband, the Marquis of Montferrat. Since the death of 185the marquis she had married Guy of Lusignan. Little King Baldwin died a year later (1186). Sibylla was accused of having poisoned her own child to advance her new husband’s interest. The suspicion was not lessened by her adoption of a disgraceful ruse to gain for Guy the vacant throne. As the daughter of one king of Jerusalem and sister of another, she might have held the sovereignty but for the opposition to Guy, whom she associated with herself in the government. She proposed to the chiefs that she should divorce Guy, saying, “If a divorce takes place between me and my husband, I wish you to make me sure by your oaths that whomsoever I shall make choice of for my husband you will choose for your head and lord.” She then swore that she would award him whom she regarded as the ablest defender of Jerusalem with her hand and crown. This was agreed to. The patriarch solemnly announced her divorce and placed the crown in her hands. Sibylla, to the surprise of all, turned to Guy and, placing the crown upon his head, boldly declared, “I make choice of thee as king and as my lord; for whom God hath joined together let not man put asunder.” The audacity of Sibylla apparently cowed the warriors about her; they acquiesced, and some even applauded the cleverness of her deceit.

In the meantime Saladin had gathered into his hand the reins of Egypt and western Asia. In 1185 the Christians of Palestine sent an appeal for aid to all the courts of Europe. The imminence and magnitude of the danger led them to select the most important dignitaries as their messengers: Heraclius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, together with the Grand Masters of the Hospitallers and Templars. The ambassadors offered the crown of Jerusalem to King Henry II. of England, presenting him with the keys of the Holy Sepulchre and of the tower of David. The appeal of the East was seconded by Pope Lucius, whose letter to Henry shows that Europe dreaded as much as it pretended to despise the new Moslem leader. The letter read: “For Saladin, the most inhuman persecutor, has arisen to such a pitch in his fury that, unless the vehement onset of his wickedness is checked, he may entertain an assured hope that all the Jordan will flow into his mouth, and the land be polluted by his most abominable superstitions, and the country once more be subjected to the accursed dominion of 187the most nefarious tyrant. By the sorrows thus imminent, we entreat your Mightiness with a palpitating heart,” etc. But neither King Henry’s conscience nor his hope of gaining a brighter crown in heaven was sufficient to lure him from projects nearer home.

Saladin quickly verified the Pope’s estimate of his ability. In May, 1187, he overthrew the Templars in a battle at Nazareth. With eighty thousand horse he then invested and crushed Tiberias on Galilee. The citadel of this place alone remained untaken. The Christians massed fifty thousand men on the plain of Hattîn, above the city, for one supreme endeavor. The boldest feared the result. The sight of the wood of the True Cross gave a martyr courage rather than hope of success. Raymond, whose bravery no man questioned, made an address to the assembled barons, counselling retreat. He said: “In this army is the only hope left to the Christians of the East. Here are gathered all the soldiers of Christ, all the defenders of Jerusalem. The archers of Saladin are more skilful than ours, his cavalry more numerous and better trained. Let us abandon Tiberias and save the army.” To lose that battle in the open plain would be, as Raymond foresaw, to lose everything. To retreat might force the enemy to fight against strongholds, when the advantage would be on the Christians’ side.

This discreet counsel of the veteran was derided by the Master of the Templars, who openly taunted Raymond with some secret alliance with Saladin. Raymond rejoined, “I will submit to the punishment of death if these things do not fall out as I have said.” 188The barons were for following the advice of the veteran, but King Guy, after various changes of mind, gave the fatal order for battle.

The day (July 4, 1187) was excessively hot. The Christians, worn out with the march, advanced to the fight, sustained chiefly by the desperation of their resolve. The Mussulmans occupied the vantage-ground on the hills which make the western shore of the Lake of Tiberias, and welcomed their adversaries’ approach with a furious discharge of arrows. Then suddenly, as lightning through a pelting storm, the white turbans and cimeters of the Saracen cavalry, led by Saladin in person, flashed across the field. In the language of the Arabic chronicler: “Then the sons of paradise and the children of fire settled their terrible quarrel. Arrows hurtled in the air like a noisy flight of sparrows, and the blood of warriors dripped upon the ground like rain.”

The True Cross, which had animated the Christians’ courage, was an occasion of their weakness; for, despairing of victory through their own valor, they sought the protection of the emblem of their religion. Saladin said afterwards that the Franks flew round the cross like moths round a light. Again and again the sultan drove his squadrons through the thickest ranks of his opponents, and would that day have sealed the Christians’ fate had not night given recess to the battle. During the darkness the Christians closed their ranks in dense array. The Saracens, having superior numbers, adopted the opposite plan and extended their lines, so that when morning broke they surrounded their antagonists on every side. The 189Christians in vain tried to break the cordon, which was steadily drawing closer and closer, limiting the space within it as one by one the doomed knights fell. The Saracens fired the grass of the plain. Swords flashed through the lurid smoke, and the bravest, whom arms could not daunt, dropped from suffocation. The Templars and Hospitallers maintained the battle all day long, rallying about the cross; but that symbol was ultimately taken. It was being borne by Rufinus, Bishop of Acre, when he fell, pierced with an arrow. Says a contemporary writer: “This was done through the righteous judgment of God; for, contrary to the usage of his predecessors, having greater faith in worldly arms than in heavenly ones, he went forth to battle equipped in a coat of mail.”

Guy was a captive, together with the Master of the Templars and many of the most celebrated knights, who had failed to find death, though they sought it. Raymond cut his way through the line of Saracens, who praised his amazing valor as they witnessed his exploit, while the Christians denounced him for connivance with the foe.

A scene followed which showed the temper of Saladin. The conqueror received King Guy and his surviving nobles in a manner to lessen, if possible, their chagrin for the disaster. He presented to the king a great goblet filled with drink, which had been cooled in the snows from the Lebanons. Having drunk from it, Guy passed the cup to Renaud, the man who had violated the truce in former years. Saladin could be magnanimous to a worthy antagonist. 190So great was his self-command that he observed the most punctilious etiquette even in the rage of a hand-to-hand fight. But to the false and treacherous he could show no mercy. The sight of the truce-breaker fired him with uncontrollable frenzy; he exclaimed, “That traitor shall not drink in my presence.” He gave Renaud the instant choice of death or acceptance of the religion of Mohammed. Renaud refused to subscribe the Koran. Saladin smote him with the side of his sabre, a mark of his contempt. At a signal a common soldier swirled his cimeter, and the head of Renaud fell at King Guy’s feet.

Towards the Templars and Hospitallers the sultan had conceived similar hatred from the conviction that they regarded their covenants with their enemies too lightly. As these knights of the white and the red cross were led past him Saladin remarked, “I will deliver the earth of these two unclean races.” He bade his emirs each slay a knight with his own hand. Neither the defenceless condition of the captives nor the protestation of his warriors against this cruelty produced any compunction in the breast of the resolute conqueror.

Four days later St. Jean d’ Acre fell under Saladin’s assault; but the people were spared and allowed to depart with all their movable property. The churches were converted into mosques, and resounded with prayers and thanksgiving to the Prophet. The yellow flag of Saladin soon floated from the walls of Jericho, Ramleh, Arsuf, Jaffa, and Beirut. Ascalon resisted for a while, in spite of the threats of the conqueror and the entreaty of his prisoner, King Guy, that the 191garrison should not prolong the useless conflict. The defenders of the city refused submission unless the victor should pledge the safety of the women and children and the liberty of the king. Saladin honored their bravery by acceding to these conditions, and Ascalon became his possession (September 4th).

Two weeks later (September 18th) his troops invested Jerusalem. Sending for the principal inhabitants, he said to them: “I, as well as you, acknowledge Jerusalem to be the house of God; I will not defile its sanctity with blood if I can gain it by peace and love. Surrender it by your Whitsuntide, and I will bestow upon you liberty to go where you will, with provisions in plenty and as much land as you can cultivate.” The reply of the Christians was valiant: “We cannot yield the city in which died our God; still less can we sell it to you.” Saladin then swore to avenge the slaughter perpetrated by the Christians upon the Moslems when, under Godfrey, the first crusaders had captured Jerusalem and massacred its inhabitants.

The assault was furious and met with equal valor. Within and without, the walls were fairly buttressed with the bodies of the fallen. It was not until the principal gate was undermined, the ramparts tottering, and the soldiers of Saladin occupying some of the towers, that Balian d’Iselin, the commandant, proposed to accept the conditions the Christians had rejected before the fight. “It is too late,” replied Saladin, pointing to his yellow banners, which proclaimed his occupancy of many places along the walls. “Very well,” replied Balian; “we will destroy the 192city. The mosque of Omar, and the mysterious Stone of Jacob which you worship, shall be pounded into dust. Five thousand Moslems whom we retain shall be killed. We will then slay with our own hands our wives and children, and march out to you with fire and sword. Not one of us will go to paradise until he has sent ten Mussulmans to hell.” Saladin again bowed to the bravery which he might have punished, and accepted the capitulation (October 2, 1187).

The Christian warriors were permitted to retire to Tripoli or Tyre, cities as yet unconquered by Saladin. The inhabitants were to be ransomed at a nominal sum of money for each. Many, however, in their poverty could not produce the required amount. The fact, reported to the victor, led to a deed on his part which showed his natural kindliness, together with the exactness of his rule. The ransom money could not be remitted; it belonged of right to the men whose heroism had been blessed of Allah in taking the city. Saladin and his brother, Malek-Ahdel, paid from their own purses the redemption money for several thousand Christians, who otherwise, according to the usages of war, would have become the slaves of their conquerors.

On the day for the evacuation of the city Saladin erected his throne at the Gate of David to review the wretched army of the vanquished as it passed out. First came the patriarch and priests, carrying the sacred vessels and treasures of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Next followed Queen Sibylla with the remnant of her court. Saladin saluted her with 193great courtesy, and added words of seemingly genuine consolation as he noted her grief. Mothers carried their children, and strong men bore the aged and sick in their arms. Some paused to address the sultan, asking that members of their families from whom they were separated might be restored to them. Saladin instantly ordered that in no case should children be separated from their mothers, nor husbands from their wives. He permitted the Hospitallers to remain in the city on condition of their resuming those duties which their order was originally instituted to perform, and committed to them the care of the sick who could not endure being removed. Many writers are disposed to analyze the motives of Saladin and to attribute his clemency to politic foresight in subduing the hatred as well as the arms of his enemies. But surely the annals of war are too barren of such acts of humanity to allow us to mar the beauty of the simple narration; and the virtues of Christians in such circumstances have not been so resplendent that they may not emulate the spirit of one who was their noblest foe.

The new lord of Jerusalem purged the sacred city of what to him was the taint of idolatry, the worship of Jesus. The mosque of Omar on the temple site was washed within and without with rose-water. The pulpit which Nourredin had made with his own hands was erected by the side of the mihrab, towards which the people prayed as indicating the direction of Mecca. The chief imam preached from it on the glories of Saladin, “the resplendent star of Allah,” on the redemption of Jerusalem, from which Mohammed had 194made his miraculous night journey to Mecca, and on the holy war, which must be continued until “all the branches of impiety should be cut” from the tree of life.

The joy of the Moslem world had its refrain in the wails of Europe. It is said that Pope Urban III., on hearing the news, died of a broken heart. The minstrels composed lamentations as the captives did by the rivers of Babylon. Courts and churches were draped in mourning. The superstitious saw tears fall from the eyes of the wooden and stone saints that ornamented the churches. The general gloom was described by one who felt it as “like the darkness over the earth from the sixth to the ninth hour, when Christ was crucified.”

Forty years had elapsed since the ill-fated crusade of Louis VII. and Conrad (1147) to avenge the capture of Edessa by Zenghi, and the crowning calamity, the fall of Jerusalem into the hands of Saladin (1187). We may briefly note some of the conditions and changes in Europe during this period.

Men were thinking, though the dense darkness of mediæval night yet remained, and the spectres of superstition which inhabited the human mind were as many and as strange as ever. For example, the year 1186 was looked for with alarm by the people of northern Europe, because of the predictions of astrologers that certain conjunctions of the stars then betokened dire evils to mankind. In the language of a contemporary: “The planets being in an aërial and windy sign, ... there shall arise in the East a mighty wind, and with its stormy blasts it shall blacken the air 196and corrupt it with poisonous stench.... The wind shall raise aloft the sands and dust from the face of the earth, and utterly overwhelm such cities as Mecca, Baldac [Bagdad], and Babylon. The regions of Egypt and Ethiopia shall become almost uninhabitable. In the West shall arise dissensions, raised by the wind, and seditions of the people shall take place; and there shall be one of them who shall levy armies innumerable, and shall wage war on the shores of the waters, on which a slaughter so vast will take place that the flow of blood will equal the surging waves. This conjunction signifies the mutation of kingdoms, the superiority of the Franks, the destruction of the Saracenic race, together with longer life to those who shall be born hereafter.”

Other astrologers blew their star-blasts of similar warning. More startling still were the reported words of a pious monk, which he chanted while in a trance, confirming the astrologers with rhapsodic quotations from Scripture and the Greek mythologists. The popular consternation was somewhat allayed by Pharamella the Moor, whose humanity was stronger than his religious bigotry, and led him to write to the Christian Bishop of Toledo, from the tower on which he was watching the stars, that their prognostications of the “aërial or windy signs” were wrong; but that there would be sufficient force of evil abroad in the atmosphere to produce “scanty vintage, crops of only moderate average, much slaughter by the sword, and many shipwrecks.” The most serious chroniclers of the time still associated as effect and cause the rise and fall of kings and the issue of battles with natural 197phenomena of comets, eclipses, and storms. Epidemic madness continued to see celestial warriors through the dust of earthly combat, and the ubiquitous presence of the mother of God in churches and cells, in the silence of the roadway, and, in company with Mary Magdalene, trudging along amid bands of pilgrims. Men visited purgatory and returned to describe its burning floor and the writhing shapes of its inhabitants. Indeed, the human mind was not yet sufficiently awake to know that it had been dreaming.

Yet here and there were those who threw off the age delusion. The logic of Abélard and the love of liberty voiced by Arnold of Brescia roused more than one of the sleepers, who kept awake and jostled their fellows.

Thus the sect of the Waldenses foretokened the rise of modern Protestantism. Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Lyons, was afflicted with the rigors of ecclesiastical rule, which robbed more than it protected the people, and with the dogmatic traditions of the church, which were being manipulated as strangling strings about the mind. He threw off these restraints; he devoted his large fortune to the relief of the poor and organized a brotherhood of kindred spirits, who took the name of the Poor Men of Lyons. There had as yet been no attempt to teach the masses the simple religion of Jesus as contained in the Scriptures, Jerome’s Latin Bible of the fourth century being the only translation in use. Waldo secured a rendering of the four Gospels into French. The reading of this by the people led them to dissent from the assumptions of the Roman Church, to question 198its sacraments, and to deny to the priesthood the sole prerogative of preaching and administering religion. Waldo and his followers claimed liberty to expound the Word of God according to its own rules, and to interpret its precepts in the light of reason and prayer-illuminated conscience.

The Waldenses were at once proceeded against by the Bishop of Lyons as heretics and rebels. His judgment was confirmed by the anathemas of the papal see. Waldo and his friends fled to the mountains of Piedmont and Dauphine. In 1179 the new doctrines were denounced by the Third Lateran Council. Waldo died the same year, having lived long enough to anticipate in his own person the persecutions which were to make his sect forever famous among martyrs.

The history of the Papacy during this period was humiliating. Popes and antipopes strove for the seat of St. Peter. The hierarchy invoked the aid of the Emperor of Germany, Frederick Barbarossa, to overturn the republic of Rome, which Arnold of Brescia had inspired. That leader atoned for his audacity by being hanged and burned. Barbarossa was, however, equally determined that the secular power of the popes should not be rebuilt upon the ruins of Roman independence. Italy was laid waste by the armies of the empire, until the centre of Christendom was disgraced by scenes as cruel as those which marked the contention of Christian and Turk in the East.

France was scarcely less unfortunate. Louis VII., shortly after his return from Palestine, divorced his queen, Eleanor, who became the wife of Henry of 199Anjou, afterwards Henry II. of England, and added to the possession of England the territories of Aquitaine and Poitou, leaving to the French monarchy less than half of what had been, and was again to be, the land of France. Guizot remarks: “This was the only event under Louis’s reign of any real importance, in view of its long and bloody consequences to his country. A petty war or a sullen strife between the kings of France and England, petty quarrels of Louis with some of the great lords of his kingdom, some vigorous measures against certain districts, the first bubblings of that religious fermentation which resulted before long, in the south of France, in the crusade against the Albigensians—such were the facts which went to make up with somewhat of insipidity the annals of this reign.” Kingship, on the death of the Abbé Suger, Louis’s prime minister, steadily declined, until Philip Augustus opened for it a new era of strength and progress. Philip had been seven years on the throne (from 1080) at the time of the capture of Jerusalem.

England at the beginning of this period was distressed with the war between King Stephen and Matilda. Churches were converted into fortifications, and castles into prisons. For nineteen years the country was so ravaged by the contending parties that, in the language of the contemporary chronicler, “to till the ground was to plough the sea,” and brave men, “sickened with the unnatural war, put on the white cross and sailed for a nobler battle-field in the East.” With the son of Matilda, Henry II., the dynasty of the Angevins, or Plantagenets, was established. 200Inheriting Normandy from his mother, and acquiring by his marriage with Eleanor her estates, at the age of twenty-one Henry II. ruled from the Arctic Ocean to the Pyrenees. “Though a foreigner, never speaking the English tongue, he seems to have possessed something of the spirit which produced the subsequent Anglican civilization. He abolished feudalism as a system of government, and left it little more than a system of land tenure. It was he who defined the relations established between church and state, and declared that in England churchman as well as baron was to be held under the common law” (Norgate). Though his quarrel with and murder of Thomas à Becket left in suspension the Constitutions of Clarendon, which gave the kingship preëminence over the hierarchy, the principles of that document were soon revived. Henry II. admitted no papal legate into England without an oath not to interfere with any royal prerogative. Though he repented the death of Becket, he forced the monks of Canterbury to elect a successor of his own nomination.

Perhaps the most important progress of Henry II.’s reign was marked by the Assizes of Clarendon (1166), which gave to England the beginning of trial by jury. A grand jury of twelve men was to hear all accusations, and only on sufficient evidence allow further procedure, although the final trial of a case was, until 1216, allowed to proceed according to the laws of Ordeal and Combat. Circuit judges were also appointed, subject only to the king and his council as a court of appeal.

In 1155 Ireland was given over to the conquest of 201Henry by Pope Hadrian for one penny a house, to be paid into the papal treasury; for, said the Holy Father, “all the islands on which Christ, the Sun of justice, has shone belong to the see of St. Peter.” Henry’s victory over William of Scotland also gave him the ascendency in that kingdom. Thus was woven the substance of the band which now holds together Great Britain.

The reign of Henry II. was brought to a close in personal disaster. At Le Mans in France he was beaten in battle by his son Richard, who, in conjunction with King Philip Augustus, had raised an unfilial hand against his father. Henry died, cursing God and muttering, “Shame! shame on a conquered king!”

Richard I. (Cœur de Lion) may be said to have been badly born (September 8, 1157). His father, Henry II., though astute in kingcraft, was among the most disreputable of monarchs in personal character. St. Bernard said of Henry, “He comes of the devil, and to the devil he shall return.” His remorse for the murder of Becket, which seems to have been genuine, did not restrain him from spending his later years as a notorious libertine, polluting every innocent thing about him with his lecherous touch. Even childhood was not safe from his lust. It is typical of the man and the times that Geoffrey, for whom the king secured the bishopric of Lincoln, was his own natural son by Rosamond, his concubine.

Richard’s mother, Eleanor, was perhaps of as unwholesome a sort as his father. She never blushed except at the failure of some intrigue which in our 202later age is regarded as shameful to her sex. Her first royal husband, Louis VII. of France, though fascinated by her beauty, could not abide her infidelities, and put her away. If the chronicle be true, she avenged the marital sins of Henry II. by slaying with her own hand his mistress, Rosamond.

Richard thus inherited much of the disposition which marred his many nobler traits. Guizot’s portrait of him is fair: “Beyond comparison the boldest, the most unreflecting, the most passionate, the most ruffianly, the most heroic adventurer of the middle ages.” The first suggestion of his title, “Lion-hearted,” is perhaps in the pages of Roger de Wendover (died 1237), who, describing the ravages Richard committed in France, says: “He invaded the territory with more than a lion’s fury, carried off the produce, cut down the vines, burned the villages, and demolished everything.” His first act upon coming to power was to release his mother, Eleanor, from the twelve years’ imprisonment she suffered at the hands of her husband, Henry II. Then was remembered, and applied to her and to Richard, a prediction of Merlin, the “Wizard of the North,” in the fifth century: “The eagle of the broken treaty shall rejoice in her third nestling.” Roger de Wendover thus interpreted the hitherto enigmatic words: “The queen [Eleanor] is meant by the eagle, because she stretches out her two wings over two kingdoms, France and England. She was separated from the king of the French by divorce on account of consanguinity, and from the king of the English by suspicion and imprisonment; and so she 203was on both sides the eagle of a broken treaty. ‘She shall rejoice in her third nestling’ may be understood in this way: the queen’s first-born son, named William, died when he was a boy; Henry, her second son, was raised to the rank of king, and paid the debt of nature after he had engaged in hostilities with his father; and Richard, her third son, who is denoted by the ‘third nestling,’ was a source of joy to his mother.”

Richard was crowned September 11, 1189. Wendover, who may have witnessed it, describes the coronation service. Richard was conducted to Westminster in solemn procession, headed by ecclesiastics bearing the cross, holy water, and censers; four barons carried candlesticks with wax candles, two earls holding aloft two sceptres, one surmounted with a golden cross, the other with a dove; three earls followed, carrying three swords with golden sheaths; six earls and barons carried a checker, over which were placed the royal arms and robes, while a seventh held aloft a golden crown. Richard swore upon the Gospels his kingly devotion, pledging to observe peace, honor, and reverence towards God and the holy church, and to exercise true justice to all his people. “After this they stripped him of all his clothes except his breeches and shirt, which had been ripped apart over his shoulders to receive the unction. He was then shod with sandals interwoven with gold thread, and Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, anointed him king in three places, namely, on his head, his shoulders, and his right arm, using prayers composed for the occasion. 204Then a consecrated linen cloth was placed on his head, over which was put a hat, and when they had again clothed him in his royal robes, with the tunic and gown, the archbishop gave into his hands a sword wherewith to crush all the enemies of the church.... Then they placed the crown upon his head, with the sceptre in his right hand and the royal wand in his left.” Preceded by candles and cross, he went to the celebration of mass; thence “to the dinner-table, and feasted splendidly, so that the wine flowed along the pavement and walls of the palace.”

A very different scene, though not less characteristic of the age, took place beyond the palace. Richard had issued an edict forbidding any Jew to appear at his coronation. Some of the wealthiest Hebrews, presuming upon the splendid gifts they brought, approached the dining-hall. The populace, willingly interpreting the king’s mandate as a license for persecution, set upon the Jews, not only at the palace gate, but throughout the city. They murdered them without stint and looted their houses. The king, essaying an investigation, found that the chief dignitaries and citizens were leaders of the mob, and stayed further inquiry. Other cities emulated the cruelty and greed of the Londoners. At York five hundred Jews, who had fled for safety to the castle, unable to defend themselves, slaughtered their own wives and children to save them from worse fate, threw the dead bodies to the Christians without the walls, and then set fire to their refuge, perishing in the flames. The people to whom the Jew’s had loaned money, the bonds of which were kept in the cathedral, 205seized these evidences of debt and burned them in pious offering before the altar.

The chief interest of Richard, even surpassing the care of his throne, was to fulfil the vow he had taken two years before (1187) to join a new crusade against the Infidels in Palestine.

CHAPTER XXVIII.
WILLIAM OF TYRE—BARBAROSSA.

With the news of the fall of Jerusalem came William, Archbishop of Tyre (the chief chronicler for this time), to stir up Europe to avenge the great disaster. This man possessed powers of speech equal to those of his pen. He appeared before an assembly near Gisors, where were gathered the bravest knights of England and France under their respective kings, Henry II. and Philip Augustus. These monarchs had laid aside the arms they were bearing against each other, that they might hear the appeal to holier warfare. The presence of such royalty did not restrain the fiery and indignant eloquence of William of Tyre. He cried, “To meet you here I have traversed fields of carnage. But whose blood have you been shedding? Why are you armed with these swords? You are fighting here for the banks of a river, for the limit of a province, for transient renown, 207while Infidels trample the banks of Siloam. Does your Europe no longer produce warriors like Godfrey and Tancred?” Even the blood of Henry II., poisoned as it was with many sins, felt the ardor of the appeal. He embraced his foe, Philip Augustus, with tears, while they together put on the badge of the cross. Princes and nobles followed the royal example, foremost among them Richard, then Duke of Guienne. Upon those who did not enlist was imposed a tax of one tenth of the value of their property, to be annually continued in a tenth of their incomes. This, in attestation of the terror inspired by the arms of the Saracen, was called “Saladin’s tithe.” The appeals of William of Tyre were supported by the pastoral letters of Pope Gregory VIII., which promised to all who should “undertake the labor of this expedition ... plenary indulgence for their offences and eternal life; ... and no person is to make any claim against the property of which, on assuming the cross, they were in quiet possession; ... they are not to pay interest to any person if they have so bound themselves.” The Pope further ordered a Lenten fast on every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, to appease the wrath of Heaven for sins, adding that the papal household would also abstain from flesh on Mondays.

The entire ritual of worship became infected with militarism and fear of the common enemy beyond the sea. In 1188 the Pope ordained that prayer against the Saracens should be offered everywhere daily. In the Church of St. Paul a recognition of the distressful condition was introduced into the liturgy. On 208Sundays there was read the psalm beginning, “Why do the heathen rage?” On Mondays, “Save us, O God, by Thy name.” On Tuesdays, “O God, why hast Thou forsaken us?” On Wednesdays, “O God, why hast Thou cast us off forever?” On Thursdays, “O God, the heathen are come into Thine inheritance.” On Fridays, “God standeth in the congregation of the mighty.” On Saturdays, “O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth, show Thyself.”

The peace between Henry II. and Philip Augustus made under the crusader enthusiasm, like other sudden excitements of religious emotion, did not long continue. A believer in the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints would hardly expect to find its proof in the house of Anjou, save by its exceptions. The recklessness of Richard again embroiled his father and the French king in war. An attempt to restore the truce on the same “sacred field” of Gisors where it had been solemnly enacted failed, and Philip Augustus cut down the elm-tree under which they had sworn it, that nature might not taunt them with their perjury. Saladin’s tithe was first devoted not against the Infidels, but to the infidelity of Christians in warring with one another, and was ominous of much of the subsequent use of that treasure. Rome excommunicated Richard, who drew his sword upon the papal legate that announced to him the decree. Philip as quickly repelled the interference of the spiritual power with what he deemed the more sacred right of conducting his own quarrels. It required the opportune intervention of a thunder-storm to shake the worldly purpose of Henry II., who, in genuine 209terror at the voice of heaven, at length agreed to peace.

In the meanwhile William of Tyre had electrified Germany with his appeals. The old emperor, Frederick I., took the cross, together with many of his chief nobles, including his son, Frederick, Duke of Swabia.

Frederick I., called Barbarossa by his Italian enemies because of his red beard, was the most astute statesman, the most experienced general, and the most powerful of the crowned heads of Europe during the twelfth century. He had been thirty-seven years on the throne of Germany. Though not altogether successful in his strifes with the popes, he had been able to consolidate his empire and extend its prestige. Now, at sixty-seven years of age, the peace of his dominion offered him the most envied imperial honors and the quiet ending of his days; but his heroic soul forgot the fatigue of age; he spurned the enjoyments of his palace when he heard the call for new adventures. He was the first en route for Palestine; indeed, had completed his ill-fated expedition before the younger princes of the West were afield.

The array of Frederick reflected the dignity of its commander. It was under careful, even stringent discipline; camp followers were unwelcome; no women were allowed in the expedition. This was a grievance to many of the fair sex, whose love would have led them to accompany their husbands, or whose adventurous instinct prompted them to put on armor; but the order rid the army of the throng of immoral 210creatures who were accustomed to attach themselves to the crusading masses. The usual crowd of paupers who became soldiers only to better their condition, and bands of pilgrims who sought safe convoy to the sacred shrines, were ordered out of the ranks, only those being allowed to start who showed possession of sufficient money to maintain themselves for two years.

In true chivalric spirit, the veteran warrior of the West sent to Saladin his royal challenge before proceeding to battle. His letter was true to the times also in that it showed the customary bravado of the knight, entering the lists with self-laudation, and hurling scorn at the visor of his antagonist. “We, Frederick, by the grace of God, Emperor of the Romans, ever August, the Magnificent Triumpher over the enemies of the empire, to the Illustrious Saladin, Governor of the Saracens.... Thou hast profaned the Holy Land, over which we, by the authority of the eternal King, bear rule.... God willing, you shall learn by experience the might of our victorious eagles.” Then Frederick lists the nations in his following: “The towering Bavarian, the cunning Swabian, the cautious Franconian, Saxony that sports with the sword, the active Brabantine, the Lorrainer, unused to peace, the fiery Burgundian, the nimble mountaineer of the Alps, the Friesian, with his javelin and thong, the Bohemian, ever ready to brave death, Polonia, fiercer than her own fierce beasts,” etc. “And, lastly, also, you shall be taught how our own right hand, which you suppose to be enfeebled by old age, can still wield the sword.”

211Saladin, in turn, outdid his challenger in courtesy if not in bravado. “To the Great King, his sincere friend, the Illustrious Frederick, ... in the name of God the merciful.... You enumerate those who are leagued with you, but if we wished to enumerate those with us, the list could not be reduced to writing. With us are the Bedouins, alone sufficient to cope with you; the Turkomans, unaided able to destroy you; our peasants, able to despoil and exterminate you; the warlike Soldarii, by whom we have already beaten you. These and all the kings of Islam are with me; Babylon, with its dependencies, the land of Damascus, and Jerusalem on the sea-coast, ... and the land of Sudia, with its provinces. If you wish for war, we will meet you in the power of the Lord; but if you wish for peace, we will restore to you the holy cross, and liberate all Christian captives, and permit pilgrims to come freely and do them good. And may Allah give us counsel!” A rumor was current, based, doubtless, upon the clemency of Saladin to the Christians, that he was himself contemplating conversion to the faith of Europe. His letter to Frederick was its sufficient refutation, even without its closing invocation, “May God save our Prophet, Mohammed!” He emulates the conceit of his antagonist by signing himself, possibly with a touch of sarcasm, “Saladin, Illustrious Lord, Victorious King, Adorner of the standard of truth, Corrector of the world,” etc.

This seeming bombast was not peculiar to these potentates. The Greek emperor, Isaac Angelus, styled himself “The Most Sublime, Most Powerful 212Emperor, the Angel of the whole earth.” Isaac, however, possessed no personal qualities worthy of commendation. He inherited, together with the conceit, the cowardice and treachery of the whole line of Greek monarchs. He wrote to Frederick, promising aid, and at the same time made alliance with Saladin. Nicetas, the Greek historian of this period, admits against his nation that Isaac broke the treaties, impeded the roads, and diverted provisions from his German allies. At Adrianople he laid ambush for their scouts. The veteran Frederick, incensed at this treatment, made a bloody retaliation upon a detachment of Greeks. This brought Isaac to terms. His friendship was measured by a flotilla of fifteen hundred ships and twenty-six galleys, which he prepared for the speedy transportation of the Germans beyond the Marmora and out of menacing distance of his capital.

Kilidge-Arslan had sent fifty Moslem knights to meet Frederick on the way, and to pledge his friendship, but when the army reached Iconium it was discovered that this had been only a device to delay the emperor. Frederick taught the Moslems that he was in no mood to be trifled with, by suddenly assaulting and capturing the city. Pressing onward, the Germans had daily to meet the guerilla attacks of the Infidels. Their provisions were destroyed as fast as gathered. Water was scarce, only the stagnant pools in fever-impregnated marshes affording palliation to thirst. The soldiers at times killed their horses and drank their blood. Yet the discipline was strictly maintained. No crime went unpunished. It was evident 213that a stronger hand was guiding the crusaders than had before been felt. The Armenian patriarch wrote to his friend Saladin, warning him of the extraordinary type of man with whom he had to deal. Christian and Turk awaited the issue of the campaign with respective hope and solicitude.

In spite of all obstacles, the Germans made a triumphant march almost to the borders of Syria. The pure water of the river Selef, which flows by the walls of Seleucia, tempted the conqueror to bathe. Seized with cramps, he was carried away by the hurrying current. At length he was dragged from the water, but was in dying condition. Tradition says that on a rock near this spot was carved this prediction: “Hic hominum maximus peribit.” If the omen be fabulous, the description is correct, for Frederick Barbarossa remains in history as one of the “greatest of men.” William of Tyre, in his eulogy, translates his spirit to heaven, while the Arabian historian, Omad, tells us with equal confidence that the angel of death carried his soul to hell.

The German host, now led by the feebler hand of his son, Frederick of Swabia, succeeded in reaching Antioch with less than seven hundred horse and five thousand foot, a retinue scarcely sufficient to do honor to the remains of the grand old hero, which they there buried in the Church of St. Peter.

In June, 1190, the English and French made preparation to follow their unfortunate forerunner. It was not, however, until a year later that they arrived in Palestine.

The movements of Saladin, in the meanwhile, engrossed 214the fears of the Christian world. After capturing Jerusalem he attacked Tyre. The bravery of the defence was supplemented by the timely arrival of Conrad, whose father, the Marquis of Montferrat, Saladin held prisoner. Conrad had already made his name famous for valor. For his assistance of the Greek emperor against seditions in Constantinople he had won the title of Cæsar and the hand of the emperor’s sister. Saladin endeavored to divert him by threatening to kill his father unless he relinquished the defence of Tyre. Conrad’s reply was noteworthy: “The life of my father is less dear to me and to him than the cause we both serve.” Saladin was forced to give up the siege. He turned against Tripoli. Aided by Admiral Margarit, whom the King of Sicily had sent with a fleet and who had won the titles of “King of the Sea” and the “New Neptune,” the Tripolitans successfully resisted. Saladin then assailed Carac, which was forced to yield to the Moslem chief. He granted its defenders their liberty, and restored to them their wives and children, whom, in an hour of deathly fear, they had sold as slaves to Saladin rather than see them the victims of such ravages as usually followed the capture by the common soldiery. King Guy of Jerusalem had been released from imprisonment by Saladin on condition that he would leave Palestine and return to Europe. Guy paid no respect to his oath, but, gathering the loyal remnant of his kingdom, laid siege to Ptolemaïs (Acre), there inaugurating a contest which, for its duration and the fame of the great chieftains engaged in it, was the most noted in the sad annals of the third crusade.

The plain of Acre is surrounded by great natural defences. On the north is Mount Saron, the narrow pathway over which is called the “Ladder of Tyre”; on the south rises the bulwark of Mount Carmel, touching the sea; on the east lie the mountains of Galilee; on the west the plain is washed by the Mediterranean. Within this seemingly impregnable district lay the strongly fortified city of Acre. Its port rivalled those of Tyre, Sidon, and Jaffa. High walls, guarded by deep moats, bent in shape of a horseshoe from the crags on the north to a fortress on the south, which rose from a rock in the waves. With the water front these enclosed the place.

Into the plain beyond the wall Guy collected nine thousand men. The rapid arrivals from Europe augmented this force to eighty thousand, even before the kings of England and France had started from home. The Infidels already occupied the city, and when Saladin seized the mountains about, the besiegers were themselves besieged. By a sudden dash Saladin penetrated their hosts, entered Acre, and 216reconnoitred the Christian armies from the towers. Conrad hastened from Tyre; two fleets brought new bands of German and Danish crusaders. The Christians gave battle, and drove the Moslems from the field with such slaughter that Saladin was left almost alone amid the wreck of his forces. But he quickly recuperated his strength, and a few days later returned the assault. No fury of fight could blind the eyes of this commander. Ten times he cut through the Christian lines, leading in person his swift riders. By night the crusaders were driven back and huddled impotently in their camps. The morrow revealed the plain strewn with the débris of both armies.

Though Saladin had fully avenged his first discomfiture, he had learned more of the sharpness of the Christians’ swords, and was too wise to risk another immediate engagement. He therefore withdrew to his fastnesses in the rear of the Christian encampment. During the entire winter (1189-90) the Christians were unmolested, and prosecuted the siege unremittingly. More than once the city barely escaped becoming the prize of the Christians’ daring or stratagem.

In the spring (1190) Saladin returned. Every attack made upon Acre by the crusaders was foiled by a counter-attack by the Moslems upon their rear. Egypt sent ships to succor the city, and Europe sent ships to succor its soldiers. Masts bearing the cross and those flying the pennant of its adversaries seemed at times to be mingled in confusion over the bay. The Moslem and Christian armies often manned their fortifications and stood as spectators of naval duels, where 217they were impotent to help their coreligionists. The enthusiasm of the observers, not having sufficient expression in shouts and cheers, often found vent in supplementary fights in the field. In the battles which raged on land the Christians were ordinarily victors during the morning, the Saracens in the latter part of the day. This was due, doubtless, to the fact that the discipline of Saladin’s men was superior, and that the self-command of their great general patiently waited for the first ardor of the crusaders to spend itself, or for their cupidity to divert their attention from the foe to the plunder which they had already taken.

Saladin’s forces had been weakened at the time by the ravages of Frederick Barbarossa in Asia Minor, which we have described, and which drew off many of the Moslem leaders to defend their own possessions in that quarter. The Christians took advantage of this to give the foe what they hoped to be a decisive engagement. Their impetuosity could not be resisted; they broke through even to the tent of Saladin. As usual, they paused for the prey, and received the usual punishment for their greed. Off guard, they were massacred by thousands, even amid the camps they were looting. An Arabian writer says: “The Christians fell under the swords of the conquerors as the wicked will fall into the abode of fire at the last day. Nine ranks of dead covered the ground, and each rank was of a thousand warriors.”

The besieged in Acre sallied forth and gave the Christians a double defeat. Then came the news of Frederick Barbarossa’s death. In the deep depression 218wrought by these tidings, a treaty of peace with Saladin would doubtless have been at once concluded, had not the Christians’ spirit been raised by the timely arrival of European fleets. Frederick of Swabia’s appearance with the remnant of his father’s army was signalled by new adventures, only to be met with new failures. The Christians, having no support from the surrounding country, were reduced almost to starvation, feeding upon horses and making soup of their harness. The plain, inundated by the overflowing river, bred epidemic, which carried away multitudes, three or four hundred being buried daily. Frederick of Swabia, the heir of the German throne, sickened and passed away, and many of his men returned to the West.

Queen Sibylla of Jerusalem also died at this juncture, and the Christians were divided into the hostile camps of those who were seeking to possess themselves of the shadows of the kingship. Humphrey had married Sibylla’s sister, and put forth his claim to the throne. Conrad gained the favor of the bishop, who forcibly dissolved Humphrey’s marriage and gave his wife to Conrad, though that worthy had already a spouse, the sister of the Greek emperor. King Guy, however, maintained his own rights to the empty sceptre. A civil war, which would surely have brought the Christian cause to ruin, was diverted only by the expected arrival of the kings of England and France, to whom it was agreed that the dispute should be referred.

Richard I. was crowned King of England in September, 1189. In October there arrived in England a messenger from Philip of France, reminding the king of their mutual oaths to make the crusade. The adventurous spirit of Richard did not need this appeal. He drained the resources of his realm in gathering means. All the money left him by his father, Henry II., was first appropriated. He then sold the manors and prospective income of the crown. Next the chief offices of honor and responsibility went to the highest bidder who had ready cash. Thus Hugh de Puzas, Bishop of Durham, became chief justice of England for a thousand marks. Having abundant soldiery at his command, Richard then allowed any one to purchase the privilege of staying at home; he even declared that he would sell the City of London for a reasonable price. The vassalage of Scotland went for a thousand marks, together with the fortresses of Roxburgh and Berwick. When he had nothing more to sell he forced his 220richer subjects to make him loans, which they knew he never would repay. A plain-spoken preacher advised him, before he set out on an expedition in the name of religion, to dispose of some of his notorious vices, naming especially his pride, avarice, and voluptuousness. Richard replied, “You counsel well, and I hereby dispose of the first to the Templars, of the second to the Benedictine monks, and of the third to my prelates.”

Consigning the administration of England to Hugh, Bishop of Durham, and an unsavory Frenchman, Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, he left England, accompanied by a turbulent crowd of adventurers. He made his rendezvous with the French king at Vezelay (June, 1190). Here the monarchs swore fraternity and to sacredly respect each other’s domains during the crusade. They invoked upon themselves the curses of Heaven and the church if they should prove unfaithful. The joint armies numbered a hundred thousand men. Warned by the reverses experienced by their predecessors in crusading overland, they chose the sea route to Palestine.

Philip sailed from Genoa for Sicily. He entered the port of Messina, September 16, 1190. Richard sailed from Marseilles, hugging the Italian coast, according to the sea travel of the day, visiting port towns en route, and paying worship at the shrines of the various local saints. He reached Messina a few days later than Philip (September 23d).

The main English fleet, leaving England and Normandy, had gone southward along the coast of France and Spain. The lands they passed in sight of were 221strange to the navigators, so little was known of the geography of even the countries of Europe. At Lisbon they could not resist the temptation to help the Portuguese Christians in a war with the Saracens, nor of indulging a less laudable sort of prowess, which Hovenden describes: “Disembarking from their ships, they made their way into the city, and as they went through streets and lanes talked to the people, giving themselves airs and committing violence upon the wives and daughters of the citizens; they drove away pagans and Jews, plundered their property, and burned their houses. They then stripped their vineyards, leaving them not so much as a grape.” This faithful chronicler also narrates that during a storm at sea St. Thomas à Becket appeared to them and calmed the waves. “They passed the city of Silva(?), which was the most remote of all the cities of Christendom.” At Marseilles they missed King Richard, who already had departed; but they were compensated for their disappointment in being enabled to worship the identical “rods with which our Lord was scourged, the jaw-bone of Lazarus, and one of the ribs of Lawrence.” Approaching Sicily, they saw the marvellous fish of St. Agatha, the story of which they believed: how that the heat of the volcano of Mount Gebel (Stromboli?) once threatened the town of Catana; but the people took the veil of St. Agatha from her tomb, “carried it before them, facing the fire, on which the flames returned to the sea and, parching it, dried it up for nearly a mile, and scorched the fish, many of which were half burned; and there are 222to this day many fish there of the same kind.” But the marvels of that voyage are too many for our pages, if not for the credulity of the reader.

Richard himself remained six months in Marseilles, a delay that nearly caused the destruction of his enterprise. A quarrel was started with Tancred, ruler of Sicily, about certain rights of Richard’s sister Joanna, who was the widow of Tancred’s predecessor. Says the chronicler: “Quicker than priest could chant matins did King Richard take the city.” Philip resented Richard’s audacity and forced him to take down his standard. Richard had once solicited and gained from Philip the hand of the French princess Alice; but, his advantage now blowing from another direction, he preferred Berengaria, a princess of Navarre. Berengaria, through the connivance of Eleanor, was brought to Messina. Only at the entreaty of utmost piety and discretion could Philip be persuaded to lay aside his rage at this new insult. He sailed at once for the East.

Richard followed eleven days later (April, 1191), taking with him Berengaria and Joanna, ex-Queen of Sicily. Three ships of the English fleet were wrecked on Cyprus, and their crews imprisoned by the inhabitants. Isaac, the king of the island, refused to redress the wrong. Richard administered swift punishment. Within three weeks he conquered the entire country, and, binding its ruler in a chain of silver, took him along on an involuntary pilgrimage to Palestine. Richard had celebrated his prowess at Cyprus by his nuptials with Berengaria. The new queen took with her as companion the daughter of 223Isaac, whose constant presence is said to have disturbed the already uncertain marital habits of her husband.

The French welcomed the arrival of their English allies with great bonfires, which were designed to proclaim the joy of the Christians and to flash dismay to the Moslem camps. The plain of Acre was soon filled with the tents of a host which represented the strength of combined Europe. Peoples strange to one another in speech, manners, and arms were one only in their cause. It is not to be wondered at if, at times, these races more sharply accentuated their differences than their unity. The contention between Guy and Conrad for the kingship of Jerusalem, which was referred to Philip and Richard for settlement, only gave opportunity for renewed hostility between these monarchs, Philip declaring for Conrad, and Richard for Guy. The matter was finally settled by agreement that Guy should reign and that Conrad should be his successor.

The jealousy of French and English prevented mutual help in the battles daily occurring, wherefore it was agreed that but one army should fight at a time against the walls of Acre, while the other should guard against a rear attack by Saladin. Thus the honors were easy, as the tasks assigned were equally hazardous. The courtesies of the camp were more readily extended to their enemy than to one another. Saladin, during the sickness of both sovereigns, sent to them his own physicians, and such luxuries as the East provided. While they received these from their foe without suspicion, Philip and Richard each attributed 224his sickness to the poisoning of the other, and each accused his Christian associate with using Saladin’s favors with a view to treasonable alliance.

Often tournaments were arranged between Moslem and Christian in the sight of both armies. Knight and emir entered the lists, abusing each other with their tongues like twin Thersiteses, then fighting with the valor of Hector and Achilles. Women did not disdain rivalry for the palm in swordcraft, and bands of children from either side fought to the death in the presence of their parents. The Infidel played for the dance of the Christian, and the minstrel of Europe gave the rhythm to the feet of the Saracen. The table of Saladin was sometimes graced by the presence of the foremost European knights, and in turn emirs feasted at the board of those whom they most dreaded to meet on the field. Saladin so respected the courtesy and devotion of the true Christian knight that he willingly wore the decoration of Chivalry, while Richard rode into battle one of the two splendid steeds which were the gift of the sultan’s brother. The lowest vices of the East and the West became the open indulgence of the camps of both. But each party maintained the utmost outward reverence to the symbols of his own religion; Saladin pausing in the midst of battle to read a chapter of the Koran, and the King of Jerusalem advancing to fight with the Gospels borne aloft before him.

The besieged in Acre were reduced to extremities, the Christians completely investing the city on the land side in spite of the forays of Saladin from the hills, and their fleets cutting off all succor from the 225sea. At length, after two years of incessant fighting, during which nine great battles were fought, the standard of the cross was seen floating from the ramparts of the city (July 12, 1191). The besieged had capitulated upon condition that their lives should be spared, and that Saladin should pay their ransom in two hundred pieces of gold. In the original proposal it was agreed to surrender the wood of the True Cross, the possession of which by the Infidels was imagined to be the cause of all sorts of disasters to the Christian world; among the least of which, if we are to believe a chronicler of the time, was that all children born in Christendom since the capture of the cross at Hattîn had but twenty-two instead of thirty-two teeth. Richard was not religious enough to insist upon the restoration of this precious symbol.

Saladin, after the city had fallen, delayed in fulfilling the condition that the defenders of Acre had put upon him relative to their ransom money. Richard avenged this assumed breach of faith by massacring five thousand unarmed Moslems before the city wall. Philip, in disgust at this action, turned over his army to the Duke of Burgundy and returned to France.

Richard, thus left in sole command, crossed Mount Carmel and proceeded southward, keeping close to the shore that he might have timely assistance from his fleet. At every stream and sand-dune he met the omnipresent Saladin. The Christians’ march was under an incessant rain of arrows, which covered the frequent dashes of the Moslem squadrons. At the banks of the Arsur (Nahr Falik) the Christians encountered 226the entire army of their contestants (September 7, 1191). Though Richard led sixty thousand, the Oriental historian Omad, secretary to Saladin, says that the Mussulmans surrounded them as the eyelashes surround the eye. The cry “Allah! Allah!” was echoed by “Deus vult!” as the mighty hosts sprang upon each other. The Christian infantry, leading the assault, suddenly opened its ranks; the cavalry poured through and made the first attack. Richard followed with the main body. Nothing could withstand the fury of his onset. The Moslems were swept before him; but they as quickly gathered in his rear, compelling him to return and fight over again the battle he had already won. The plain was too small for the multitude to marshal in orderly array. The armies were intertwined as the many folds of two serpents of hostile breed. It is said that more than once Richard and Saladin tested each other’s qualities by personal encounter; the only doubt cast upon this story by Christian writers being from the fact that Saladin survived, the Arabic chroniclers rejecting it on the ground that Richard still lived.

At nightfall the Moslems extricated themselves from the mêlée and disappeared in the forests of Saron, the Christians being wary enough not to follow them. Had Richard pursued his advantage the Arabian historians admit that he might have secured Jerusalem; but the impulsive temper of this leader suffered from sudden reaction. He repaired to Jaffa with the women of his household, and there established a brilliant and festive court. One day while hunting he was surrounded by a troop of Moslems. 227When he was on the point of being captured a French knight cried out, “I am the king; spare me.” The Moslems, thus diverted, allowed Richard to escape, and brought the knight a captive to Saladin.

Richard soon tired of his rest, and even of revelry, at Jaffa, and projected the siege of Ascalon. Saladin, made aware of that enterprise, burned the city. Richard set about its rebuilding; his orders were disobeyed. Many echoed the words of Leopold of Austria, who declared that he was a warrior, but neither a carpenter nor a mason.

The resentment of this prince had been kindled against the Englishman by an outrage on the part of Richard in ordering the standard of Austria to be thrown from the walls of Acre, where Leopold had presumptuously planted it after the capture of that place. Conrad of Montferrat had also taken umbrage at Richard’s lordly treatment of him, and was detected in courting alliance with Saladin for the restitution of Acre. Richard foiled him with deeper play. He proposed to give his sister, the ex-Queen of Sicily, as wife to Malek-Ahdel, brother of Saladin, that there might be erected at Jerusalem a mongrel empire of Christians and Moslems. Saladin toyed with the proposition sufficiently to delay Richard’s attack upon Jerusalem until that city had been greatly strengthened. Thousands of Christian captives were set to work upon the walls and in the ditches, under threat of being massacred, as were the Moslems by Richard’s order at Acre. Realizing that his scheme of alliance with Saladin had failed, Richard endeavored to engage his antagonist in battle in the open 228country; but the astute Moslem was too discreet to risk his cimeters against heavy swords, except when necessary. He had also some less martial schemes on foot; he seduced Conrad at least from whole-hearted loyalty to the cross, by promising to defend him in permanent possession of whatever cities he might take from his fellow-Christians. Conrad was soon assassinated by two Moslems. Richard was quickly accused of being accessory to this deed. The suspicion grew in plausibility when he forced Isabella, widow of Conrad, to marry his nephew, the Count of Champagne, who thus, through Isabella’s rights as sister of Sibylla, became titular King of Jerusalem. King Guy was compensated for the loss of his throne by the gift of the government of Cyprus, where his descendants reigned for two hundred years, until the Moslem wave had ingulfed the entire eastern Mediterranean.

Saladin was also thought to have connived at the murder of Conrad. One of the murderers, however, confessed to having been the agent of the Old Man of the Mountain, the chief of the sect of Assassins, who also avowed himself responsible for the deed.

This sect, whose name has given to European languages their word for the most atrocious crime, is one of the many divisions of the Moslem peoples. Their sheik regarded himself as the lineal successor of Hassan, and thus the inheritor of the Imam or Holy Spirit, whose possession is the inner sign of the caliphate. Hassan, after various adventures, retired to Altamont, a strong castle in the mountains of Persia, whence his title, and that of his successors, of “Old 229Man of the Mountain.” He attempted to enforce his spiritual authority by inspiring universal dread of his vengeance. His successors and agents became adept in the use of poisons, the dagger, and all methods of secretly disposing of human life. So wide were the ramifications of this brotherhood that, not only throughout the Moslem world, but in Christian Europe, sudden death, otherwise unaccountable, was accredited to the Assassins, whose dusky forms were imagined to move unseen in the bedchambers of princes and to stand behind thrones. The name “Assassin” is apparently from “hashish,” the drug with which the murderer stimulated his courage when accepting the desperate commission from his chief.

Richard, thus relieved of his rival, Conrad, again showed his superior powers of command. With marvellous celerity he swept over the country, even to the southern extreme of Palestine, where he captured Dârôm, at the entrance to Egypt. Saladin was apparently forced to retire within the walls of Jerusalem. Richard pressed towards the sacred city (June, 1192). Rumors of Saracen destitution and fright came upon every wind. The crusaders were eager to pluck again the prize of Jerusalem, which Providence seemed to hang within their reach; but Richard was incredulous of the weakness of a foe he had always found as strong as himself, and whom he knew to be his superior in craft. He pointed out to his followers that at that very moment the Moslem armies, scattered everywhere among the Judean foot-hills, actually surrounded their own; that the roads to the city were in places but narrow defiles 230guarded by precipitous heights, from which a few could hurl destruction upon many. To carry siege apparatus through such a country, facing the menace of a Saladin, was to invoke certain disaster. If repulse should come, what relief could they find so far away from the coast? How could they ever hope to make good a retreat to their ships?

The council of knights to whom the matter was referred agreed with their chief. Richard, with undoubted affliction of his martial pride, if not of his pious spirit, gave one longing look towards the distant domes of Jerusalem. He then covered his face with his shield and turned away, declaring that he was unwilling to gaze upon that which he was unable to conquer.

The retreat from Jerusalem destroyed Richard’s prestige as a strategist and capable leader of great enterprises; but nothing ever lessened his lustre for personal bravery. The lion may be outwitted by the fox; and it is no deep disgrace to Cœur de Lion that he could not circumvent a Saladin. Richard vented his disappointment and rage upon many parts of the Moslem host. Like a wounded lion, he destroyed whatever came within his reach. One day he annihilated a squadron of seven thousand Infidels; another time he captured as many camels laden with provision.

Saladin had outgeneralled him at Jaffa and captured that city, with the exception of the citadel, which promised surrender if succor did not come within a day. Richard in turn outplayed his rival; he slipped from the harbor of Acre with a few galleys and surprised the garrison at Jaffa. Such was the celerity 231of his approach that the Moslems fled from the city without having time to strike another blow in its defence.

Having obtained all the glory that was possible from his Eastern adventure, Richard proposed peace with Saladin. His emirs, equally wearied with war, urged the reluctant Saladin to accede to the crusaders’ terms. These were that the Christians should possess all the coast, except Ascalon, which should remain unoccupied, and that Jerusalem should be free for the feet of all pilgrims. The compact was made in the presence of the Koran and the Bible, the silent witnesses of the oaths taken respectively in the names of Allah and Jehovah. It was to be faithfully observed, according to some chroniclers, for the space of three years, three months, three weeks, three days, and three hours—a suggestion that came from the crusaders’ reverence for the Trinity. The peace was celebrated by a friendly tournament between chosen Christian and Moslem champions, in which lances clave through armor and swords drew life-blood in mere play. The gates of Jerusalem were thrown open that the warriors of the cross might kneel at the spot where the symbol of their faith had stood when their God hung upon it, and so return to Europe having accomplished a holy pilgrimage, if not a successful warfare.

Thus ended the third crusade, marked by the loss of perhaps a half-million Europeans, the foremost of emperors, an inestimable amount of treasure, and the prestige of Christendom as against the onrolling power of the Moslem world.

232Richard returned to Europe (October 9, 1192). He was led to this purpose not more by his evident inability to found a kingdom in Palestine than by the necessity of maintaining his kingdom at home. Philip Augustus was menacing his domain. When this fellow-crusader left Palestine he renewed his oath with Richard not to commence any hostilities against him during his absence. It is said that he applied to the Pope for a dispensation from this vow. If this was not so, his actions showed that its restrictions were irksome to him. Longchamp, whom Richard had left in charge of the English government conjointly with the Bishop of Durham, endeavored to exercise limitless control. Even the mandates of Richard were disregarded by him. Compelled to flee the country, Longchamp became the open promoter of Philip’s designs. Philip made war upon Richard’s possessions in Normandy, and seduced from his allegiance Prince John, the king’s younger brother, destined to be his successor on the throne.

Richard, not daring to pass through France lest Philip should lay violent hands upon his person, sailed up the Adriatic. He was shipwrecked near Aquileia, and in disguise made his way northward through Austria. But no need of caution could restrain the impulsiveness of Richard, either in war or in pleasure. Dressed as a pilgrim, he lived as a prince; his prodigality easily led to his identification. Duke Leopold of Austria, whose banner he had thrown into the ditch at Acre, now took occasion to avenge that insult. He arrested Richard and threw him into prison (1193). The German emperor, Henry VI., 233also claimed the royal captive, and secured his person by paying to Leopold sixty thousand pieces of silver. The chronicler remarks, in the spirit of that age: “Forewarnings of this calamity had appeared in unusual seasons, inundations of rivers, awful storms of thunder and rain, with dreadful lightning.”

England, through Richard’s mother, Eleanor, appealed in vain to the Pope to intervene, inasmuch as the holy see had guaranteed the humblest—and surely the noblest—crusader against any detriment from Christians. But the priests of Rome were politicians, and made no sign. Philip of France, now in league with Prince John, and relieved of his dread of Richard, boldly made war in Normandy, where, however, he was repulsed by Robert of Leicester, a crusader who, more fortunate than his king, had reached home. Prince John also made an unsuccessful attempt to seat himself on his brother’s throne.

In the meanwhile Richard chafed in a dungeon where he was loaded with irons. His perpetual incarceration, or his assassination, being fraught with too much danger to his captors, it was determined to bring him to judicial disgrace. He was therefore summoned before the Diet of the Empire at Worms, and formally accused of crimes of all sorts, such as having insulted the Duke of Austria, having assassinated Conrad of Montferrat, having concluded a disgraceful treaty with Saladin. The royal captive, with marvellous self-restraint for him, deigned to explain these matters; then he burst out into indignant denunciation of his captors. The princes of Germany were made ashamed of the ignominy that in their 234name had been thrust upon the foremost hero of the age. Even prelates at length remembered that Richard had remained alone in Palestine when others were wearied with the defence of the faith.

Henry VI. was forced to release his royal captive. Yet he managed to fix as his ransom a hundred and fifty thousand marks. This large amount it was difficult to raise. The churches of England melted their plate; prelates paid a fourth of their income, the lower clergy a tenth, and all ranks a commensurate tax. Queen Eleanor in person bore the sum thus collected to Mayence (1194). Henry, however, could not yet brook his victim’s escape. Having received the ransom, he ordered Richard’s rearrest; but the English ship that bore him slipped from the mouth of the Schelde before the officers could overtake it. Philip of France sent this ungraceful but timely warning to Prince John: “Take care of yourself; the devil is broken loose.” One chronicler notes that at the very hour in which the king landed in England there appeared “a brilliant and unusual splendor in the heavens, of a very white and red color, about the length and breadth of a human body.” He also observes that Duke Leopold of Austria was horribly punished for his cruelty to Richard. Infernal fires were kindled in his limbs, whose progress he in vain tried to stay by amputating his own foot with an axe, and at length expired in dreadful agony. Romance has invented a pleasing story of Blondel, Richard’s friend and minstrel, who discovered the place of his king’s imprisonment by singing in its proximity a familiar song, to which Richard responded. It is true 235to the times, but the historian cannot vouch for its basis in fact.

Before Richard reached his throne his great competitor for renown in arms, Saladin, had passed away (March, 1193). He had retired to Damascus. A year after the peace, feeling the approach of the last enemy, and realizing that a greater than Richard was upon him, he ordered that his burial shroud, instead of his usual standard, should be carried through all the streets of Damascus, while his herald cried, “This—this is all that remains of the glory of Saladin, who conquered the East.”

After the death of Saladin his empire fell to pieces. Afdhal, his eldest son, secured the title of Sultan of Damascus; another son, Aziz, that of Sultan of Egypt; and a third, Dahir, that of Sultan of Aleppo; Malek-Ahdel, his brother, the rule over Mesopotamia. Afdhal warred upon Aziz, and Malek-Ahdel took advantage of the reverses of both.

The Christians also fought among themselves. The jealousies of Templars and Hospitallers were intense. These two orders had, since their founding early in the century, grown to be powerful organizations, not only in Palestine, but throughout Europe. They held valuable property in all lands. Princes, feudal lords, and high dignitaries of the church were enrolled in their membership. They were rivals everywhere for the repute of bravery, as well as in wealth and political influence. The Roman see exempted their members from secular taxation, and even from religious oversight, except by the Holy Father himself. Their grand masters were autocratic sovereigns within 237their orders. Naturally they became overbearing, intolerant of interference, amenable to no counsel but their own. Their power bred audacity, and ecclesiastical privileges fostered the conceit of saintship, which even their crimes could not tarnish. As they despised the rest of mankind, so the two orders hated each other as rivals.

The Pope appealed for a new crusade, but could not evoke any popular response. Richard of England and Philip of France had such mutual suspicion that neither would leave his domain to the depredations of the other; and they hated each other too cordially to again unite their arms in the common cause. A few listened to the Pope’s appeal, among them Simon de Montfort, afterwards known for his butchery of the Albigenses.

It was reserved for Henry VI., the contemptible persecutor of Richard, to represent the royalty of Europe in response to the call of the Holy Father. He emulated the fame of his father, Frederick Barbarossa, whose ambition he inherited with neither his character nor ability. Not content with issuing royal mandates, he himself became a preacher of the holy war (spring of 1195). An army under the Archbishop of Mayence, which was joined by Queen Margaret of Hungary, moved eastward by way of the Danube. Another, under the dukes of Saxony and Brabant, left the ports of the Baltic. Henry marched with a force for Italy, but had his eye rather on Sicily than Palestine.

The first army reached Acre, and began ravaging the Moslem lands in spite of the protests of the 238Christian inhabitants, who could not bring themselves to so shameful a breach of treaty. Instantly the divisions of the Infidels were healed. From Egypt, Damascus, and Mesopotamia, the Moslems rallied to Jerusalem. Assigning command to Malek-Ahdel, they took summary vengeance upon the invaders. Jaffa fell at once into their hands.

The second army of Christians, having made the voyage down the Atlantic and through the Mediterranean, landed at Beirut and inflicted a crushing defeat upon Malek-Ahdel, who had advanced from Jaffa to oppose its progress.

Henry VI. busied himself in Sicily until he had secured that country, and with it restored the imperial preponderance in the affairs of Italy. This he accomplished through the perpetration of barbarities from which the Turks would have recoiled, and in which the Greeks at Constantinople were his only competitors. He put out the eyes of the son of Tancred, ruler of Cyprus, and stole his daughters. With the instinct of a ghoul, he dug up the body of Tancred in order to strip from it the badge of dead royalty. When he had satisfied his remorseless ambition in this section, he allowed the remnant of his army to proceed to Palestine for the succor of their brethren. He engaged to keep a force of fifty thousand in the Holy Land for one year at his own expense. The third army was led by Conrad, Bishop of Hildesheim, chancellor of the empire.

Thus augmented, the Christians in the East were enthusiastic for the recapture of Jerusalem; but the coming of winter, the well-known strengthening of 239the fortifications about the Holy City, and, above all, the dissensions among the rival leaders, who cared more for the maritime cities, with their treasures, than for a place whose chief glory was its sacredness, led to the postponement of the enterprise until the spring.

An assault upon Thoron occupied them meanwhile. The fortress of Thoron, between the Lebanons and the Mediterranean, was the great menace to the ambition of the invaders. This stronghold was on the top of a mountain, and guarded from hostile approach by precipitous walls and deep ravines. Its seeming impregnability did not daunt the spirit of the crusaders; they bridged chasms and dug into cliffs, until they thoroughly undermined the masonry of the fortress.

The Moslems, realizing their extremity, proposed to capitulate on simply being guaranteed their lives. The proposition divided the Christian leaders, the majority being willing to accept this condition of surrender; but many, overcome by their passion for blood, voted to give no quarter. The attitude of this latter party in the conference convinced the Moslem deputies that the lives of their people would not be safe even under the sacredness of an agreement, an impression which was confirmed by the remembrance of past occasions when the Christians won the name of truce-breakers. Believing that they had nothing to hope for, the Moslems resolved to fight it out. In vain did the more moderate among the besiegers assure them of protection. The broken ramparts were repaired, or the gaps filled with solid ranks of soldiers who with upraised swords invoked 240the judgment of Allah. They countermined, and met their assailants in subterranean passages. The Saxon miners who entered these shafts often reappeared in the hands of captors upon the walls, whence they were hurled by the engines through the air, to fall dead in the camp they had left. The desperate valor of the Moslems depressed the hosts which but yesterday were waiting to bathe their victorious swords in the blood of the victims. The chiefs accused one another of cowardice and treachery. The miserable rivalry led them one by one to desert and retire to the coast. One day, when the orders for general assault had been issued, the various divisions found themselves without leaders and without plans. Disorder was followed by panic, augmented by the report that Malek-Ahdel had been joined by Aziz, the son of Saladin and Sultan of Egypt, and that soon this force would be upon them. A furious tempest swept over the mountain. Their superstition heard in the thunders the malediction of heaven, and saw in the freshets which obliterated the paths the vengeance of nature for their having turned aside from the conquest of Jerusalem. The Germans made a wretched flight for Jaffa; the Syrian Christians huddled themselves into Acre. Malek-Ahdel quickly assaulted Jaffa, and, though repulsed, left the dukes of Saxony and Brabant dead upon the field.

News soon came of the death of the Emperor Henry VI. (September 28, 1197). The German chieftains hastened their return to Europe in order to secure their individual interests with the successor to the imperial throne. In vain did the Pope protest 241against the desertion of the pious cause. A woman, Queen Margaret of Hungary, alone remained with her soldiers on the sacred soil. The remnant left at Jaffa were surprised during a roisterous and drunken celebration of the feast of St. Martin, and were massacred almost to a man by the Moslems.

Thus terminated what some writers denominate the fourth crusade, but which surely deserves no such designation. It was a European raid in which the religious motive scarcely evidenced itself except in the fact that it was proclaimed by a Pope. The thirty ounces of gold which Henry VI. promised to each of his soldiers seem to have been more influential over their minds than even the desire to pray at the Holy Sepulchre. The movement inspired new confidence in the prowess of the Moslems, confirming their own belief in the invincibility of their Prophet, and exciting a query throughout the Christian world, if Christ had not deserted His people because of their sins.

CHAPTER XXXII.
HISTORY AND CONDITION OF CONSTANTINOPLE.

In the year 395 the Roman world was divided into the empires of the East and the West, and Constantinople became the rival capital of that on the Tiber. Eighty-one years later (476) Odoacer, the barbarian, sacked Rome and brought to an end the Western Empire, from which time Constantinople claimed the sole heirship to the power of the Cæsars. In 800 Charlemagne reëstablished the imperial power in western Europe, but within fifty years it again fell to pieces in the hands of his less puissant sons. The Greek emperors and people assumed the title of Romans. Their capital was called New Rome.

There had occurred a similar breach between the Roman and Greek churches. A doctrinal divergence had assumed irreconcilable proportions in the sixth century. The controversy centred chiefly in the question of whether the Holy Spirit proceeded equally 243from the Father and the Son, or solely from the Father; the Roman Church maintaining the former dogma, as expressed by the addition of the word “Filioque” to the Nicene Creed, the Greek Church repudiating it. Many minor differences of doctrine and discipline were also generated. Ecclesiastical separation followed. After generations of wrangling, the Pope’s legates shook the dust from their feet and departed from Constantinople, leaving on the altar of St. Sophia a writ of excommunication and anathema. Thus the last tie between the two peoples was sundered.

From 867 to 1057 the Basilian dynasty steadily compacted the power, developed the governmental system, augmented the wealth, and extended the area of the Greek empire. From 1057, however, under the dynasty of the Comneni, Greek prestige has steadily declined. The strength of its dominion had been largely due to the preservation of a municipal and provincial spirit, a virtual independence of its various communities, each seeking its own welfare, while all maintained their loyalty to the central authority. Under the later Basilians ambitious emperors adopted the policy of absorbing all the local rights into their personal control. The Comneni continued this fatal policy, but their hands were not strong enough to retain what they had grasped. The occupants of the Greek throne were weak men. The names of Isaac, Michael, Nicephorus, and Alexius are those of pygmies compared with the German emperors and the popes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Indeed, in the East the art of statesmanship 244had been lost. The rulers of Constantinople were intriguers, not diplomats. With them dissimulation took the place of caution, trickery that of courage, and prosperity was measured only by the number and value of the royal perquisites. The Oriental practice of farming the revenue was the easiest method of obtaining income. He was regarded as the wisest administrator who squeezed the largest amount from the unwilling people. Officers were commissioned without salary or even provision for their expenses, it being expected that they would first of all feather their own nests. Even an emperor is accused of fitting out vessels for piracy upon his own seas.

The personal character of the later Greek monarchs was equally despicable with their system of government. Alexius Comnenus spent his time in play. Andronicus was chiefly renowned for the magnificence of his horse-shows, attendance at which was varied by drunken debauches and acts of cowardly cruelty. Isaac was noted for the wasteful extravagance of his table, the frequent changes of his apparel, and the peacock magnificence of his public appearances. It is said that madmen were held in honor as being under the special direction of Heaven, and it would seem from their conduct that the emperors were ambitious to secure this sole mark of the divine favor.

Such rulers, having lost the respect, could not hold the loyalty of their subjects. The people no longer responded to the calls of the throne for aid in the war-fields. Indeed, the independent peasant class, having been reduced to virtual slavery, were more 245ready to admit a change of rulers than to risk their lives for the support of such as they had. The emperors were thus compelled to surround themselves with mercenaries whom they hired in foreign countries. Slavonians, Italians, Warings (Saxons who were crowded out of England by the recent Norman conquest), filled the armies and oppressed the citizens. The Greek navy was composed chiefly of Venetian bottoms, and manned by water-dogs from every seaport in Europe. To these elements of decrepitude we must add the ceaseless strife for occupancy of the imperial throne. During the quarter-century ending with 1200 there were more claimants than there were years.

This internal weakness of the Byzantine or Greek empire left it largely the prey of enemies from without. Ever since their first irruption from their original home in central Asia the Turks had menaced the imperial provinces. They succeeded in wresting vast lands, and in either driving out their Christian inhabitants or making them tributary to the cause of Islam. Asia Minor was lost to the Greek, and the Moslem negotiated with his foe from the banks of the Bosporus. During the twelfth century scarcely a year passed which did not witness some battle between the Byzantines and the Turks. Defeated by the crusaders, these quick-moving hordes of the East found redress in ravaging some part of the empire. When victorious in Syria they echoed their joy in new battle-shouts in the direction of the Greek capital. Their swords dripped blood on the shores of the Marmora and the Black Sea almost as frequently as on 246the fields of Syria. In 1185 the emperor was compelled to purchase immunity from attack by paying tribute to the Sultan of Iconium, and even to call in the assistance of Saladin to secure him from the aggressions of other Moslem hordes.

The Huns also assailed the Byzantine power. In 1184 Maria, dowager empress at Constantinople, was put to death for having engaged these ruthless people, under their king, Bela, to invade the empire. Bulgarians, Patchinaks, Turkomans, Wallachs, and Servians raided in turn the Balkan peninsula.

The crusaders also, with their enormous armies and the pilgrim hordes that followed them, made the Greek lines their camping-ground, their forage-fields, and their battle-sites, until Constantinople dreaded these fellow-Christians as much as it feared the Infidels. Richard of England took Cyprus from the Greeks and ultimately gave it to the Templars. Henry VI. of Germany forced from the emperor five thousand pounds of gold, as the price of the immunity of his lands from the ravages of Western armies. The imperial treasury was so depleted that the churches of Constantinople were rifled to raise what was thus called the “German tax.”

Beyond the actual aggressions of the Latin Christians upon their Greek brethren there was developed a deeper menace in the hatred which had sprung up between the two peoples. Throughout Europe the eagerness to exterminate the Moslems was almost matched by a purpose to subjugate the Greek power. For this antipathy there were other and special occasions, some of which we will narrate.

247The Normans, who, under Robert Guiscard, had in 1062 conquered Sicily, were the inveterate foes of Constantinople. Robert and his son, Bohemond, invaded Epirus and Thessaly. In 1107 Bohemond repeated the attempt to capture the western borders of the empire. In 1130 Roger of Sicily made alliance with the German emperor for the same purpose. William, son of Roger, in 1156 pillaged Corfu, Corinth, and some of the Ægean Islands, and sent a fleet to parade his insults in the Bosporus and Golden Horn, where his sailors shot gilded arrows against the very palace walls.

About 1180 the Emperor Andronicus cruelly massacred the Latins in Constantinople, dragging the sick from their beds in the hospital of St. John, and decapitating the papal envoy, Cardinal John, whose head was tied to a dog’s tail and dragged about the streets. William II. of Sicily appointed a certain Tancred, his agent, to avenge these atrocities. Tancred sacked Salonica and ravaged Macedonia and Thrace. In 1194 Henry, King of Sicily, claimed all these lands and held Irene, daughter of the Emperor Isaac, as hostage. Thus the Sicilians were always ready to leap at the throat of the Greek empire in sheer vengeance, if not with thirst for the blood of spoil.

Another menace to the Eastern Empire was from the Italians, who were represented by large colonies throughout the imperial territories, and even in the capital itself, where they enjoyed for a time exceptional privileges, such as being directly governed by their own ambassadors, having favored rates of tariff 248on their commerce, often amounting to free trade, and at times receiving high appointments in the service of the empire. Yet these prosperous conditions were frequently interrupted by quarrels with the Greeks, reaching on occasions to civil war within the walls of the capital. Pisan and Genoese pirates ravaged the Ægean, and even blockaded the Dardanelles against the passage of Greek ships. In 1198 these freebooters defeated the imperial navy.

Venice, however, was the most formidable of these rivals for power within the empire, as she had been at times the most favored nation. In 1171 the Venetians attacked Dalmatia and pillaged the Ægean, until they were forced by herculean efforts of the Greek government to sue for peace. Henry Dandolo conducted the mission for treaty, and during his stay in Constantinople became blind. It is asserted by the Venetians that his affliction was due to torture perpetrated upon him by command of the emperor. It was a common practice of the Greeks to destroy the sight of those they would render impotent to do them harm. This ancient punishment was called abacination; the process was that of forcing the victim to gaze into a basin of highly polished metal, which by its shape concentrated the rays of sunlight and constituted a burning-mirror. Whether this is the true explanation of his blindness or not, it is certain that Dandolo ever after displayed an absorbing passion to wreak vengeance upon the Greek power, and we shall find him foremost among its foes in the fatal expedition called the fourth crusade.

But, aside from these inducements, the wealth of 249the city offered to the covetous a prize second to none in the world. The situation of Constantinople on the narrow highway of the Bosporus or Strait of St. George, which connects the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, made it mistress of the maritime commerce between Europe and Asia. Neighboring countries contributed by their very geographical relation to the power on the Bosporus. The Balkan peninsula, terminating in the classic land of Greece, and fringed with the islands of the Ægean and the Adriatic; the eastern provinces of Europe, drained by the Danube, whose mouth was hard by; Russia from the Siberian snows to the temperate climate of the Euxine; Asia Minor, the seat of ancient civilization in the middle Orient, even to the entrance of Persia; the Holy Land, and the fertile valley of the Nile—each of these, in extent and population enough for an empire, and all of them lying in easy accessibility, fitted Constantinople to be the natural capital of the greatest power in the world.

Its immediate site, too, was inviting. Enthroned upon magnificent hills, with the harbor of the Golden Horn as a safe refuge for its fleets, and a salubrious climate assured by the perpetual breeze from either of the great seas which lay at its feet, it was the especial abode of comfort and splendor. In its stately palaces, churches, and public squares was preserved the best art inherited from the ancient world, for which the temples of Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, and the isles of the Mediterranean had been rifled. Its merchants lived with the splendor of princes, dwelling in palatial homes, adorning themselves with most costly 250robes and rarest gems, and clothing even their horses with gold. To outrank their subjects in splendor, princes lived in houses whose columns and walls were sheathed in golden plates. The palaces of Blachern and Bucolion were furnished with incredible treasures.

The Church of St. Sophia, says Benjamin of Tudela (1161), was richer than “all other places of worship in the world.” To its magnificence Ephesus had contributed eight pillars from the temple of Diana; Aurelian’s Roman temple of the sun, eight columns of porphyry; the temples of the Nile, twenty-four columns of polished granite. Its vestries contained “forty-two thousand robes embroidered with pearls and precious stones.” But St. Sophia was only one of many churches whose golden domes flashed over the Bosporus. Other structures vied with the temples. The hippodrome was nine hundred feet long, lined with tiers of white marble seats, from which the spectators, in the intervals of the races, admired the four horses in bronze which now surmount the entrance of St. Mark’s in Venice. Columns, statues, baths innumerable, feasted the eyes or invited the indulgence of the citizens.

Even more tempting to the covetous piety of the western Europeans were the stores of sacred relics possessed by the churches and monasteries. It was believed that more than half the objects of veneration associated with dead saints throughout the world were in case or crypt within Constantinople; and the common faith attributed to the army of saints thus honored, and whose ghosts were presumably guarding their bones, the preservation of the city during 251so many generations. Most of these relics had been purchased at or stolen from their original resting-places in different parts of the East; but many undoubtedly were manufactured to gratify the credulity of the foreigners who thronged the bazaars.

To the treasures of the capital itself must be added the wealth of the territory subject to it. Western Europe, as we have seen, had been impoverished by generations of feudal control; district had warred upon district until the spoil was insufficient to evoke further forays. In marked contrast, the Greek lands had been measurably protected by having a central government. The ground was well tilled; many handicrafts were developed. Instead of feudal towers, shadowing the lower classes with desolation, were well-filled granaries and storehouses of goods. Fair roads invited intercourse of adjacent communities; and at a time when robbers infested the suburbs of every town, and lay in wait in every forest of Europe, the shores of the Bosporus and the eastern end of the Marmora were enlivened with cosey cottages and pleasant villas. The Westerner cast envious glances about him whenever he passed the beautiful city on the strait, and the early crusaders paused to wonder if it would not pay them as well to extirpate the Greek heresies as to slaughter the Moslems. This inquiry was keener from the fact that on every side, as has been narrated, they saw evidences of weakness. While amazed at the prosperity, they thought of the opportunities offered to the sword.

The most envious eyes turned upon the Greek lands were those of the blind old Dandolo. This 252remarkable man had become doge of Venice in 1192, at the age of seventy-two (some say eighty-two), and was to close his octogenarian period with a series of exploits which might have been the envy of the most daring and ambitious youth. To understand the final diversion of the fourth crusade from its original religious purpose, we must not lose sight of Dandolo’s sleepless purpose. This was not recognized at the time, but is abundantly illustrated by the subsequent events of the crusade, and confirmed by documents which have but recently come to light.

In the year 1198 there came to the papal throne Innocent III., one of the most astute, tireless, and ambitious of the pontiffs, and, to those who accept the righteousness of the hierarchical supremacy over the world, one of the best. The failure of recent enterprises in Palestine afflicted Innocent’s soul. He announced to the titular Patriarch of Jerusalem his purpose of massing Europe in another endeavor. His summons sounded over Christendom: “Arise, ye faithful; arise, gird on the sword and buckler; arise and hasten to the help of Jesus Christ. He Himself will lead your banner to victory.” The Pope sent his prelates everywhere to bid princes cease their mutual quarrels and unite in the common cause. To all who obeyed he gave the usual promise, in the name of God, of remission of sins. He especially entreated sinners to mark with the badge of the cross their moral reformation, and the saintly disposed to thus add new adornment to their crown of glory. His own earnestness was illustrated by his melting 254the gold and silver dishes in his palace into marketable metal, and replacing them with vessels of clay or wood. Foreseeing a lack of money for the holy emprise, he bade Christian people borrow from the Jews, who should be compelled to lend without interest. If such help of the Lord did not procure any positive blessing to this accursed people, it would at least prevent the penalty of the total destruction of their business, which was threatened in case of their not complying. Even the hated Greeks were to be allowed some part in this holy warfare. In his appeals to the Emperor Alexius the Pope predicts, “The pagans will flee before you;” and promises, “You yourself will share with the others in the pontifical favors.” Lest the heretical emperor should not feel the need of such patronage, Innocent reminds him that God had said to the Roman pontiff what He had said of old to Jeremiah: “I have placed thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, to waste, and to destroy, to build, and to plant.” He further compares himself to the sun, and secular princes to the moon, which shines in borrowed light. The emperor in reply, with perhaps a premonition of what was about to transpire, reminded the Pope of the ravages which Western crusaders were accustomed to inflict upon his realm, and begged him to first rebuke the crimes which these zealots for God were disposed to perpetrate against their fellow-men.

At this time a French priest, Fulque, was filling the land with his fame for eloquence. Crowds thronged to his services in the churches and fields. 255He denounced sin with the power of an Elijah, and comforted the penitent with the sweetness of a St. John. He adapted himself marvellously to all men, leading the lordly profligate to repent at the incensed altar, and making the boorish peasants kiss the stick with which he beat them to be quiet as they crowded about him in the fields. Pope Innocent enlarged this zealot’s commission to be that of another Peter the Hermit, or Bernard, in preaching the crusade.

Among Fulque’s first converts was Count Theobald of Champagne, to whom over two thousand knights did homage as his vassals. He was chosen to command the French contingent. Louis of Chartres and Blois followed, and soon a host was enrolled representing the nobility and wealth of France. Among these was Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne, to whom we are largely indebted as the historian of the events we are about to narrate. Germany also answered the call. But for the death of Richard of England (April, 1199), this hero would doubtless have been chosen to lead the combined host with an English army. The Venetians do not seem to have volunteered any help; perhaps it was not anticipated. The Pope, in his call for the crusade, had expressly forbidden Venice to furnish the Saracens with iron, ropes, wood, arms, ships, or munitions of war; for in the previous holy adventures they had not regarded trade with the Infidels as infringing upon their Christian duty.

The military leaders already chosen were averse to another overland march to the East, since every interjacent country was marked with the disasters of 256previous armies; they therefore decided to go by sea. The commissioners having charge of the expedition therefore sent messengers to Venice, as the chief maritime power in the West, to negotiate with Dandolo for transportation of men and furnishing of provisions. After a week’s deliberation the Council of Venice made answer. Dandolo proposed, the people approving, that the republic should provide the required vessels and a definite amount of food, and also an independent fleet, which Dandolo said he would send “for the love of God.” He, however, required in payment for such equipment and service eighty-five thousand silver marks, and that half the cities and lands conquered should fall to the Venetian possession. This was eagerly agreed to by the commissioners.

A general assembly was convoked in St. Mark’s in Venice (April, 1201). Mass was celebrated to secure Heaven’s blessing upon the compact. Villehardouin thus addressed the people: “The lords and barons of France, the most high and the most powerful, have sent us to you to pray you in the name of God to take pity on Jerusalem, which the Turks hold in bondage. They cry to you for mercy and supplicate you to accompany them to avenge the disgrace of Jesus Christ. They have made choice of you because they know that no people that be upon the sea have such powers as your nation. They have commanded us to throw ourselves at your feet and not to rise until you shall have granted our prayer.” The commissioners fell upon their knees and raised their hands in supplication to the people. The crowd 257caught the enthusiasm and cried, “We grant your request.” Dandolo himself overflowed with pious, not to say politic, emotion. This spectacle of fraternal union in the cause of Christ drew from all eyes “tears of tenderness and joy.” The Pope, to whom the compact was submitted, ratified it with the strict condition that under no circumstances should an attack be made upon any Christian state.

It was deemed best to land the crusading armies at Alexandria in Egypt; the voyage thither would be unmolested. Besides, a series of events had taken place in Egypt which led many to see the hand of Providence pointing to that country. In 1200 the Nile had for some mysterious cause failed to give its annual inundation; harvests had failed; famine afflicted the inhabitants, who were reduced to feeding upon grass, the dung of animals, and even the carcasses of their fellow-victims. At Cairo women, in the insanity of starvation, had killed and eaten their own children. To famine succeeded plague; one hundred and eleven thousand died of it at Cairo. The unburied lay everywhere; a fisherman counted four hundred corpses that floated by him during a single day. The wrappings of dead bodies were as numerous on the waters of the Nile as lotus flowers in their season. In the language of an Arabian, “The most populous provinces were as a banqueting-hall for the birds of prey.” The Roman pontiff urged Europe to take the opportunity of these terrible visitations to break the treaties between Christians and Moslems and occupy the land of the Delta. To this advice the military leaders added the less inhuman consideration that Alexandria 258would afford a ready entrepôt for supplies from the West, and a convenient point from which to strike the enemy; at the same time it would enable the crusaders to sever the Eastern Infidels from their Saracen coreligionists along the North African coast. Egypt was thus chosen as the immediate destination of the crusade.

Shortly after the ratification of the Venetian compact with the crusaders, Theobald of Champagne, the chosen commander, died. Boniface of Montferrat was chosen in his stead. The first movement of Boniface is suggestive in view of the sequel. He spent several months at the court of Philip of Swabia, the rival of Otho for the German throne. Philip had married the daughter of Isaac Angelus, a deposed emperor of Constantinople, who had been blinded by his successor and was now a captive. A son of Isaac, “young Alexius,” as he was called, to distinguish him from the reigning monarch of the same name, a lad of twelve years, was led about by the Emperor Alexius to grace his triumph. Young Alexius eluded the vigilance of his keepers and, disguised as a common sailor, or, as some say, in a box as freight, made his way to Italy and eventually to the court of his brother-in-law, Philip of Swabia. Philip was undoubtedly pledged by his own interests, as well as by vengeance on behalf of his kinsman, to forward the project of young Alexius for the restoration of Isaac to the throne of Constantinople. Boniface, the commander of the crusaders, was a relative of Philip. He had also family alliances with the throne of Constantinople. One of his brothers, Conrad, had married 259Theodora, a sister of Isaac; another, Reynier, had married Maria, a daughter of the Emperor Manuel. As the heir of this latter brother, Boniface regarded himself as de jure King of Salonica. That he was not averse to the project of Philip and young Alexius is proved by the fact that on leaving Philip he went to Rome and endeavored to induce the Pope to declare himself in favor of young Alexius as a contestant for the throne of Constantinople against the reigning monarch. It is well to keep these facts in mind if one would understand the depth of the plot which subsequent events exposed.

The grand departure of the crusaders from Venice had been fixed for June, 1202. At that time but a part of the leaders appeared. Some had taken ship from Bari, Genoa, and even the ports on the Northern Ocean, as served their convenience or as they were able to make better terms than with the Venetians. Of four thousand expected knights, but one thousand had arrived; of one hundred thousand men, less than sixty thousand; of the eighty-five thousand marks pledged for passage, but thirty-four thousand were in hand. Dandolo protested against this as breach of faith with him, and pointed to his fleet, waiting, manned and provisioned, in the harbor. He demanded the immediate payment of the entire sum. In vain had the crusaders sent what they could to the ducal palace—money, vessels of silver and gold, jewels, and securities on their lands. The doge declared, according to Robert de Clari, who was in this army, “If you do not pay, understand well that you will not move from this spot, nor will you find 261any one who will furnish you with meat and drink.” The crusading army thus found itself a crowd of starving prisoners on a fever-fraught island near Venice. In the heat of the summer many sickened and died; others managed to escape. Those who remained communicated with friends in France and induced a few more knights and nobles to join them. But with this assistance, and though the richest of them had stripped themselves of possessions until nothing but horses and armor were left, the debt was unpaid.

Having gotten from them all that was possible, Dandolo assumed the rôle of friendship and proposed to forgive the remainder of their obligation upon condition of first receiving their help as soldiers in an expedition against Zara, which he had in contemplation. The city of Zara was Christian, the capital of Dalmatia, a province of Hungary, and just across the Adriatic from Venice. It was rapidly rising into the position of a competitor for the commerce of those waters, and thus excited the greed of the doge.

But a richer prize than Zara was before the ambition of the Venetian ruler. From the beginning of his negotiations with the crusaders he doubtless contemplated the diversion of these forces, though collected in the name of religion, to the conquest of the Greek empire. Documents that have recently come to light make it clear that Dandolo had no purpose of assisting in war against Egypt and Palestine, but, in collusion with Boniface and Philip of Swabia, planned and executed one of the most marvellous schemes of perfidy that history portrays.

262As the basis of this severe judgment we must be content to give the dates of certain events.

February 1, 1201, commissioners of the crusaders arrive in Venice, asking Dandolo’s assistance with the fleet.

Autumn, 1201, Dandolo sends agents to Malek-Ahdel, of Egypt, proposing a settled peace with him.

May 13, 1202, Dandolo concludes secret treaty with Malek-Ahdel, in accordance with which the Venetians are to have favored quarters in Alexandria for trade, and all pilgrims to Jerusalem who come under Venetian patronage are to be forwarded with safety.

June 24, 1202, crusaders arrive in Venice, and Dandolo refuses to provide them ships.

With these layers of the foundation we may understand the superstructure of after events. The proposal to attack Zara thus appears as the first movement in realizing the plot to divert the Christian forces from Egypt. Vainly did the noblest of the crusaders protest against this sacrilegious use of arms which had been consecrated only to the service of the cross. In vain did Pope Innocent denounce it with his divine authority. Dandolo relentlessly pursued his advantage, and with such consummate tact that the cardinal legate of the Pope, Peter Capuano, expressed himself convinced that it would be less of a sin to take part in the capture of Zara, and then pursue the original object of the crusade, than to return home having done nothing. Dandolo completed the delusion he 263was practising upon the people by allowing himself to be led up the pulpit of St. Mark’s (August 25th), where he thus addressed the Venetians: “I am old and infirm; as you see, I have need of rest; yet I know of no one more capable of taking command of your undertaking than myself. If you desire it, I will myself take the cross and go with you and the pilgrims for life and death.” The assembly cried, “Come with us for God’s sake!” Dandolo was then led to the altar, and, while his agents were signing the compact with the Infidel, knelt amid the tears and huzzas of his people to have the cross fastened upon his ducal bonnet. The papal legate indeed protested against any one posing as the head of the armies summoned by the Pope who did not acknowledge the pontiff’s leadership through his representative, but Dandolo read him a lesson on the duty of ecclesiastics to content themselves with preaching the gospel and setting a godly example to the flock.

Villehardouin narrates at this point “a great wonder, an unhoped-for circumstance, the strangest that ever was heard of.” This event was the arrival in Venice of the ambassadors of young Alexius, asking in the name of justice and humanity the aid of the Venetians in the liberation of his father and the restoration of his own princely rights at Constantinople. It is evident that Villehardouin’s surprise was not shared by either Dandolo or Boniface of Montferrat.

October 8th the fleet sailed from the lagoons. It consisted of four hundred and eighty ships. It was a gala-day: palaces and storehouses were covered 264with brilliant banners and streamers; the guilds rivalled one another in the gorgeousness of their flags, floats, and various insignia. The ships were arrayed in responsive glory as one by one they glided out to sea. About the bulwarks of each vessel were hung the polished shields of the knights it carried. The doge’s galley was vermilion-hued, the color of royalty. The sound of silver trumpets echoed the lapping of the waves as the fleet moved out upon the Adriatic, while the ancient hymn, “Veni, Creator Spiritus,” was chanted by priests and monks from the crosstrees of the ships.

Pausing at Trieste, the fleet on November 11th entered and captured the harbor of Zara. The citizens at first proposed to surrender if their lives should be spared; but later, learning of the Pope’s mandate forbidding the crusaders to attack their fellow-Christians, and assuming that it would suffice for their protection, they withdrew the offer. Dandolo ordered an assault. Many of the crusaders refused to obey his order. At a council in the tent of the doge, the Abbot of Vaux exclaimed, “I forbid you, in the name of the Pope, to attack this city. It is a city of Christian men, and you are soldiers of the cross.” This bold speech nearly cost him his life. Dandolo braved the threat of excommunication and assailed the walls. In five days (November 24, 1202) Zara fell. The people were pillaged, many were banished, some beheaded, and others mercifully allowed to flee, leaving their houses and goods to the captors. Dandolo proposed to divide the city as common spoil and to enjoy its comforts for the winter. His purpose was too evident; 265it was to take time to effectually establish the Venetian control on the eastern shore of the Adriatic.

The crusaders were made aware that they had been used as cat’s-paws for the doge’s chestnuts. To disappointment succeeded remorse. They began to meditate upon the papal excommunication they had so foolishly provoked. The Venetians, meanwhile, managed to get the larger part of the spoil, and the soldiers were often suffering while their allies were feasting. This led to continual fighting in the streets, where more fell than had been slain during the siege. The more valiant longed for service against the Infidel, not against Christians; the commoner souls longed for home. Desertions took place in bands of hundreds and even thousands. The French leaders humbly petitioned the Pope’s forgiveness. It was granted on condition of their setting out for Syria, “without turning to the right or left.” The Holy Father pledged them his care if they immediately obeyed, and promised, “In order that you may not want for provisions, we will write to the Emperor of Constantinople to furnish them; if that be refused it will not be unjust if, after the example of many holy persons, you take provisions wherever you may find them.” This permission to pillage the Pope extenuates by adding, “Provided it be with the fear of God, without doing harm to any person, and with a resolution to make restitution.” At the same time he argues for the righteousness of taking other’s goods without their permission: “For it will be known that you are devoted to the cause of Christ, to whom all the world belongs.”

266This papal intervention jeopardized the schemes of the Venetians; but, very opportunely for those opposed to the Pope’s counsel, there arrived at Zara ambassadors from Philip of Swabia, the brother-in-law of young Alexius. In their address they said: “We do not come for the purpose of turning you aside from your holy enterprise, but to offer you an easy and sure means of accomplishing your noble designs.... We propose to you to turn your victorious arms towards the capital of Greece, which groans under the rod of a usurper, and to assure yourselves forever of the conquest of Jerusalem by that of Constantinople.... We will not tell you how easy a matter it would be to wrest the empire from the hands of a tyrant hated by his subjects; nor will we spread before your eyes the riches of Byzantium and Greece.... If you overturn the power of the usurper in order that the legitimate sovereign may reign, the son of Isaac [young Alexius] promises, under the faith of oaths the most inviolable, to maintain during a year both your fleet and your army, and to pay you two hundred thousand silver marks towards the expenses of the holy war. He will accompany you in person in the conquest of Syria or Egypt, and will furnish ten thousand men, and maintain during his whole life five hundred knights in the Holy Land.” Then followed a clause which was supposed to catch the consciences of the most pious: “Alexius is willing to swear on the holy Gospels that he will put an end to the heresy which now defiles the Empire of the East, and will subject the Greek Church to the Church of Rome.”

267The proposal did not carry to all conviction of its wisdom and justice. The Franks had reason to suspect the good faith of the Greeks. Blind Isaac, whom they were called upon to restore to his throne, had been himself a usurper, as unjust to his predecessor as his successor had been to him, and, moreover, had done everything in his power to defeat the previous crusades. But the Venetian influence prevailed.

The Venetians and crusaders left Zara in ruins, its palaces and walls razed to the ground. They sailed for Corfu. Dandolo and Boniface waited five days until they were joined by young Alexius. These chiefs paused at Durazzo, where the inhabitants were led to recognize Alexius as the lawful heir to the sovereignty, and on May 4, 1203, they joined the army before Corfu.

Here there was developed great dissatisfaction among the soldiers as the full meaning of the diversion of the crusade burst upon them. More than half the army rose in rebellion; they held their parliament of protest; the leaders were gathered in a secluded valley preparatory to desertion. It seemed for the moment that conscience and piety, fanned by resentment, would triumph over chicanery and deceit; but Dandolo and Boniface were equal to the situation. They threw themselves at the feet of the malcontents, shed abundance of tears, and so wrought upon the sympathies of the multitude that they effected a compromise, by which it was agreed that 269the army should hold together until Michaelmas and serve Alexius’s project, and after that should be carried to Syria.

Dandolo realized that there was no security for his schemes with such a host, except by their quick accomplishment. May 23d the harbor of Corfu witnessed a repetition of the gala-scene when the fleet left Venice. Far as the eye could reach the sea was colored with the sails of the invaders of a Christian empire in the name of Christ. The inhabitants of the islands touched by the voyagers, impressed with the martial might thus displayed, threw off their allegiance to the reigning Alexius and waved their banners for Alexius the Young. The natural beauties of the Ægean, the riches of the islands, the acquiescence of the people, and the abundant gifts from fields and vineyards that loaded the vessels filled all hearts with enthusiasm. By the shores of ancient Troy, up through the Dardanelles, where they lingered a week to ravage the harvest, and then over the wide Marmora they sped onward as if the very breezes articulated benedictions from Heaven. If conscience intruded, its mutterings were silenced with the thought, “After this, after Constantinople, when we shall have been sated with the spoil of the heretic, then for Jerusalem!” This mingled greed and piety burst into huzzas as they sailed by the beautiful villas which lined the western shores of the Marmora or watched the steadily enlarging roofs and gardens of Chalcedon and Scutari on the Asiatic side, until the domes and palaces of Constantinople, in multitude and massiveness beyond anything 270seen elsewhere in Europe, seemed to rise and welcome them.

But the mighty walls, which appeared to have been erected by Titans and rivalled the hills upon which the city sat, awakened a corresponding fear lest the glory they witnessed should prove beyond their possession. “Be sure,” says Villehardouin, “there was not a man who did not tremble, because never was so great an enterprise undertaken by so small a number of men.”

June 23d the fleet came to anchor off the Abbey of San Stefano, twelve miles below the city. Dandolo determined upon a reconnaissance in force which should also strike terror into the Greeks by its magnificent display. All the standards were spread to the breeze. The sides of the ships were sheathed in glowing shields. The warriors of the West stood on the deck, each one, says Nicetas, the Greek eye-witness, “as tall as his spear.” Thus they glided close under the walls of the city, upon which the inhabitants crowded to witness this picturesque prediction of their doom.

Having made a sufficiently valiant show, the fleet crossed the Bosporus and anchored in the harbor of Chalcedon. Here the army captured the harvests just gathered from the neighboring country, and pillaged Chalcedon, while the leaders occupied the palaces and gardens, upon which the emperor had just expended great wealth in making them the abode of his pleasure. The reigning Alexius deigned to send to his unwelcome guests a body of troopers, who were driven off with severe chastisement for their 271temerity. He then addressed them through Nicholas Roux, a Lombard retainer: “The emperor knows that you are the most puissant and noble of all those who do not wear the crown; but he is astonished at your invasion of a Christian state. It is said that you have come to deliver the Holy Land from the Infidel. The emperor applauds your zeal and begs to assist you. If you are needy he will provision your army if you will be gone. Do not think this generous offer prompted by any fear; with one word the emperor could gather about him innumerable hosts, disperse your fleet and armies, and forever close against you the routes to the East.”

Conan de Bethune made response for the Latins: “Go tell your master that the earth we tread upon does not belong to him, but is the heritage of the prince you see seated among us,” pointing to young Alexius. “A usurper is the enemy of all princes; a tyrant is the foe of mankind. Your master can escape the justice of God and men only by restoring his brother and nephew to the throne.”

Dandolo then tried the spirit of the people of Constantinople. A splendid galley bearing young Alexius moved close along the walls of the city. Boniface and the doge supported the prince on their arms, while a herald proclaimed, “Behold the heir of your throne!” This met with no response save the derisive shout, “Who is this Alexius?” But the defiance hurled by the Greeks from the safety of their walls was not the voice of universal courage. Nicetas tells us that “the Greek commanders were more timid than deer, and did not dare to resist men 272whom they called ‘exterminating angels, statues of bronze, which spread around terror and death.’”

The next day at Scutari the leaders, according to their custom, held council of war in the saddle in the presence of their waiting troops. An instant assault was determined upon. After due religious solemnities they embarked. The war-horses, heavily caparisoned for battle, with their knights in armor at their sides, were put upon huissiers, or flat-bottomed boats constructed with wide gangways across which a number could quickly dash from ship to shore. The rank and file were packed into larger vessels. The fighting galleys were trimmed for action, and each took in tow a huissier. Much depended upon the celerity of the crossing and the surprise of the Greeks, since the swift current of the Bosporus might quickly ingulf them in the terrible Greek fire if the combustible material should be spread upon the water. At sound of trumpet the Venetian rowers sprang to the oars; the narrow Bosporus suddenly foamed with the impact of hundreds of prows. No order was observed, except that the crossbowmen and archers led the van to drive the enemy from the landing-places. The ships struck the shore probably near the modern Tophana, north of the Golden Horn. The Greek soldiers could not withstand the showers of arrows that swept the open places, and precipitately fled. The knights leaped their horses into the water and prevented the enemy’s return to attack. Within an hour the open camp of the Greeks was in possession of the Latins. The harbor of the Golden Horn had been closed with a chain, behind which the Greek 273fleet lay in apparent immunity from attack by the Venetian galleys. The northern end of this chain was fastened within the strong tower of Galata. That fortress was quickly carried and the chain released, but not until the Venetian ship, the Eagle, with its tremendous ram armed with enormous shears of steel, had already severed it midway. The Latin galleys swept in, sinking or capturing the entire Greek fleet.

The marine defence of Constantinople, which might with ordinary foresight have been made resistless, was inconsiderable. The demoralization of the Greek service was pitiable. Admirals had sold the very sails for their own private gain. Useless masts had not been replaced, though the near forests abounded in timber; for the trees, as Nicetas tells us, were guarded by the eunuchs like groves of worship, but really as hunting-preserves for the pleasure of the court.

The victory of the Latin fleet left Galata their easy prey, and gave them a near basis from which to conduct operations against the city across the Golden Horn.

Four days were spent in bringing over from the Asiatic side the provisions. Dandolo proposed to transport all the soldiers with his fleet and assault the water wall of the city, where, presuming upon the defence of their ships, the Greeks had left the fortifications weakest. But the crusaders, accustomed only to land operations, were averse to this plan and marched around the end of the Golden Horn. The fleet met them opposite the palace of Blachern, which occupied the corner of the northwestern wall and thus faced both land and sea. Though the walls extended for seven miles, this spot was regarded as the strongest of all. A wide moat was backed by three enormous lines of masonry, to capture one of which was only to lodge beneath the terrible menace of the others. Immense towers were so close together that to pass between them would be to challenge burial beneath the missiles which could readily be dropped from almost above their heads. Here twice within the preceding half-century the Greeks 275had discomfited the Arab hosts. At this point the Turks, under Mohammed II., were, two hundred and fifty years later, to make their victorious assault. The Greeks within the city were assisted by armies without, which, under Theodore Lascaris, the hero of the day on the part of the besieged, assailed the camps of the crusaders.

July 17th witnessed the grand assault. Boniface and Baldwin were in command. The battering-rams delivered their blows until one tower fell. Platform-ladders were quickly reared; fifteen Flemings secured a footing on the outer wall, but were slain or captured by men of their own blood, the hired Waring guard. The Venetians’ attack was more successful; their ships were covered with rawhides to protect them from the Greek fire, which flashed like liquid lightning from the walls above and spread in sheets of flame over the water. Bridges had been arranged from the crosstrees, which, as the vessels were anchored close to the shore, reached to the top of the walls. Every huissier carried a mangonel, which returned the stones hurled by the besieged.

The battle being contested thus far with equal skill, Dandolo gave orders to land; he himself set the example. Old and blind, he was carried in the arms of his attendants, and, with the banner of St. Mark floating above him, placed upon the shore. His heroism inspired his men. While the fight raged above their heads, on the bridges that ran from the rigging to the walls, the host below erected their scaling-ladders and emerged upon the parapets. Soon the gonfalon of St. Mark floated from a captured 276tower. Twenty-five more of these strongholds were quickly taken. The Venetians poured down through the streets of the city. Setting fire to the buildings, their progress was led by a vanguard of flame.

In this terrible emergency the emperor was caught by a momentary impulse of valor, and, putting himself at the head of sixty battalions, sallied from the city to strike the crusaders. The multitude of his men, their splendid accoutrements, and their unanticipated appearance led the crusaders to leave their assault upon the ramparts and range for defence behind their palisades. A more serious consequence of this valiant counter-attack was that it forced Dandolo to leave what he had already conquered and hasten to the assistance of his allies. But the Greeks had exhausted their fury in its first outburst, and made no further onset, contenting themselves with showering arrows from safe distance. Theodore Lascaris, the son-in-law of the emperor, in vain asked the imperial permission to assail the crusaders’ intrenchments. Alexius III. was content with the martial glory of having paraded before his foe; his troops, carrying the eagles of ancient Rome, as if the more to emphasize their shame, retreated without having struck a blow with the naked sword.

The next morning (July 18, 1203) the city was filled with a deeper sense of disgrace as the people learned that the emperor himself had stolen away during the night, taking with him a bag of gold and jewels, leaving his empire to him who could hold it, and his wife amid the spoil. Alexius III. was a despicable 277character, as cowardly as he was cruel, crafty, but without will power to sustain his own designs when they exacted much energy. His natural weaknesses had been increased by the habits of a voluptuary and drunkard until he had become but a crowned imbecile.

Realizing the condition of affairs, the troops, led by Constantine, the minister of finance, raised the cry for the deposed Isaac. The courtiers ran to his prison in the vaults of the Blachern, broke off his chains, and led the old and blinded man out, as he, having become hopeless of relief, believed, to execution, but, to his grateful surprise, to be seated again upon his throne. The wife of Isaac was sought out in an obscure quarter of the city, where she was living, grateful for even life; while the wife of the fugitive Alexius III. was thrust into a dungeon.

The recall of their former emperor could scarcely have been prompted by affection or even respect for him personally. Isaac was without character. Buffoons despised him for allowing himself to be the chief court fool. His ambition was divided between his sensuality and his extravagance; he had twenty thousand eunuchs, and spent four million pounds sterling on the housekeeping of his palace. His piety seems to have been limited to a belief in the prediction of a flattering patriarch, who had once assured him of an indefinite conquest of the world, for which, however, he made no preparation other than invoking an alliance with Saladin, whose sword he would buy to hew down his Christian opponents.

The news of the change of emperors was not assuring 278to the leaders of the Latins. Notwithstanding the pretence of having come to right the wrongs of Isaac, their plans necessitated either their own occupancy of the empire or the placing of young Alexius as the creature of their will upon the throne. Alexius, not Isaac, had made the bargain to pay the Westerners for their expedition two hundred thousand marks of silver, to furnish the army and fleet with provision for a year, and to bring the Greek Church into subjection to Rome. Would Isaac assume the same obligations?

The Latins sent a deputation to the palace; they passed between the lines of the same hired soldiers that yesterday guarded Alexius III., equally loyal to whatever hand fed them. There, upon a throne of superlative splendor, the Latin deputies saw the resurrected relic of a former monarch, blind and emaciated. To have rendered the picture sensationally complete, old and blind Dandolo should have stood before Isaac.

Villehardouin, who was one of the deputies, demanded of Isaac the confirmation of the contract made by young Alexius. On learning its nature, Isaac expressed his amazement and the impossibility of meeting it. The deputies assured the old man that his son should never be permitted to enter the city unless his father assumed his pledges. The emperor replied, “Surely the bargain is a hard one, and I cannot see how to carry it out; but you have done so much for him and me that you deserve our whole empire.” With hand trembling with age and fright he set to the compact the golden seal.

279The deputies returned to the camp. Young Alexius entered the city, riding, with a retinue of knights, between Dandolo and Baldwin of Flanders, and followed by the Latin clergy; they were met at the gates by the various ranks of Greek ecclesiastics, arrayed in splendid vestments. The churches throughout the city resounded with thanksgiving and the streets with festivity, while within the palace Isaac, having endured a dungeon for eight years, embraced his son whom he could not see.

August 1st Alexius was crowned coemperor in St. Sophia; he immediately cancelled a portion of his indebtedness to his allies, and wrote to the Pope, avowing his purpose to recognize Rome as the ecclesiastical head of the Greek empire. The Pope, knowing the vicissitude of affairs and distrusting the volatile disposition of the youth, replied, urging him to speedily practicalize his good intention. At the same time the Holy Father addressed the crusaders, declaring that, “unless the emperor made haste to do what he had promised, it would appear that neither his protestations nor their intentions were sincere.”

The payment Alexius was able to make to those who had sold themselves to his service was not sufficient to satisfy their ambitious greed; it barely sufficed to pay back to each soldier the money he had been compelled to cash down to the Venetians for his passage, and which had left the Latin army bankrupt in a foreign land. But the Greek treasury was empty and could not meet the expenses of the new government, nor even provide for the personal protection of the emperors against their domestic foes.

280If the adherents of the fugitive Alexius III. were not to be feared, there were new aspirants to the throne, which had come to be recognized as the legitimate spoil of usurpers; besides, the emperor’s pledge to recognize the Pope’s supremacy had kindled fury in the breasts of the Greek devotees. The monk was accustomed in those days to finger his dagger as well as his beads. The Waring guard could alone be trusted, but their loyalty would lapse at the first passing of a pay-day. Some men are stimulated by necessity—hardship evokes their genius; but the Latins knew that Alexius was not of this sort. Scarcely out of boyhood, he was already displaying the vices and weaknesses for which his race was notorious. He needed a guardian—a Dandolo or Boniface, or both.

It was therefore evident that if the new régime were not to be an immediate failure, carrying down with it the honor of the Latins, the latter must continue at Constantinople in spite of the fact that the agreement between the Venetians and the army expired at Michaelmas. They were forced to accept Alexius’s proposition that they should remain with him for another year. Thus circumstances conspired to favor Dandolo in his compact with Malek-Ahdel and to check the impatience of the crusaders for a march upon Syria or Egypt.

The reign of Alexius and Isaac was inaugurated by a terrible calamity. According to long custom, the Arab and other Moslem traders had been allowed to occupy a section of the city with their bazaars and mosque. The crusading zeal, baffled of finding its natural vent in Palestine, sought a slight compensation 281in looting this smaller nest of Infidels. During the fighting that ensued fire was started in several places. Under a strong north wind it swept in a wide swath across the city; then, the breeze shifting, the conflagration raged in another direction. For eight days there was a continual crash of falling houses, palaces, and churches, thousands of the homeless population fleeing through smoke and cinders from the pursuing flames. Many perished, and at the cessation of the ravages multitudes were left in utter destitution. The blackened ruins covered a section half a league in width and two leagues in length, extending from the Golden Horn to the Marmora.

The fury of the elements was followed by as destructive a fury of human passions. The Greek rose to exterminate the Latin resident population. All were driven out. Fifteen thousand of these sojourners escaped across the harbor to Galata, that their lives might be saved in the camp of the crusaders.

This disaster rendered hopeless any further payment of the debt pledged by Alexius. The crusaders took advantage of the situation to inaugurate a plan to capture the city for themselves, to depose both emperors, and seat upon the throne one of their own number. It was first necessary to provoke a formal breach with Alexius and Isaac. A deputation was therefore sent them to demand instant payment or war. The Greek populace resented this insult to their rulers, whose office they worshipped even if they had contempt for their pusillanimity. They retaliated upon the Westerners by attempting 282to burn the Venetian fleet with fire-boats floated among the ships, and trying to destroy the crusaders’ camp by a sudden cavalry attack.

A more serious menace was in the popular meetings held daily in St. Sophia to denounce the emperors and to demand their displacement to make way for some stronger hand. The leader of this movement was Alexius Ducas, called Mourtzouphlos because of his meeting eyebrows. The populace, with whom this man was unsavory, offered the crown to Nicholas Kanabos. Alexius was kept a virtual prisoner in the Blachern, defended by his Warings. Mourtzouphlos came to the palace, and, persuading Alexius that a mob was about to attack him, pretended to conduct him to a place of safety. Getting him thus to his own tent, Mourtzouphlos put the young man in irons, shod himself with the vermilion buskins, and strode out, proclaiming that he was emperor.

With vast energy the usurper set about refortifying the city. He impressed Dandolo and Boniface with the fact that they had now to deal with a man not unlike themselves in ability and daring. What they were to do must be done quickly. They made to Mourtzouphlos the proposition, “Give us Alexius, and we will depart and allow you to remain emperor.” With this prince in their hands they could still scheme. The reply came, “Alexius is dead.” He had been found lifeless in his chamber (February 1, 1204). Isaac soon followed his son with as mysterious a taking off. Dandolo then proposed a personal interview with the new monarch. The meeting was 283held a half-mile beyond the palace. Treacherously a squad of Latin horsemen raided the place of conference, capturing some of the imperial body-guard, but Mourtzouphlos escaped.

Nothing now remained for the Latins but to risk all in an assault upon the city.

By April 8th all preparations were completed. It was determined to boldly cross the Golden Horn from Galata and assail the water front of the city. At a hundred points at once they flung the bridges from the yard-arms to the top of the wall, while at the same time they battered the base with rams. The air about them was a firmament of flame from the heavy discharges of Greek fire, through which hurtled stones, javelins, and arrows in such storm that flesh could not stand against it. At night the Latins retired, confessing the failure of the first attempt. The churches of the city resounded with grateful prayers, and the streets were riotous with joy.

On the 12th the assault was renewed. The ships now fought in pairs, so that a heavier force of men might land upon the walls from each drawbridge. Two transports, the Pilgrim and the Paradise, having on board the bishops of Troyes and Soissons, carried one of the towers and planted there the banners of these ecclesiastics. Soon four towers more 285succumbed; the gates beneath them were forced open, and the knights, who had waited by their horses on the transports, dashed into the city. The Venetians say that their blind old hero was among the first to pass the gates, and that there was fulfilled the prophecy of an ancient sibyl: “A gathering together of the powerful shall be made amid the waves of the Adriatic under a blind leader; they shall beset the goat [the symbol of Greek power in Daniel’s vision], ... they shall profane Byzantium, ... they shall blacken her buildings; ... her spoils shall be dispersed.” The Latins charged straight for Mourtzouphlos’s headquarters; his body-guard fought well, but were no match for the heavy-armored knights, and soon fled. Such was the consternation of the Greeks that even the size of the Latins was fabulously exaggerated, Nicetas crediting one gigantic soldier with eighteen yards to his stature, and a proportionate strength.

At night the crusaders, having set fire to the houses on every side of them, occupied the deserted camps of the emperor, which he had set up in the district burned by the previous conflagration. The next day they encountered no opposition, as Mourtzouphlos had fled away through the Golden Gate on the Marmora side of the city. With the exception of the imperial treasury and arsenal, all was given up to be plundered by sailors and soldiers. Before the assault the barons had divided among themselves the palaces. Villehardouin boastfully narrates: “Never since the world was created was there so much booty gained in one city; each man took the house which 286pleased him, and there was enough for all. Those who were poor found themselves suddenly rich. There was captured an immense supply of gold and silver, of plate and precious stones, of satins and silks, of furs, and of every kind of wealth found upon earth.”

The Greek eye-witnesses give the same picture, but in other colors. They tell how neither matron nor nun, age nor condition, home nor church, was safe from brigandage; nor yet the tombs of the dead, since the coffins of the ancient emperors were opened, that the gems might be taken from their wrappings and golden rings from their finger-bones. The body of Justinian was thus rudely exposed after its sleep of centuries. The sacred chalices of the communion-table were distributed to the crowd for drinking-cups. The vessels of the altar were thrown into heaps, together with the table plate of the rich, to be parcelled out among the victors. Holy vestments were used as saddle-cloths. Mules were driven into St. Sophia and there on the mosaic floors were loaded with the furniture which piety had adored and art had cherished for ages. The altars were broken into pieces, that the bits of precious metal in them might be extracted, and the veil of the sanctuary was torn into shreds for the sake of its golden fringe. A slattern courtesan was enthroned in the chair of the patriarch and entertained the rabble with obscene dances and songs, while men who had left their homes for the service of Christ played at dice upon the tables which represented His apostles.

Nicetas, the historian, describes his own escape. 287A Venetian, whom he had served a good turn, defended his house as long as he could. When this was no longer possible he led away the unfortunate family and a few friends, roughly treating them as if they were his prisoners. The young ladies of Nicetas’s household blackened their faces to mar their fairness. The beauty of one shone through this disguise; she was seized by some passing soldiers and liberated only at the tearful solicitation of her father. Looking back upon the city, of which he had been a chief ornament and whose epitaph he was to write, Nicetas exclaimed, “Queen of cities, who art become the sport of strangers, the companions of the wild beasts that inhabit the forests, we shall never revisit thy august domes, and can only fly with terror around thee, like sparrows around the spot where their nest has been destroyed.” On the road he came up with the Patriarch of Constantinople, without bag or money, stick or shoes, and with but “one coat, like a true apostle.”

The plunder of the city was evenly divided between the crusaders and the Venetians. The hard cash discovered in treasure vaults or concealed in wells amounted in value to over eight millions of dollars. The value of movable wealth of various kinds has been estimated at one hundred millions.

The greed thus fed, but not satiated, seemed to turn the brains of the conquerors and to transform them into veritable barbarians, as the Greeks denominated them. Works of art were ruthlessly destroyed, bronze statues were melted for the sake of their metal, and rarest marbles broken in the 288abandon of resuscitated savagery. Thus perished the colossal figure of Juno from Samos, so large that it required four oxen to carry away its head; the statue of Paris presenting the apple of discord to Venus; the famous obelisk surmounted by a female figure that turned with the wind, and covered with exquisite bas-reliefs; the equestrian statue of Pegasus; the “Hercules” of Lysippus, whose thumb was the size of a living man’s waist; the bronze ass which Augustus Cæsar had ordered to commemorate the victory of Antium; the ancient group of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus; and the statue of Helen of Troy. Out of the ruin of such inestimable treasures of art the four horses which now adorn the porticos of St. Mark’s in Venice were saved from the general wreck, to stand as a monument among the Venetians not of the glory, but of the vandalism of their ancestors.

But more than the spoils of art and treasure, the sacred relics stored in Constantinople excited the saintly cupidity of the conquerors. In their greed for these objects men utterly forgot the divine law, and silenced the last remonstrance of human conscience. Martin Litz, Abbot of Basel, worming his way through the pillage piles in a church, came upon an old Greek monk at prayer. “Your relics or your life!” was the alternative offered him. Martin thus procured the key to an iron safe and rifled it of bones and jewels, without thought that the eighth commandment held good as between a Romanist and heretics. Gunther, a German monk, telling the story of what he witnessed at this time, rejoices that thus 289was secured a piece of the True Cross, the skeleton of John the Baptist, and an arm of St. James. As the transportation of these articles to the West was accomplished without their having been again stolen by some shrewder saint or sunk to the bottom of the sea, Gunther believed that they had been watched over by angels especially sent from heaven to convoy the treasure. It would seem that some ghostly intervention must have restrained John the Baptist and St. James from visiting their wrath upon these unconscionable robbers of their bones. The abbey of Cluny received thus the head of St. Clement; the cathedral of Amiens the head of John the Baptist; and the various churches of Europe such articles as Jacob’s pillow at Bethel, the rod of Moses, the wood of the True Cross, the drops of blood shed in Gethsemane, the sponge and reed of Calvary, the first tooth and locks of the infant Jesus, a piece of the bread of the Last Supper, a tear of our Lord, a thorn from His crown, the finger which Thomas thrust into His side, the shirt and girdle of the Virgin Mary. But these did not satisfy the relic-hunters. Churches in Europe competed with one another for the objects of adoration, which brought revenue to their coffers; prices went up, but Byzantine craft was able to make the supply equal the demand. A few years later (1215) the Lateran Council had, in the name of common sense, to caution the faithful against becoming the prey of their own credulity.

Even the enormous aggrandizement of the Latins, and the advantages to be derived, in the estimate of Western piety, from the union of the Greek and 290Roman churches, could not subdue the general sense of shame at the atrocities which had been perpetrated. Pope Innocent III. wrote: “Since, in your obedience to the Crucified One, you took upon yourself the vow to deliver the Holy Land from the power of the pagans, and since you were forbidden, under pain of excommunication, to attack any Christian land or to damage it, unless its inhabitants opposed your passage or refused you what was necessary, and since you had neither right nor pretence of right over Greece, you have slighted your vow; you have preferred earthly to heavenly riches; but that which weighs more heavily upon you than all this is that you have spared nothing that is sacred, neither age nor sex. You have given yourselves up to debauchery in the face of all the world, you have glutted your guilty passions, and you have pillaged in such fashion that the Greek Church, although borne down by persecution, refuses obedience to the apostolical see, because it sees in the Latins only treason and the works of darkness, and loathes them like dogs.”

Having conquered Constantinople and presumably the empire hitherto ruled from its palaces, it now devolved upon the Latins to select an emperor from their own race. Twelve electors were chosen, six from the Venetians and six from the crusaders, to whom was delegated the responsibility of making the final choice. These met at the Church of our Lady the Illuminator, which was located within the walls of the palace of Bucolion. After celebration of mass the electors took a solemn oath upon the relics deposited in that church, that they would bestow the crown upon him whom they regarded as the ablest to defend and exalt their new possessions. To silence any popular opposition to their choice, the bravest of the guards were placed about the palace, pledged to maintain the election.

There were three, possibly four, preëminent candidates for the imperial honor. Dandolo was recognized as chief in ability, but he was far advanced in years and could promise at best but a brief tenure of 292the sceptre; besides, the Venetians themselves were not agreed in asking for his elevation. If the doge of Venice should have his capital in the East, Venice herself, the queen of the Adriatic, would sink beneath the splendors of the queen of the Bosporus. The men who had exalted their city to that of chief prominence in the maritime world were naturally jealous of this transfer of prestige. Dandolo himself was astute enough to foresee the danger and declined to contest the election.

Boniface, as head of the crusaders, was next in prominence. He had, moreover, sought to make himself more eligible by marrying Maria, the widow of the late Emperor Isaac, that thus he might secure the loyalty of the Greeks. But his election would be fraught with disadvantage to Venice in that his alliance would be first of all with his relative, Philip of Swabia, and, in the event of the union of the East with that German power, Venice would be politically overshadowed.

It is alleged by some writers that Philip himself was proposed. He was at the time, as we have stated, contesting the sceptre of Germany with Otho, who had been approved by the Pope. Philip’s acquisition of the Eastern sceptre might give him predominant weight in the West and possibly convert the Pope to his interests, especially as thus the union of the churches would be facilitated. Thus the reasons urged against Boniface were of equal force against Philip.

Dandolo declared his preference for Baldwin, Earl of Flanders. This chieftain was but thirty-two years 293of age, a cousin of the King of France, and of the blood of Charlemagne. He had proved his bravery on many a field, and was, moreover, unobjectionable to the more ardent among the crusaders from the fact that, unlike Boniface, he had taken no active part in originally diverting the movement from its legitimate destination against Syria and Egypt. The French, who were the majority in the host, sided with him. Between the parties of Boniface and Baldwin it was agreed that, in the event of either attaining to the immediate government of the empire, the other should acquire as his special dominion the Peloponnesus and the Asiatic provinces beyond the Bosporus.

While the electors deliberated the crowd without waited with anxiety. At midnight, May 9th, the doors of the church were opened. The Bishop of Soissons announced the decision: “This hour of the night, which saw the birth of God, sees also the birth of a new empire. We proclaim as emperor Earl Baldwin of Flanders and Hainaut.” The successful candidate was raised upon a shield and carried into the church, where he was vested with the vermilion buskins. A week later he was solemnly crowned in St. Sophia. At the coronation Boniface attended his rival, carrying in the procession the royal robe of cloth of gold.

But Boniface’s loyalty scarcely endured the strain put upon it. He soon exchanged the dominion of the Peloponnesus and Asia Minor, which had been assigned to him by the electors’ agreement, for that of Salonica. Over this he and Baldwin incessantly 294quarrelled. This strife between the leaders was the indication of the dissensions everywhere among the Latins in their greedy division of the estates of the new realm.

The chief actors in that stirring drama soon passed off the scene. Baldwin was captured, and probably murdered, by the Bulgarians before Adrianople in 1205, and was succeeded by his brother Henry. Dandolo, having acquired the title “Lord of a Quarter and a Half of all the Roman World,” died June, 1205. A slab recently discovered in St. Sophia is inscribed, “Henrico Dandolo,” and probably marks his grave. With all his faults, the modern Venetian might well cry with Byron:

Boniface two years later was mortally wounded in a fight with the Bulgarians in the Rhodope Mountains. Mourtzouphlos was soon taken prisoner and hurled headlong from the column of Theodosius, thus fulfilling a local prophecy relative to the column, that it should witness the destruction of some perfidious ruler.

It is not within our scope to narrate the history of the Latin empire thus established. For fifty-seven years it maintained a precarious existence, and finally fell again into the hands of the Greeks, who had constantly menaced it from their opposing capital of Nicæa (1264).

The most serious consequence of the capture of Constantinople by the Latins was the new hope and 295opportunity imparted to the Turks. The Greeks, with all their weaknesses, had for generations been a buffer between Islam and Europe. The empire had stood like a wall across the great highway of the Asiatic incursion. If the Greeks had been generally the losers in the struggle, they had maintained sufficient power to occupy the arms of their contestants, leaving the Christians of the West free to prey upon the Moslems of Syria and adjacent countries. Now all was changed in this respect. The war of Latins with Greeks engrossed, and largely used up, the power of both as against their common enemy. Though the capital had fallen, the Greek everywhere was still the sworn enemy of the Latin.

In the meantime the Moslems were compacting and extending their military power. They were growing in multitude by the migration of new swarms from the original hive in the farther East. They were destined to become too strong for Christendom to resist, to move steadily on to their own conquest of Constantinople, and even to knock at the gate of Vienna. The words of Edward Pears are undoubtedly warranted: “The crime of the fourth crusade handed over Constantinople and the Balkan peninsula to six centuries of barbarism.”

The campaign of Europe against Constantinople wrought only evil among the Christian colonists of Syria and Palestine. In the time of their deepest need there were diverted from their cause the enormous sums of money that had been raised for their succor, multitudes of brother warriors, whose swords were sadly missed amid the daily menaces of their foes, and the active sympathies, if not even the prayers, of their coreligionists at home. Dire calamities also fell upon them, which no human arm could have prevented. The plague had followed the terrible Egyptian famine of 1200, and spread its pall far to the East. Earthquakes of the most terrific sort changed the topography of many places; tidal waves obliterated shore-lines; fortresses, like those of Baalbec and Hamah, tottered to their fall upon the unsteady earth; stately temples, which had monumented the art and religion of antiquity, became heaps of ruins; Nablous, Damascus, Tyre, 297Tripoli, and Acre were shaken down. It would seem that only the common prayers of Christians and Mussulmans averted the calamity from Jerusalem, the city that was sacred in the creed of both.

Such sums of money as the cries for help brought from Europe were expended first in repairing the walls of Acre, into which service the Christians forced their Moslem prisoners. Among the chain-gangs thus set at work was the famous Sa’di, the greatest of Persian poets, almost equally noted for his eloquence as a preacher and for his adventures as a traveller.

Amaury, King of Jerusalem, died, leaving his useless sceptre in the hands of his wife, Isabella, whose demise passed it on to her daughter, Mary, by her former husband, Conrad of Tyre. Such were the burdens of the unsupported throne that none of the warriors in the East ventured to assume the responsibility of the new queen’s hand. A husband was sought for her in Europe. John of Brienne was nominated by Philip of France for the hazardous nuptials. John had been a monk, but his adventurous and martial spirit soon tired of the cowl. He abandoned the austerities of a professional saint for the freedom of the camp and the dangers of the field. The romantic perils of wedding the dowerless queen attracted him.

Rumors of a new crusade of gigantic proportions led Malek-Ahdel to propose a renewal of the truce with the Christians, which, though continually broken, was in his estimation safer than an openly declared war. The Hospitallers approved peace. This was 298sufficient to make their rivals, the Templars, eager for the reverse, and the majority of the knights and barons flew to arms against one another.

John of Brienne reached Acre with a meagre following of three hundred knights. His nuptials with the young Queen Mary were rudely disturbed by the Moslems, who besieged Ptolemaïs and swarmed in threatening masses around Acre. In their straits the Christians again appealed to Europe; but Christendom was fully occupied with contentions within its own borders. France was at war with England to repossess the fair provinces which the Angevine kings had wrested from her along the Atlantic. At the same time she was pressing her conquests beyond the Rhine against the Germans. Germany was divided by the rival claimants for the imperial sceptre, Otho and Philip of Swabia.

A more serious diversion of interest from the affairs of Palestine was due to the crusade under Simon de Montfort against the Albigenses, whose record makes one of the blackest pages of human history. (See Dr. Vincent’s volume in this series.) The Saracens in Spain were also threatening to overturn the Christian kingdom of Castile, and were defeated only with tremendous effort, which culminated in the great battle of Tolosa (1212).

In 1212 or 1213 occurred what is known as the Children’s Crusade, a movement that doubtless has been greatly exaggerated by after writers, but the facts of which illustrate the ignorance and credulity, as well as the adventurous, not to say marauding, spirit of the times. If in our day the free circulation 299of stories relating the adventures of cutthroats and robbers inflames the passions and engenders lawless conceits in the young, we may imagine that reports of the bloody work done by persecutors of the Albigenses, dastardly and cruel deeds, which were applauded by Pope and people, could not but make a similar impression upon the callow mind of childhood in the middle ages. Boys practised the sword-thrust at one another’s throats, built their pile of fagots about the stake of some imaginary heretic, and charged in mimic brigades upon phantom hosts of Infidels. It needed only the impassioned appeals of unwise preachers to start the avalanche thus trembling on the slope. It was proclaimed that supernal powers waited to strengthen the children’s arms. The lads were all to prove Davids going forth against Goliaths; the girls would become new Judiths and Deborahs without waiting for their growth. It was especially revealed that the Mediterranean from Genoa to Joppa would be dried up so that these children of God could pass through it dry-shod.

From towns and cities issued bands of boys and girls, who in response to the question, “Whither are you going?” replied, “To Jerusalem.” “Boy preachers” were universally encouraged to proclaim the crusade. One lad, named Stephen, announcing that Christ had visited him, led hundreds away. A boy named Nicholas, instigated by older persons, deluded a company into crossing the Alps, where many starved, were killed, or kidnapped. The real leaders, however, seem to have been men and women of disorderly habits, who in an age of impoverished 300homes readily adopted the lives of tramps, and used the pitiable appearance of the children to secure the charities of the towns and cities they passed through. Saracen kidnappers also took advantage of the craze to lure children on board of ships by promise of free passage to the Holy Land. Thus entrapped, they were sold as slaves for Eastern fields or harems. Seven vessels were loaded with Christian children at Marseilles. Five of the ships reached Egypt, consigned to slave merchants; two were wrecked off the isle of St. Peter, where Pope Gregory IX. afterwards caused a church to be built in memory of the victims.

CHAPTER XL.
DISASTER OF MARIETTA.

Pope Innocent III. comforted himself for this “slaughter of the innocents” by making the incident the basis of a new appeal for the relief of Palestine. “These children,” said he, “reproach us with being asleep while they were flying to the assistance of the Holy Land.” In his exhortation to Europe the Holy Father ventures to interpret the mysterious prediction of the Book of Revelation regarding the duration of the Antichrist symbolized by the beast. Some Protestants have presumptuously applied the figures to the destiny of the Roman Church. Innocent regarded Mohammedanism as meant, and, counting from the hejira of Mohammed (622) to his own day, announced to the people, in the name of God, whose infallible vicegerent he was, “The power of Mohammed draws towards its end; for that power is nothing but the beast of the Apocalypse, which is 302not to extend beyond the number of six hundred and sixty-six years, and already six hundred have been accomplished.” Europe was asked to believe that the marshalled nations of the East, then so threatening, would only furnish the funeral cortège of Antichrist, after which the world would enter upon its millennium of peace.

Every crowned head, every noble, every knight, every city, every church, received its especial appeal from Rome to offer men, ships, money, and incessant prayers for this last holy adventure. With equal assurance Innocent addressed letters to the sultans of Damascus and Cairo, giving them an opportunity to voluntarily restore the holy places before the final vengeance of the Lord. Ardent orators, like Cardinal Courçon and James of Vitri (an original chronicler of these events), went everywhere, firing the passions of the people. Philip Augustus appropriated for the project two and a half per cent. of the territorial revenue of France. King John of England promised to make amends for his many sins by taking the cross; he was the more inclined to this from the fact that his barons had just wrenched from him Magna Charta, and the Pope had put him under excommunication; his pretence of piety was the policy of the moment. Frederick II. of Germany, to secure the papal favor in his contest with Otho for the imperial throne, assumed the rôle of a crusader.

The movement was, however, halted by the affairs in France. England, Flanders, Holland, Boulogne, with the aid of the German Otho, invaded France. At the battle of Bouvines (1214) this combination 303was overthrown, and the French monarchy, with restored territory and prestige, assumed the independence which it maintained until recent times.

In 1215 the Lateran Council issued the grand order for the crusading expedition. The Pope and cardinals taxed themselves a tenth of their income, and all ecclesiastics a twentieth. So great was the excitement for war that two astounding phenomena were observed: luminous crosses appeared in the heavens, and the Troubadours sang only of battle, no longer of love. Innocent III. proposed to head the crusade in person, but when his example had wrought its full influence discreetly retired from the leadership. Shortly after he died, and Honorius III. came into the pontificate.

In 1217 the mighty armament was in motion. Andrew II., King of Hungary, was designated chief. Germany, under its representative dukes of Bavaria and Austria, followed in his train. The host was augmented by those from Italy and France and the islands of the Mediterranean. According to the Arabian historian, it was the largest force ever at one time pitted against them in Palestine.

The army landed at Acre. The new soldiers signalled their arrival by an impressive exhibition of their pilgrim zeal. They formed an immense procession. At their head was the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who bore aloft a piece of wood which had been surreptitiously cut from the True Cross at the time it was captured by Saladin at Hattîn. With utmost pomp they passed over the land from the sea to the Jordan, bathed in the waters of the sacred river, and 304lingered to pray amid the ruins on the shores of the Sea of Tiberias. They gathered many relics, and did not hesitate to take as their pious plunder many of the people of the land, whom they brought with them as prisoners to Acre.

No enemy molested them. Malek-Ahdel had advised that the invaders be left to their own dissensions, which, judging from previous observation, were sure to follow as soon as they should attempt to divide the spoil they might take. The martial spirit of the Christians did not resent this idleness, and stagnation of energy bred moral malaria. Camp vices thrived to such an extent that the leaders were forced to drive out the soldiers in search of manly adventures. Mount Tabor, the Mount of Transfiguration, lifted high its head, crowned with Moslem forts in place of the Church of St. Helena and of the two monasteries which had formerly commemorated the tabernacles of Moses and Elias. The crusaders were ordered to capture the holy mountain. That all doubt of Heaven’s favor in the enterprise might be removed, the patriarch read the gospel for the day, first Sunday in Advent, and interpreted the words, “Go ye into the village over against you,” to mean the castle on Tabor.

Led by this high dignitary, who carried the ubiquitous piece of the True Cross, they made the ascent through a shower of Moslem arrows and an avalanche of stones. The defenders at first retired within their citadel, but an unaccountable panic seized the assailants: they deserted their own cause at the moment of victory, and made a disorderly retreat down to the 305plain. Their piety was, however, compensated by the capture of a number of women and children, whom they forced to be baptized. The anticipated dissensions followed. Each leader reproached the others. On Christmas eve a terrific storm swept the camp, which, in the general discouragement, they attributed to the displeasure of Heaven. Lack of provisions forced them to encamp in different neighborhoods—Tripoli, Acre, Mount Carmel, and the plains of Cæsarea. The commander-in-chief, the King of Hungary, returned to Europe, consoling himself for lack of martial laurels by the possession of the head of St. Peter, the hand of St. Thomas, and one of the seven water-jars in which Christ had made water wine at Cana. The sacred relics did not, however, prevent his subsequent excommunication.

This crusade was saved from utter and ignominious failure only by the arrival of fresh enthusiasts from the West. Bands from Friesland and the banks of the Rhine had taken ships on the Baltic and coasted by France and Portugal. They told of the luminous crosses which appeared in the heavens and signalled them by moving towards the East, and how squadrons of angels had fought with them against the Moors on the Tagus.

The courage of their brethren was thus rekindled to venture at the opening of spring (1218) upon an invasion of Egypt. The chronicler tells us of a favorable omen here observed by the crusaders: the water of the Nile, which was sweet to the taste on their arrival, afterwards became salt.

The city of Damietta was guarded by a strong 306tower, which rose from the middle of the Nile, and was connected with the walls by an immense chain which impeded the passage of ships. The crusaders attacked this unavailingly. There were in the host certain skilled mechanics, who, “by the inspiration of the Almighty,” constructed an enormous wooden tower, which floated upon two vessels and overtopped the walls of the great citadel. In vain did the Moslems set fire to this with streams of liquid flame. The prayers of the monks on the shore, together with the “tears of the faithful,” and, we may add, the abundant oblation of the buckets, soon subdued the conflagration. The huge drawbridge which dropped from the top of the floating tower successfully landed upon the walls three hundred brave knights. Their valor, together with the spiritual prowess of the patriarch, who lay stretched on the ground wrestling with the will of Heaven, was resistless, and soon the flag of the Duke of Austria was flying from the ramparts; not, however, until the usual band of celestial knights in white armor had dazzled the eyes of the Moslems, so that they could not see where to strike their foes. This was on August 24th, which, being St. Bartholomew’s day, enabled the crusaders also to see that saint, clad in red, at the head of their celestial assistants.

Mastering the tower of the Nile and breaking the chain which obstructed the channel, the Christian fleet lay close to the walls of the city.

Seventeen months were destined to pass in the siege of Damietta. In September Malek-Ahdel died. He had before formally laid down the chieftainship, 307and divided his realm among his many sons; but his prestige and continually sought counsel made him until his death the virtual head of the Moslem power. He maintained a sumptuous court and a splendid palace, the recesses of which were regarded by the faithful as a sanctuary where Heaven daily blessed its favorite son. The various courts saluted him as “king of kings,” and the camps hailed him as saphadin, the “sword of religion.” His death threw a shadow upon the Moslem world.

Instead of taking advantage of this providence, the Christians seemed to emulate the divisions of their enemies. Many grew weary of the task they had vowed to Heaven, and returned to Europe. The priests pronounced a curse upon the deserters. This malediction was regarded as inspired when it was learned that six thousand of the crusaders from Brittany had been wrecked off the coast of Italy, and that the returning Frieslanders reached their homes only to witness the wrath of the North Sea, which broke the Holland dikes, submerged their richest provinces and cities, and drowned one hundred thousand of the inhabitants.

But new warriors were excited to redeem the opportunity. France and England sent much of their best blood and many of their most famous names. Among the multitude of celebrities was one who was destined to bring the entire crusade to a fatal ending. Cardinal Pelagius was delegated as papal legate. He was a man of arrogance, and asserted his right to supersede even John of Brienne, the King of Jerusalem, in the military command. This position was 308refused him by the soldiery. He at length accomplished his ambition by threatening all who opposed him with excommunication.

The coming of these auxiliaries spurred the Christians to take advantage of contentions among the Moslems and make a forward movement. They crossed from the west bank of the Nile and invested Damietta. The menace reunited the Infidels. Battles were of daily occurrence, in which whole battalions, now of Christians, now of Moslems, were driven into the Nile, and perished.

One beautiful episode redeemed these hellish scenes. St. Francis of Assisi visited the camps; he went among his brethren with consolations for the sick and wounded, his presence redolent with heavenly charity. No labors could weary this man, who already seemed divested largely of his physical nature, and to be sustained only by the power of his inward spirit. His zeal for God led him to visit even the camp of the Moslems. He preached his doctrines before Malek-Kamel, the Sultan of Cairo; he alternately threatened the sultan’s infidelity with the pains of hell, and sought to win his better faith by promises of heaven. Francis proposed to test the truth of either religion by passing with the holiest Moslems through an ordeal of fire. This being declined, he offered himself to the flame, provided that the sultan’s conversion should follow the refusal of fire to burn the representative of the faith of Christ. With courteous words the test was declined. Moslems reverenced insane persons as in some way under a divine influence; Malek-Kamel treated his uninvited 309guest as one of this sort. The Moslem doctors of the law commanded Malek-Kamel to take off the head of the intruder, but the warrior was either too much amused with the simplicity, or too much amazed at the sincerity, of his visitor to harm him, and dismissed him with presents, which, however, Francis’ vow of poverty would not allow him to accept.

Whether persuaded by the holy eloquence of the saint, or by the rumor that Frederick of Germany was approaching with fresh armies, the sultan proposed peace. He offered the flattering condition of giving up Jerusalem to the Christians. The warriors would have assented thus to secure as the reward of their valor that which had been the object of the entire crusade; but Cardinal Pelagius forbade, in the name of the Holy Father, the cessation of arms at any less price than the entire subjugation of the Moslem power.

Damietta was therefore more closely invested; its garrison was reduced to starvation. To prevent possible defection among his miserable soldiers, the commander of Damietta walled up the gates of the city. The Christians made an assault in full force; the rams battered the trembling towers; ladders swarmed with assailants; no one opposed them. Sweeping over the ramparts with naked swords, they found the streets and houses filled with the dead. Of seventy thousand scarcely three thousand of the inhabitants had remained alive. The air was fraught with poisonous stench from the decaying corpses; as the chronicler says, “the dead had killed the living.” 310The crusaders could abide only long enough to gather the booty, and left the city to be cleansed by carrion-birds and the air of heaven.

This temporary success of his policy inflamed the conceit of Cardinal Pelagius. According to his own people, the “King of kings and Lord of lords” had given him the city; “under the guidance of Christ” the soldiers had scaled the walls. The victors took as their reward the rich plunder of the place, and gratefully “baptized all the children who were found alive in the city, thereby giving to God the first-fruit of souls.”

The Moslems, afflicted by these reverses, enlarged their conditions of peace to the yielding up, not only of Jerusalem, but all the Holy Land. The cardinal refused even these terms, and proposed to march to the capture of Cairo, the capital of Egypt. In vain did the military leaders protest against that which they esteemed impracticable in itself, and which, in the event of its success, would leave on their hands a land which they could not hope to defend against the myriads who were swarming from all parts of the Moslem world. The cardinal accused the warriors of timidity and irreligion. This was too much for John of Brienne, who would have dared to sheathe his good sword in the bowels of Lucifer himself. Orders for the ascent of the Nile were given. At the junction of its two branches, the southern extreme of the Delta, the Moslems made their fortified camp, and built what has since been known as the city of Mansourah. The enemy approached; once 311more the sultan offered peace, including now the gift of the Delta, together with the previously offered conditions.

The refusal of this exhausted the patience, not only of the sultan, but seemingly of Heaven also. With the rising of the Nile the Moslems opened the sluices, flooded all the canals of Lower Egypt, and inundated the Christians’ camp. Simultaneously the Moslem ships made their way up through the canals and destroyed the vessels of their foes. The Infidels occupied every rising knoll; “while,” says a letter from the camp, “we were thus caught in the midst of the waters like fish in a net.” In vain did the Christians endeavor to force a battle. Shrewdly retreating from the arbitrament of the sword, the Moslems left the invaders to the destruction which they proclaimed Allah had prepared for His insolent adversaries.

Cardinal Pelagius now begged for the peace he had despised; nor did he stop with the old conditions. He would yield all he had taken or claimed, if only he might be permitted to lead the armies of Europe safely into the walls of distant Acre. This capitulation was reluctantly accepted by the Sultan of Cairo. The haughty cardinal, the brave King John of Brienne, the Duke of Bavaria, and many of the nobles meditated their disgrace as hostages in the hostile camp, while the Christian soldiers were still waiting the will of their conqueror in the marshes. King John of Brienne one day sat down at the feet of the sultan and burst into tears. The Moslem respected his courage and was grieved at the distress which 312seemingly had shaken it. “Why do you weep?” he asked. “To see my brave people perishing with hunger amid the waters.” The sultan immediately provisioned the Christian camp, and sent his own son to conduct the host in safety out of the land they had come to conquer (autumn, 1221).

CHAPTER XLI.
FREDERICK II. AND POPE GREGORY IX.

Seven years elapsed before another attempt worthy of record was made for the recapture of Palestine. Frederick II. (Hohenstaufen) of Germany was its leader; hero it had none.

Frederick was one of the ablest men of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though not meriting the title given him by an English chronicler, “the Wonder of the World.” The grandson of Frederick Barbarossa, son of Henry IV. and Constance of Sicily, he united in his person the strongest traits of German and Italian stock. Born in 1194, at two years of age he was elected king of the Romans, and in his fourth year was crowned King of Sicily. Pope Innocent III. was the guardian of his childhood, and well discharged his duty, if the rare education of Frederick may be taken as evidence. The royal youth mastered Latin, Greek, French, German, and 314knew something of Arabic and Hebrew; he was creditably versed in Saracenic science and arts, as well as in Christian philosophy and scholasticism; he wrote well on the habits of birds, and shared with the Troubadours the joys of the poet’s art; he endowed universities, patronized painters, and encouraged architects. In government he deserves to rank among the empire-builders, for in a narrow age he extended the scope of law for the toleration of Jews and Mohammedans, for the emancipation of peasants from undue oppression at the hands of the upper classes, and for the enlargement of international commerce almost to the line of the modern theory of free trade. His liberality towards Moslems brought him the accusation of harboring in his heart a secret infidelity, which his severity with the Christian schismatics could not entirely dispel.

At the age of eighteen Frederick entered into contest for the imperial throne of Germany, and in 1215, at the age of twenty-one, won the crown of Charlemagne. In order to accomplish this grand object, he had, as a first step, secured the alliance of the Pope. This he did by pledging, among other things, to lead a crusade; but the pressing emergencies of his new crown caused delay from year to year. In 1225 he married Iolante, the daughter of John of Brienne, King of Jerusalem. He at once asserted that John held his crown only in virtue of being the husband of Queen Mary, and this lady having died, her daughter, Iolante, was lawful sovereign. Thus by marriage he annexed to his German title that of King of Jerusalem, and was looked to by 315all for the defence of his new dominion. But two years later (1227) he was still too busy unravelling European complications to absent himself in the distant East.

In this year Gregory IX. ascended the papal throne. While this Pope still retained the faculties and ambition of youth, he had developed also the obstinacy and petulance of old age. By his unwise dealing with the German emperor, and the impolitic assertion of his own capricious will as of divine authority, he may be said to have started the decadence of the papal throne, which in another generation was destined to lose the prestige of the Hildebrandian policy and all prospect of becoming the world monarchy.

On the day of his accession to power Gregory IX. issued a proclamation for all the sovereigns of Christendom to unite in a new crusade, and openly threatened Frederick with his ecclesiastical vengeance if he longer postponed the fulfilment of his vow. He accused the emperor’s delay with being due to luxury, if not sensuality, in living. The former charge probably had in it a measure of truth, for Frederick’s court at Palermo, where he spent more time than in his northern capital, was the centre of gayety, not only among the Christians, but to a certain extent for Mohammedans. Many of the fairest women of Asia and North Africa graced his salons. It might also be imagined of Frederick that his faith was not of that intense and credulous nature which foresaw a heavenly crown awaiting his exploits in the Holy Land. Equally detrimental to his repute for crusading zeal were the courtesies he was exchanging 316with Malek-Kamel, Sultan of Egypt. It was even rumored that he had made alliance with this sultan, pledging help against the rival Sultan of Damascus, on condition of the restoration of Jerusalem.

But the sincerity of Frederick was proved by the gathering of his fleets and the massing of his armaments at Otranto. The fame of his leadership attracted the noblest of Germany. Among them was Ludwig, Landgrave of Thuringia, noted for having won the hand of Elizabeth, daughter of Andrew II. of Hungary, who in her girlhood had attained renown for her asceticism and charities, and died (1231) at the age of twenty-four, to be canonized as the fairest saint of the middle ages. From distant England many came at Frederick’s call, and further impelled by visions of the Saviour on the cross of fire which appeared in that northern sky.

The season was intensely hot, and gendered a fever fatal to the crusaders who were gathered in southern Italy. Among its victims was Ludwig, leaving his faithful spouse to keep his memory revered by her refusal to marry any one of the numerous kings who were attracted to her feet. Many bishops and thousands of pilgrims succumbed to this plague. Frederick sailed, but only to return in three days, seeking hospital in Otranto.

Pope Gregory IX. fulminated against Frederick all the terrors of his personal scorn and ecclesiastical vengeance. From his pulpit he pictured him “breaking all his promises, bursting every bond, trampling underfoot the fear of God, despising all reverence for Jesus Christ, scorning the censures of the church, 317deserting the Christian army, abandoning the Holy Land to unbelievers, to his own disgrace and that of all Christendom withdrawing to the luxury and wonted delights of his kingdom, and seeking to palliate his offence by frivolous excuses of simulated sickness.” Then, while the cathedral bells were clanging a demoniacal accompaniment to what was transpiring beneath them, the clergy stood with lighted torches around the altar. Gregory invoked the eternal curse of God upon his imperial victim. The clergy dashed their torches and extinguished them upon the floor, in token of the “blackness of darkness forever” which should settle upon the emperor’s soul.

The news of this anathema excited the minds of the common people to such a degree that they saw all sorts of signs of Heaven’s disapproval of the crowned Judas; such as bloody crosses, on which the Saviour was dying afresh, “as if laying a complaint before each and every Christian.” Frederick made a quick retort to the papal fulmination, in which he advised all temporal princes to beware of the unscrupulous domination of the Roman hierarchy. He closed a letter to the princes of Europe with these words of an old couplet:

The Pope, having generated a fresh supply of gall, discharged it in an interdict by which all subjects of Frederick should be deprived of the ministrations of religion.

318The emperor, in order to prove the injustice of the Pope’s assault upon him and the falsity of the accusation that he had feigned sickness, prepared to resume the crusade, taking, however, his own time and way. His armaments were repaired. He summoned all the dignitaries of his kingdom to meet him at Baroli (April, 1228). There, in the presence of a vast multitude, he declared his will regarding the succession in the event of his not returning alive, and exhorted his people to live in peace during his absence. The Pope now became not less violent in denouncing the crusade than he had been previously in urging it, on the ground that its leader was excommunicate. He refused to recognize it as a holy war, and stigmatized it as an expedition of piracy.

With a small army of six hundred knights Frederick sailed for Acre (September, 1228). Two Franciscan monks in a swift bark outsped him, and aroused Palestine against the coming of such a champion. The partisans of John of Brienne refused to recognize the kingship of his son-in-law. Templars and Hospitallers were jealous of the new hand in affairs, and refused to serve under him.

Frederick then pursued his old friendship with Malek-Kamel. Speaking Arabic, he discussed with the emirs philosophy and astrology, and sent difficult questions to the sultan, reminding the chroniclers of the converse of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The ladies of the Christian and Moslem courts mingled, say the papal apologists, to the mutual disadvantage of the morals of both. The emperor desired to make a pious pilgrimage to the Jordan. The 319Templars sent a letter to the sultan, suggesting his capture. The sultan delivered the missive into the hands of Frederick.

Such exchange of courtesies was only preliminary to a treaty by which the astuteness of the emperor won the kingdom of Jerusalem without drawing his sword. It was stipulated that Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the Holy City, with the exception of the Temple Mount, which was occupied by the mosque of Omar, should be given to the Christians for ten years. In a letter to the King of England Frederick wrote how, “in a few days, by a miracle rather than by strength, that business hath been brought to a conclusion which for a length of time past many chiefs and rulers of the world, among the multitude of nations, have never been able till now to accomplish by force, however great, nor by fear.”

The fury of the papal party knew no bounds. That the Infidel should retain a spot for worship was in their eyes a sacrilege; that a man under papal displeasure should be recognized as king in Jerusalem was an impiety which Heaven should punish. The city of Jerusalem was put under the ban. Pilgrims were forbidden by the Holy Father to pray at the sepulchre of our Lord, for which purpose, with the Pope’s encouragement, they had left their homes, and in many cases sacrificed their earthly all.

Frederick repaired in great state to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for his coronation (March 18, 1229). No priest ventured to celebrate the mass or pronounce a blessing upon the accursed of the church; the silence was unbroken except by the clang of 320armor; the images of the apostles were veiled that they might not look upon the reprobate. Frederick took the crown from the altar with his own hands and placed it upon his head; then was read in his name a formal exculpation of the Pope for his persecution, on the ground of the Holy Father’s ignorance of his motives and conduct; he also announced his humiliation before God and His vicar for his crown. With more catholicity he visited the same day the mosque of Omar. A muezzin, whose station was near the emperor’s house, by order of the kadi omitted the usual call to prayer, lest it should give offence to his Christian Majesty. Frederick gently rebuked the Moslem official: “You are wrong to neglect, on my account, your duty, your law, and your religion. If you should visit my realm, you would find no such respectful deference.” A priest had brought into the mosque a copy of the Gospels. Frederick rebuked this as an insult to his allies, saying, “Here we are all the servants of the sultan; it is he that has restored to us our churches.” The emperor then retired to Acre. The papal interdict upon all people among whom he should find abode followed him. The churches of Acre were unopened; the sick were refused consolation in their homes, and the dead were buried, without funeral service, in the fields.

At this juncture news from Europe urged the emperor’s return home. John of Brienne, his father-in-law, was ravaging the kingdom of Naples. The Pope was filling all Christendom with denunciations, and plotting that the imperial crown itself might be 321taken from the head of the man who, by the treaty with the Moslems, had effected “reconciliation of Christ and Belial.” The Moslem world simultaneously rang with as bitter denunciation of the act of Malek-Kamel in surrendering the sacred city.

Thus, amid the universal confusion produced by his aim to establish peace, Frederick returned to the West. With a popularity which the ban of Rome could not destroy, after crushing his enemies in the field he engaged in the work of giving to his people better laws, and stimulating the new civilization which was everywhere appearing as the Dark Ages were wearing away.

With the retirement of Frederick from Palestine the Christians were reduced to utmost extremity. Notwithstanding the treaty, constant collisions occurred between the Moslem and Christian bigots. The great bell of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre often rang its alarm. The pilgrims generally sought safety in the fortress of David, or in more obscure retreats in the neighborhood of Jerusalem; their cries again afflicted their brethren in Europe.

The Pope convoked an assembly at Spoleto, at which it was determined to ignore Frederick’s truce with the Sultan of Cairo, and renew the war. Special agents of the holy see visited the various courts; monks and orators went everywhere, preaching the necessity of dyeing the cross anew in the blood of unbelievers. The followers of St. Francis and St. Dominic were diverted from their legitimate and honorable work of charity to act as the collectors of 322a war fund. Troubadours, headed by Thibaut V., King of Navarre, sang:

and urged in rhythmic piety the exchange of earthly amours for the service of the Virgin:

The war upon the helpless Albigenses having come to an end from the extermination of its victims, many soldiers were impatient of new service to appease their sharply whetted appetite for blood. Thus a multitude was enrolled for a new crusade.

But a diverting cry came from a different direction. The Latin empire at Constantinople was falling. First Lascaris and then Vataces had for years kept the Greeks well in hand, and they now assailed the walls of the capital. John of Brienne was called to the tottering throne. As everywhere during his long career, so now at the age of eighty years this man showed splendid qualities on the field, but died without effectually driving away the foe. His son-in-law, Baldwin, succeeded him to a barren sceptre, and visited Europe in piteous entreaty for help.

This call would have been sufficient in itself to divert much of the energy of the crusaders; but the Pope, now far gone in senility, further embarrassed affairs by commanding the warriors to return to their homes. This order went far towards depreciating the Pope in popular reverence. Those assembled at Lyons replied to the papal message: “Whence arises this fickleness in the Roman court? According to 323the promises of the preachers we have prepared ourselves in God’s behalf; we have sold or pledged our lands, taken leave of friends, sent our money to the Holy Land in advance. Why do our pastors change their tone and rise against us?” With difficulty were they restrained from doing violence to the papal agents. The Pope, however, remained inexorable, and threatened all who proceeded with the crusade that “they should not enjoy the indulgence for their sins which had been granted them.” Some urged the sacredness of their crusaders’ vow. This scruple the Pope readily turned to the account of his treasury by absolving such from their pledge upon payment of a sum of money equal to that required to provision themselves for the voyage, whence “great scandal and schism arose among the people.”

The Emperor Frederick also proposed that the expedition should be postponed until, with the rallied forces of his empire, he might give it better assurance of success. Pope and emperor revived their strifes, and Italy was turned into pandemonium. A few of the more ardent managed to escape the entanglements at home for more honorable adventures in the East. The King of Navarre, the dukes of Brittany and Burgundy, reached Syria (August, 1239) and performed exploits sufficient to more thoroughly enrage, but not to awe, the Moslems. In 1240 Richard of Cornwall, with a band of English, sailing in spite of the Pope’s prohibition, landed at Acre, made several raids through Turkish territory, and returned, having gained nothing but a continuance of the truce with the sultan.

By a strange providence the sacred places of Palestine were destined to fall for a while into other hands than any of the former great contestants, Christian, Saracen, or Turk.

The most astounding events of the thirteenth century were in connection with the great Tartar irruption. The Mogul hosts under Genghis Khan, or “king of kings,” had broken eastward across the Great Wall of China, and poured a tide of desolation over that ancient empire. As the bloody waves returned, they moved with undiminished force westward and southward, flooding all Turkestan, and all lands to the borders of India and the Persian Gulf. These armies, numbering seven hundred thousand warriors, courageous, remorseless, and cruel as tigers, were met by five hundred thousand under Mohammed, Sultan of Carismia. But even this latter tremendous host could not withstand the impact of the Tartars. Under Octai, son of Genghis Khan, they crossed the Volga and conquered vast sections of Russia, laying 325Moscow and Kiew in ashes. Poland fell next. Even the Baltic monumented the fury of the Tartars with a circle of ruined towers and devastated country which marked its shores.

Matthew Paris describes the terror these Tartars inspired even in England, where they were thought to be “a people of monstrous shape, drinking blood warm from the veins of their victims, eating raw flesh, even of human beings, mounted upon enormous horses, which fed upon leaves and trees.” Their home was presumed to be the Caspian Mountains, the tops of which God had united and thus shut them in, until now they were let loose to be the scourge of mankind. The extreme terror spread by the rumor of their coming was such that the herring fisheries off Yarmouth were abandoned, lest the sailors should be caught by these monsters, who could sweep the waves with their ox-hide boats. Their skill in swimming was of such renown that the lone fisherman of Friesland was alert lest he should “catch a Tartar.”

At the battle of Liegnitz the prowess of Europe proved impotent against the Tartar invasion which swept Hungary. Settled communities were annihilated; nomadic peoples sought safety in migrating.

The Carismians, beaten back by the Tartars, spread themselves through Asia Minor and Syria; but these fugitives were almost as terrible a menace as their pursuers had been. They carried with them the spoil of the lands they traversed. Dreading death less than the disgrace of retreat, trained to neither give nor take quarter, waving from their spear-heads the hair of the slaughtered, they assaulted all peoples, 326Mussulmans and Christians alike. These nations were forced by the new menace to lay aside their ancient animosities and unite in a struggle for existence against the common foe.

The Sultan of Cairo, however, deemed that his policy lay in a different direction, and made alliance with the invaders, promising to them the free spoil of Palestine in exchange for the immunity of his Egyptian possessions. Twenty thousand Carismian horsemen ravaged Tripoli and Galilee and appeared suddenly before Jerusalem. The inhabitants fled; the few who remained were indiscriminately massacred. Finding nothing left to appease the appetite of their swords, the conquerors unfurled the banner of the cross from the walls and rang the bells of the churches, thus luring back to the city a multitude of the fugitives, upon whom they satiated their cruelty. Seven thousand of these helpless creatures perished at the gates. Not satisfied with the spoil of the living, the Carismians rifled the abodes of the dead. Sepulchres which had been respected by the Moslem occupants for a century were ruthlessly despoiled. The contents of the alleged tomb of Christ, together with those of the kings of Jerusalem from the days of Godfrey, were given to the flames.

The Christian and Moslem armies massed against this remorseless foe in the neighborhood of Gaza. For two days there raged as fearful carnage as has ever dyed the pages of history; but nothing could stay this host of fiends. Thirty thousand men, who had entered the battle with prayers in the name of Jesus or Mohammed, perished or were taken prisoners. 327But four Templars, twenty-six Hospitallers, and three Teutonic Knights remained to tell the story of their useless valor. The heroism of Gautier of Brienne, Lord of Jaffa, deserves to be chronicled. Captured by the enemy, he was fastened upon a cross and brought close to the walls of the town which the Carismians were besieging. He was offered his life on condition of his counselling the place to surrender. To the people who thronged the walls he cried with a loud voice, “Your duty is to fight; mine is to die for you and Jesus Christ.”

But the Carismians, though they were able to conquer, had no ability to hold their conquests. Like most semicivilized hordes, they reaped what they found, but had no enterprise to sow again for other harvests. They quickly quarrelled with their ally, the Sultan of Cairo. New combinations were made against them, and in a few years they disappeared from history, merged, doubtless, with other peoples whose home lands they shared.

CHAPTER XLIII.
ST. LOUIS.

The news of the Carismian invasion of Palestine reduced Europe to a condition of panic. It came on the heels of other adversities, which had shaken the stoutest hearts. The Latin empire at Constantinople, as we have noted, was again on the verge of falling into the hands of the Greeks. The Tartars were ravaging the Danube, and threatening the domain of the Emperor Frederick II. Terror paralyzed trade, travel, and social intercourse everywhere; even in Italy and along the borders of France fear fed the imagination that an army of demi-demons was about to appear. The rustling of the woods, the soughing of the winds, forest fires, the dust raised by storms, strange cloud shapes on the horizon, were omens, if not the signs, of the advance of this horde let loose from hell. Pope Innocent IV. called a council at Lyons. 329In his opening address he spoke of the five wounds of the Saviour, which he likened to five griefs that afflicted him as the Vicegerent of Christ. These were the Tartar menace, the Greek schism, the Carismian conquest of Palestine, the relaxation of ecclesiastical discipline and progress of heresy, and, finally, as if it were the climax of the woes of Christendom, the obduracy of the Emperor Frederick II. in opposing the papal schemes. The Holy Father could weep over the wickedness of Tartars, Carismians, and Moslems, but he could only rage against Frederick. His spirit communicated itself to his prelates. Under his direction they passed resolutions advising the Germans to dig trenches and build walls against the Tartars; they also calmly proposed a crusade against the Infidels; but, with more evidence of deep feeling, they bent to the floor, dashed out the lights of their candles, and repeated with sepulchral voices the amen to the papal anathema of the foremost Christian monarch in the world. The Pope’s fulmination concluded with these words: “I forbid any, under pain of excommunication, to henceforth yield him obedience. I command the electors to elect another emperor, and I reserve to myself the right of disposing of his kingdom of Sicily.” This was the glory of the so-called Ecumenical Council of Lyons.

Frederick, on hearing of the outrage perpetrated upon him, called for his crown, and, placing it upon his head, exclaimed; “There it is; and before it shall be wrested from me my enemies shall know the terror of my arms. Let this pontiff tremble, who has broken every tie that bound me to him.” From 330that day, as history shows, the popes lost power ever again to lead united Europe.

But for the pious zeal of one man, it is not probable that another crusading host would ever have set out against the Moslem.

The hero of the seventh crusade was Louis IX., the “Good St. Louis” of France. He was the son of Louis VIII., who, Guizot says, “added to the history of France no glory, save that of having been the son of Philip Augustus, the husband of Blanche of Castile, and the father of St. Louis.”

Blanche of Castile was a woman remarkable for her personal beauty and queenly bearing. She knew how to unite dignity of mien and elegance of estate with that suavity which wins the hearts of all. According to a contemporary, Matthew Paris, she was “the most discreet woman of her time, with a mind singularly quick and penetrating, and with a man’s heart to leaven her woman’s sex and ideas; personally magnanimous, of indomitable energy, sovereign mistress in all the affairs of her age, worthy to be compared with Semiramis, the most eminent of her sex.” The only weakness remembered of Queen Blanche was one which might be attributed to the intensity of her maternal affection. She was rudely jealous of Marguerite when the latter became wife of her son Louis, and resented the least absorption of her son’s attention and love. She was possessed of decided ability for government, and at the death of her husband, Louis VIII. (1226), assumed the direction of affairs as the guardian of her son, then a lad of eleven years.

331Louis IX. is described as very handsome, his features of almost feminine delicacy, his hair light, long, and flowing. He was extremely courteous, gentle, and companionable. One might have suspected weakness from the softness of his manners, until it was observed that he maintained the same quiet demeanor while shrewdly watching the chicanery of the court and while planning the most warlike and desperate expeditions against his foes. When La Marche rebelled and insulted his Majesty, Louis made no retort, but deliberated regarding him with his counsellors without apparent resentment, and laid plans so shrewd and far-reaching that they conquered both the rebel’s arms and hatred. The kings of France had always been at variance, often at swords’ points, with the great feudal barons of the realm; but in 1243 Louis made such arrangement with them as won their complete fidelity.

The moral qualities of Louis IX., as well as his repute for sound judgment, led to his selection by foreigners to arbitrate their disputes, as when Henry III. of England and his barons submitted their differences to the French king’s opinion. He was by impulse and principle a philanthropist, loving the people of all conditions. The sick domestics of the palace were often nursed by the royal hand. Wherever he went his servants were ordered to distribute sufficient money to provide for the needs of one hundred poor persons, that the people might not feel the shadow of royalty without its sunshine. The chroniclers delight in picturing the monarch under the broad tree, listening to the complaints of a crowd of 332his humblest subjects. That justice and mercy might extend beyond his personal supervision, he appointed “restitution offices,” where the best of men granted rehearing of any case in which a worsted litigant deemed himself injured by the letter of the law. This, perhaps, is the first institution in the spirit of our modern courts of equity. During an illness, in which he thought he might die, he summoned his son Louis and said, “Fair son, I pray thee make thyself beloved of the people of thy kingdom, for verily I would rather a Scot should come and govern our people well and loyally than have thee govern them ill.”

The piety of Louis shone in his care of religious houses and in the establishment of hospitals, especially for leprosy, a disease which was brought into Europe by pilgrims returning from the East. Churches were multiplied and ornamented, for, said the monarch, “the most sure means to avoid perishing like the impious is to love and enrich the place in which dwells the glory of the Lord.”

It is not to the discredit of the personal character of Louis IX. that he was not entirely free from the bigotry and superstition of his age. He treated heresy as of the nature of rebellion, and did not stay the heavy hand of persecution in some instances. He especially revered relics. When a nail, which was believed to have been one of those that pierced the hands of Jesus, was temporarily missing from its casket, he cried, “I would rather that the best city in my kingdom had been swallowed up in the earth.” With joy he paid a large price to Baldwin II., the 333Latin King of Constantinople, for our Saviour’s crown of thorns. The “Holy Chapel,” which he built to shield the precious relics, still remains one of the finest monuments of mediæval times. In private life Louis would have preferred the daily routine of a monk to the diversions of the court. He prided himself on the hard haircloth worn next his skin as a token of perpetual humility more than he cared for his royal robe. At his waist hung, instead of silken tassels, a scourge of iron chains, which drew blood from his back once a week. He never laughed on a Friday. Except where the dignity of his throne required public defence, Louis scarcely maintained his royal self-respect, so meek did he try to be. A common woman once brazenly said to him, “You are unfit for a king of France, fit only to be a king of monks and priests.” Louis humbly replied, “You say the truth,” and with a smile gave her a handful of money.

As early as 1239, when Louis IX. was twenty-four years of age, he manifested great zeal for the crusades, and sent Amaury de Montfort to fight as his personal representative on the field. Five years later (1244) he was afflicted with such serious illness that at one moment he was believed to be dead. The watchers were startled by his sepulchral voice: “He, by God’s grace, hath visited me—He who cometh from on high hath recalled me from among the dead.” Reviving from his swoon, he bade the Bishop of Paris place upon his shoulder the cross of the voyage over the sea. Three years passed, during which he seemingly forgot the vow, but an incident 334proved that the holy enthusiasm still burned in his heart. Allusion being made one day to the cross he wore as having been assumed at a moment when he was of wavering mind through bodily weakness, the king instantly undid the emblem from his shoulder and gave it to the Bishop of Paris; he then added, “Now assuredly I am in my senses. He that knoweth all things knoweth that until that cross is replaced upon my shoulder no food shall enter my lips.”

At this time Pope Innocent IV. was attempting to arouse Europe to a new crusade, but since his greater zeal was for a crusade against Frederick II., the holy war lacked recruits. Germany was in the midst of the civil dissension which Innocent had stirred up by acknowledging his subservient tool, Henry, Landgrave of Hesse, as emperor. Italy was rent with the contention between Guelph and Ghibelline, fostered by the same mistaken judgment of Innocent. England was at war with Scotland and Wales. Frederick II., in order to avert the thickening disasters from his realm, proposed to personally abdicate the imperial throne in favor of his son Conrad, and himself to lead an army to Palestine, with an oath never to return, if even this personal sacrifice would appease the papal resentment. Louis IX. besought the Holy Father to accede to this proposal and to assume a different attitude towards a Christian monarch, but Innocent was obdurate to all entreaties. The church of Christ was ruled by the hatred and wrath of one who, above all men, should have remembered the Lord’s prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The penalty 335of breaking the precepts of human wisdom and divine charity at length fell upon him. The Pope lost the sympathy of the kingdoms; even the French nobles, though jealous of Germany, formed a league for their defence against papal encroachments. This, if not the origin of, greatly favored the movement for Gallican liberties, which has continued ever since.

Louis IX. took upon himself the duty of leading the crusade; he convoked a parliament of the dignitaries of his realm, and by his eloquence moved the princes and nobles to follow his example. His queen, Marguerite, with many of her proudest ladies, assumed the cross. Among the warriors was the Prince de Joinville, the endeared companion and adviser of the king, to whose prolific and graceful pen the world is indebted for the history of Louis’s time and personal adventures. Those who did not at once volunteer to join the crusade were variously persuaded by the zeal of the monarch. It was the custom for the French kings at certain solemnities to present their courtiers with mantles, which they put on in his presence and wore afterwards as the sign of royal favor. Louis observed the custom on Christmas eve. As the guests marched from the shaded robing-room to the lighted chapel they were amazed to discover the cross of voyage sewed upon every man’s shoulder. The courtiers laughed at the joke perpetrated upon them, but, feeling its significance, yielded to the royal will and honored their investment by taking the crusaders’ vow.

The example of the king affected the entire population. In every village was seen the procession of 336volunteers seeking the blessing of the altar and enrolling themselves under their lords. Whole territories were thus stripped of their defenders and even of the tillers of the soil; rising arts were bereft of their workmen. France was despoiling itself for the sake of an idea. Modern utilitarianism may deride it, but our sentiment applauds where our judgment condemns. It was indeed still the “age of faith.”

In June, 1248, Louis took up the pilgrim staff together with the oriflamme of France. He left the kingdom to the care of his mother, Blanche, and with his wife set out upon what proved to be one of the most romantic and tragic of adventures. At Lyons he made confession to the Pope, whom he again unavailingly entreated to be at peace with Frederick. As the cavalcade was nearing Avignon his men were assaulted, and begged to be permitted to avenge the insult by an attack upon that city. “No,” replied the king; “I go from France not to avenge my own injuries, but those of my Lord Jesus Christ.” At Marseilles a similar outrage occurred. The king refused to retaliate, saying, “God forbid that Satan should prevail, for he is angered at our expedition and is seeking to put obstacles in the way.”

In August he set sail from Aigues-Mortes, a place he had purchased and in whose harbor he had prepared his fleet; he here diminished his host by discharging with abundant recompense all such as he deemed not of the right sort either in character or pious purpose. As the French had no experience in navigation, the movement of the fleet was committed to Genoese captains. Joinville’s experience 337will be appreciated by many landsmen: “A great fool is he who, having any sin on his soul, places himself in such danger; for if he goes to sleep at night he cannot be certain he shall not find himself at the bottom of the sea in the morning.” Landing in Cyprus, the expedition was warmly received by the king of the island, but found scanty supply of provisions. Louis appealed to the Venetians, who sent him much corn and wine. Frederick II., learning of the crusaders’ need, also sent supplies. Louis replied with thanks to the emperor, and sent another appeal to the Pope to forego his wrath upon so generous a friend to the cause of the Master; but it evoked no compassion in the relentless heart of the pontiff.

Louis was prevailed upon to spend the winter in Cyprus, under pledge of the Cypriotes to accompany him in the spring. Luxury brought relaxation of discipline and all its accompanying vices. This was followed by a pest, which caused the death of two hundred and fifty knights. During the winter there arrived an embassy of Tartars, who announced the conversion to Christianity of one of their great princes, and solicited alliance with the French. Louis apparently credited the story, and sent to the Tartar chief a scarlet tent, in the canvas of which were wrought in silken letters many texts of Scripture, which it was hoped might assist the convert’s meditation. The embassage proved to be a ruse—doubtless an attempt to spy out the destination and power of the crusaders.

A more significant overture was received from the 338Masters of the Templars and Hospitallers, who proposed, rather than war, to open negotiations with the Sultan of Cairo, who might be disposed to grant more than the Christians could wrest from him. This Louis regarded as an insult to his prowess and vow.

It had been determined to strike the enemy in Egypt. Of the wisdom of this project few were persuaded. The Arabian writers speak of it as showing an imbecile mind. Egypt was at this time governed by Negmeddin, son of Malek-Kamel, the conqueror of the Christians in their former attempt at Damietta. This chieftain had united in his hand all the Moslems from the Nile to the Euphrates. Aware of the plans of the coming invaders, he massed a great fleet to descend the Nile and meet the fleet of the Christians, and an army of commensurate proportions to guard the banks.

The crusaders sailed from Cyprus with eight hundred vessels; these carried not only warriors and implements of battle, but many artisans and vast material for establishing a colony, which project is regarded even by those who deprecate the military assault as showing the wide statesmanship of the French king. A storm scattered the fleet, driving many ships against the coast of Syria, and compelling Louis to return to Cyprus with the loss of half his armament.

A second attempt was more successful, and the fleet approached the walls of Damietta. Joinville dilates upon the magnificent spectacle: the sea covered for miles with the ships, whose topmasts gleamed with the sign of the cross; the mouth of the Nile 339guarded by the vessels of the Moslem; the shores lined with the multitude of warriors in various accoutrements, drawn from all the lands of the Infidel; the very sky resounding with their pagan cries and the noise of their trumpets and drums.

At break of the next day the French began the assault. Queen Marguerite’s bark was alone left at a distance, whence she might watch the fight. The knights stood, lance in hand, beside their horses on the broad barges, some of which were propelled by as many as three hundred rowers. At word of command the fleet seemed to be lifted by the innumerable oars and to be fairly hurled upon the shore. Before they could land the daylight became obscured with showers of arrows, javelins, and stones, that poured upon them from the banks. For a moment the fleet was retarded by the deluge of missiles that smote the rowers, but the king’s quick command redoubled their strokes. As the vessels grounded on the beach he himself led the assault, leaping into the sea shoulder-deep with sword in hand. The whole army emulated his heroism, and with the cry, “Montjoie! St. Denis!” plunged into the water. The attack was as when the sea itself assails the land with tidal wave. The Moslems were driven back. The crusaders completed their array on solid ground, but scarcely were they in battle order before the Moslem cavalry rode down upon them with the noise and speed of a sirocco from the neighboring desert. Amid the terrible mêlée Louis bent his knees a moment on the sands, anew giving himself to the will of Heaven, then dashed into the thickest of the fight. The 340shore ran with rills of blood, which incarnadined the sea. Steadily the oriflamme of France mounted the beach. The war-galleys made an equally furious assault upon the Moslem navy. With the impetuous ramming of the tough prows of the French vessels many a ship filled with Egyptian warriors was sent to the bottom. The cross gained the mouth of the river, up which its defenders fled. By nightfall the coast and both banks of the Nile had been gained, and under the stars of Egypt the Christian camp resounded with the Te Deum and shouts of victory.

The joy of the Christians was soon mingled with wonder. The horizon to the south of them suddenly seemed on fire. The scouts, approaching Damietta in the early dawn, discovered that its walls were like the crater of some vast volcano pouring up clouds of smoke shot through with flashes of flame. The gates of the town were wide open. Entering cautiously, they found the streets filled with newly slaughtered multitudes. It would seem that the panic of the Moslems had left them neither heart nor wit for the defence of their stronghold. In the blindness of their rage they had put to death multitudes of Christians, and the Christians, in the frenzy of their despair, had slain their Moslem neighbors. Fakr Eddin, the commandant, had given orders to fire the houses, mosques, and fortifications, consuming everything, that the crusaders might not profit by their victory.

The Christians upon entering the city found little spoil to tempt their rapacity, and were easily persuaded to celebrate their conquest with the services 341of religion. King Louis marched at the head of a grand procession to the great mosque, which they solemnly consecrated to the worship of the Virgin Mary. The Sultan of Cairo had been prevented by illness from personally taking part in the battle. He expressed his displeasure at the defeat of his soldiers by ordering the beheading of fifty-four men of the garrison of Damietta. But the display of vengeance upon the helpless could not restore his lost prestige in the presence of a gigantic enemy.

Queen Marguerite established her court in Damietta. The army encamped without the walls. All gave themselves up to enjoyment, as if a single defeat of the foe had been its annihilation. Instead of following up the advantage gained, it was determined to await the gathering of the ships scattered by the storm, and for the arrival of a French contingent under the king’s brother, who desired to also share in the conquest. Inaction produced the usual consequences in the camp. Vice reigned in the very proximity of the king’s quarters, which he was as powerless to prevent as monarchs of that age generally were to cleanse the slums that crept close to their palaces. The leaders fell to quarrelling over the scanty spoil of Damietta, and even disputed its possession by the sovereign. The soldiers robbed the traders who came into the camp, and soon prevented even the supply of comforts from this source. Foray parties brought in the Egyptian women they captured, and established harems, which had not even the screens of Oriental custom. The king’s authority fell into total disregard.

342There was also strife between the English and the French. William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, excited jealousy by his impetuous and successful enterprises, in one of which he captured a stronghold near Alexandria, together with many women belonging to noble Egyptian families. In another raid he seized a richly laden caravan. The French disputed the possession of his booty. The Count d’Artois was especially envious of the renown of his fellow-warrior, and seized a portion of the spoil in the name of Louis. When the king hesitated to order its restoration, fearing to excite division in his immediate family, Earl William declared to the royal face, “You are not then a king, since you are not able to administer justice.” He left the camp and retired to Acre. The Count d’Artois added insult by exclaiming, “Now the army of the noble French is well purged of these tailed Englishmen”—alluding to a rumor that, as punishment for the murder of Thomas à Becket, the people of the British Isles had begun to develop the caudal appendage in proof that they were of “their father, the devil.”

During these dissensions the lines of the encampment were left without any systematic defence, and were constantly raided by parties of swift Bedouin riders, who made their assault as the sudden dust-clouds of Libya overwhelm the traveller and quickly disappear again in their kindred sands. Carismian adventurers were also lured by the sultan’s promise of a golden bezant for every Christian head, and half as much for a right hand, and a fifth for a foot. They dashed upon the detached groups, or stole 343secretly by night into the tents, and bore away their prize, leaving the mutilated bodies of the knights to tell of their deed. The sultan, Negmeddin, knowing that disease was hastening his end, redeemed the time by the incessant activity of his subalterns. Mansourah, at the junction of the branches of the Nile, soon presented the aspect of an impregnable circle of fortifications.

The arrival of the king’s brother, the Count of Poitiers, revived the martial ardor of the French; and it was decided to attack the Egyptian capital, Cairo, or Babylon (Babloon), as it was then called. The majority of the crusaders supposed this place to be the Babylon of the Scriptures, still stored with the immense riches of the ancients, and waiting for them to fulfil upon it the curses of the prophets. There was a rumor that certain renegade Moslems had already entered into a compact to deliver the citadel of Cairo to the advancing Christians. This report even reached Europe, where it was magnified into a detailed account of the capture of the Egyptian capital, and awakened universal joy, to be turned into mourning as the news of the real events arrived.

Negmeddin, Sultan of Cairo, died, but the event was kept secret within the citadel, while Chegger-Eddour, the favorite sultana, issued orders as if her husband were living, until the new sultan, Almoadam Turan Shan, had securely gripped the reins of power.

Meanwhile the French were advancing. On December 19th they reached the canal Aschmoun, a deep and broad stream, which could be crossed only by the crusaders building a causeway. As fast as 344this work extended into the stream the Moslems dug away the opposite bank, and so each day left the canal of unlessened width. The Infidels massed across the canal; their fleet waited in the Nile above. The Christians were forced to make their camp at Mansourah, on the identical site of the terrible disaster thirty years before.

But neither the memories of the spot which monumented the fatal end of the previous crusade, nor the evidences of danger which they saw on every side, could subdue the gayety for which the French even in that age were proverbial. When a knight of rank was being buried his companions interrupted the chanting of the mass for the repose of his soul by their bantering as to which of them was most apt to win the hand of his widow. Joinville notes the punishment that followed this irreverence, in that all of this company perished in the very next battle, and that not one of their widows respected the memory of her husband sufficiently to remain long without marrying one of his better-behaved comrades. On this old battle-ground the crusaders were incessantly assailed with missiles and with Greek fire, whose huge balls, exploding with tremendous detonations, scattered danger far and wide, and destroyed the wooden towers and engines of the French as fast as they could be constructed.

A ford was opportunely discovered not far distant; the French marched by night and prepared to wade the stream at daybreak. Robert, Count d’Artois, the king’s brother, begged the honor of crossing first. He promised to wait on the farther bank until the whole 345army was with him, but the flight of an opposing band of Moslems was too much for the hot head of this youth. In vain did the experienced Masters of the Templars and Hospitallers protest against the foolhardiness of pursuing the retreating band into the very midst of their fortifications and hosts. The Count d’Artois replied with taunts, impugning the loyalty and courage of the older warriors: “They fear that if the country be conquered their domination will cease.” This was too much for the self-restraint of the most cautious. “Raise, then, the banner!” cried the Master of the Templars. William Longsword still remonstrated. The Count d’Artois replied, “What cowardice in these long-tailed English!” To which the Englishman made equal bravado: “We shall be to-day where you will not dare to touch my horse’s tail.” With that all dashed ahead for the desperate assault. The Moslems could not at first withstand this impetuous charge. Fakr Eddin was surprised half dressed, and while endeavoring to rally his troops was slain. On swept the victors, driving the enemy over the plain and following them into Mansourah.

But a keen-eyed leader had taken the place of the fallen Fakr Eddin. Bibars Bendoctar, captain of the Mamelukes, quickly checked the flight, and by skilful manœuvring surrounded the city of Mansourah before the Christians could emerge from its gates. Thus the victors were imprisoned within the walls they had conquered. The main body of Christians, delayed in the crossing, at length followed after their comrades, not knowing of their unhappy fate. Without 346orderly array they spread over the field; a thousand battles were fought instead of one, as band after band met the scattered detachments of the enemy. Before the Christians could plan their engagement Bibars had collected an orderly force and was upon them. Riding through their disconnected ranks, he steadily pressed the slaughter-line back to the canal. The water was reddened with the blood of the wounded and soon covered with the bodies of the drowned. Louis, unable to issue commands that could be heard, set a splendid example of heroism by dashing with his squires into the thickest ranks of the foe. He so far outstripped his quickest attendants that he soon found himself alone, surrounded by six stalwart Moslems, who endeavored to capture him, his royal person being revealed by his gorgeous uniform. With great strength and skill, which his countrymen have never ceased to celebrate, he extricated himself from the danger and, joined by his guards, led the army in a resistless charge. Their valor saved that day.

But alas for those in Mansourah! For five hours this valiant but deluded band stood in the streets, fighting in vain for their lives. Almost the entire vanguard of fifteen hundred perished. England mourned William Longsword, whose death, according to the chronicle, was announced at the very moment to his mother by a vision of her son, a triumphant knight, entering heaven. The bravery of Longsword so impressed his enemies that they carefully marked his grave and in after years restored his body to his kinspeople. France lost the royal 347brother, Count d’Artois, who, the English say, attempted to escape by casting himself into the Nile. The Hospitallers left their Grand Master a prisoner. The Templars watched long that night before they beheld their leader returning to their camp covered with wounds and rags. Joinville, who narrates the events of that fatal day, consoled his king by showing him his own five ghastly wounds. The Christians were victorious if victory is proved solely by possession of the field.

Three days later Bibars reappeared; his army stretched from the canal to the river. Another day of terrible havoc followed. At nightfall the Christians had maintained their ground, but their losses were equal to a fresh defeat. The records of nearly all the great families of France are starred by the dead who represented them that night as they lay unburied on the plain of Mansourah.

Discretion suggested the retreat of the remnant of the crusaders to Damietta, but desperation took counsel only of its battle-heated blood. They determined to remain and hold the ground so dearly won. It was an unwise decision. While the human enemy was unable to resume the attack, a more fearful one stalked visibly among them. The multitude of dead bodies which covered the land and water quickly putrefied and bred pestilence. The picture of a knight walking days and nights along the canal, exposed to the fetid death-vapors while he searched among the corpses for his master, Robert d’Artois, might be an allegory of France itself as she moaned and waited for thousands of her sons who would 348never return. Those who survived were attacked by a virulent disease, which Joinville thus describes: “The flesh of our legs dried away to the bone, and our skins became of black or earth color, like an old saddle which has been a long time laid aside.” The fish of the Nile had become poisonous from feeding upon the dead bodies, and putrefied the mouths of those who ate them. “It became necessary for the barbers to cut out the swollen flesh of the gums of all who were afflicted with this disease so that they could not eat, but went about in the army crying and moaning.” So decimated were the ranks that grooms took the places of knights, not waiting for chivalric ceremonies, and put on the noble armor they had been accustomed to clean. There were not enough priests left alive to shrive the dying. King Louis gave himself up to nursing the sick and consoling their last hours until he himself was prostrated by the epidemic. The crusaders watched in anxiety by his cot what they feared would be the extinction of their last hope.

The Moslems, keeping at a safe distance from this death-beleaguered camp, added famine to the other horrors by cutting off supplies. They lay in wait for vessels laden with provisions from Europe, and seized them as they were ascending the Nile. At length almost the entire Christian fleet was captured. Louis was thus reduced to making proposals to abandon Egypt on condition of the restoration of Jerusalem to Christian rule. The sultan agreed, provided the king himself should be surrendered to him as a hostage until the last European had left the country. 349Louis consented, but the warriors refused to accede to what they deemed the disgraceful terms of putting in pawn their king. Nothing remained but an attempt to return to Damietta.

This retreat of the Christians was fraught with miseries which baffle description. The women, the children, and the sick were stowed in the few boats that remained, and in the darkness of night drifted down the stream. The soldiers took up their perilous march along the banks. Some of the nobles, together with the papal legate, having secured a vessel, urged the king to embark. He refused, being determined, as he declared, to tramp with the last man that survived. The camp they were leaving was quickly assailed by the Moslems, who went through it slaughtering all they could find. Louis turned back and fought with the desperation of a tigress protecting her young. The cry, “Wait for the king!” rang along the banks, and the vessels stopped; but Louis forbade any to loiter. At length the rear-guard was in motion. The king was provided with a horse, and, without helmet or cuirass, arrayed only with his sword and surrounded by a handful of braves, brought up the rear of a mighty funeral procession, in which the living were moving to their own graves. The king afterwards spoke of the heroic fidelity of one of his attendants, Geoffrey de Sargines, “who protected me against the Saracens as a good servant protects his lord’s tankard against the flies.” The cortège—it was such rather than an army—moved along roads lined with the dead and dying. Horrible cries startled them on every side. Peering through the 350darkness, they saw the forms of comrades often deprived of hands and feet.

As birds of prey follow the traveller in the desert and sometimes do not wait until he is dead before they attack his languishing form, so the Moslems pursued the band which they knew to be foredoomed to perish, and hastened the end by their murderous assault. Those who had embarked on boats met with a disaster equal to that of those who trudged on land. The enemy’s fleet stopped them near Mehallah. The Christian boats were huddled together so that they could not move. The crusaders could scarcely find foot room on the crowded decks; the Mussulman archers on the shore poured upon them a storm of arrows, many of which were tipped with the Greek fire. The Christians on the ships were no longer soldiers, but victims of slaughter.

On the land it was the same. The king, weak unto death, was defended by the little band about him. They brought him into a house in the town of Menieh; within doors a tradeswoman from Paris held the royal head in her lap, as was supposed, watching him die. Without in the streets brave men laid down their lives in a last effort to save even their king’s body, but their heroic devotion served only to emblazon itself on this darkest page of the history of the crusades. Louis was taken by the foe and loaded with chains, but he felt more weightily the shame of being the first king of France ever a prisoner in the hands of a foreign enemy. Joinville, who tells the story, was dragged to a neighboring house, and would have been slain but that a little child clung to 351him and, by this double appeal of helplessness, excited the interposition of one whom he calls “the good Saracen.”

The Moslems returned to Mansourah in triumph. They dressed their fleet in utmost gayety as it bore the person of their royal captive. Their armies marched on either bank of the Nile, escorting the Christian survivors, who were driven along with their hands bound behind their backs.

Queen Marguerite was at Damietta, already entering the pains of childbed. Ordering all to leave her chamber but an aged knight, she said to him, “I require you, on the faith you have pledged to me, that if the enemy shall take this city you will cut off my head rather than allow me to become a captive.” “Certainly, madam, I will do it,” he replied. The queen gave birth to a son, whom she called Jean Tristan, because of the sorrows that begirt his birth. Learning that the remnant of the city guard proposed abandoning Damietta, she forbade it as involving additional disgrace. “Be moved by my tears,” she cried, “and have pity on the poor child whom you see lying on my bosom.” The attitude of this heroine saved the city, the last spot of Christian possession in the land they had come to conquer.

Louis languished in prison. He had no clothing but a coarse cassock, which a fellow-prisoner had taken from his own person. Even the Moslems who guarded him afterwards expressed their reverence for the piety the captive monarch displayed, “worthy of a saint of Islam, the religion of holy resignation.” The sultan at length sent him a wardrobe of fifty 352magnificent dresses for himself and his attendants. Louis declined them, saying that as a French king he could not wear the raiment of a foreign prince. They prepared him a feast, but Louis declined to partake of it, because he was a captive. The services of the Moslem physicians he did not reject, knowing that if it was the purpose of his enemies to keep him alive to grace their triumph, it was his duty to his throne not to sacrifice any opportunity of lengthening life by which he might regain it. The sultan promised him liberty on condition of his issuing an order for the surrender of Damietta and the Christian strongholds of Palestine. He replied, “The Christian cities do not belong to me, but to God.” The sultan then threatened him with the most frightful torture, such as was reserved for the lowest criminals. Louis replied, “I am the sultan’s prisoner; he can do with me what he pleases.” A Moslem rejoined, “You treat us, sire, as if you had us in prison instead of our holding you.”

About him in an open court Louis daily looked upon the miseries of the remnant of his army. They were naked, clothed only in scars and blood from their unhealed wounds. Each day a number were dragged out and offered the alternative of abjuring their faith and embracing Mohammedanism or being slain. The dead bodies that were daily cast into the Nile told the story of their choice. Many were carried to Cairo to die in its dungeons or were sold as slaves to surrounding tribes.

The conquerors finally wearied of their attempt to subdue the proud spirits of those whose bodies they 353held, and proposed to liberate the king for a million golden bezants and the surrender of Damietta. Louis accepted the offer on condition that Queen Marguerite should approve, adding in the spirit of the Chivalry of that age, “The queen is my lady; I can do nothing without her consent.” It was agreed that Damietta should be the ransom for the king, while he should pay from his own purse the ransom money for such of his comrades as survived.

The fulfilment of the treaty was interrupted by a strange turn of affairs. The Sultan Almoadam, inflated with pride over his victories, had stirred the jealousy of the Mamelukes. Chegger-Eddour, the slave-woman who had risen to be the mistress of Egypt, turned also against the man whom as her husband she had raised to power. The sultan gave a banquet to his chief officers; at the end of the feast Bibars Bendoctar, the leader of the Mamelukes, approached him and aimed a blow with his dagger, which, however, inflicted but a slight wound. Almoadam fled to a tower; the Mamelukes fired the edifice; their victim threw himself through the smoke and flames from a window, his bruised body falling among his foes; Bibars smote him with a sabre. Bleeding and weak with terror, Almoadam flung himself into the Nile; the soldiers plunged after him and held him until dead beneath the water.

The infuriated Mamelukes then assailed the galley in which Joinville and several leaders of the Christians were confined, and bade them prepare for death. There was but a single priest in the company and no time for shriving one by one, so they confessed to 354one another, Joinville, the layman, giving to Guy d’Ibelin, as he says, “such absolution as God had given me power to give.” Fortunately the rage of the Mamelukes was diverted elsewhere, and the “dead men came to life.”

The Moslems, unable to secure a successor to Almoadam from among their warriors, gave the crown to the Sultana Chegger-Eddour, much to the disgust of the Mohammedan world. After great dissension and many threats the leaders of the Moslems proposed to carry out the treaty with the Franks which the unfortunate Almoadam had agreed to. They took an oath to observe its conditions and asked of Louis a similar pledge; this he rejected with scorn, assuming that the word of a French king needed no confirmation. The knights and lords of his party embarked on vessels and descended the Nile, the king marching with his Moslem guard along the shore. At Damietta he was joined by Queen Marguerite and her court.

In spite of its honorable surrender the Moslems hastened to loot Damietta and put to death every Christian that remained. This breach of treaty and their new taste of blood infuriated the mob of Moslems for further deeds of dishonor and cruelty. The galleys of the French were ordered to reascend the Nile. It was proposed to complete the tragedy in one act by slaughtering all the invaders. The Moslems were diverted from this outrage only by the consideration, as expressed in the speech of one of them, that “the dead pay no ransom,” and that to massacre the remnant of the French army would be to deprive themselves 355of the bezants pledged as the price of their lives. So the miserable exodus of the crusaders was resumed, not, however, without anticipation that the fickle temper of their captors might again change. At the mouth of the Nile a Genoese vessel received the king; as soon as he was on deck an array of archers sprang to the bulwarks and dispersed the Egyptians, and the vessel sped rapidly out to sea.

Louis put in at Acre, bringing to the meagre force there but a few more war-wasted men, wider demands upon its diminished resources, and a pestilent disease, which slew scores daily. In vain did France call for her king to return; pride or piety led him to refuse to desert his unhappy followers. There were still twelve thousand Frenchmen in the prisons of Egypt or scattered as slaves over the lands bordering the Nile. These he must endeavor to rescue. The Hospitallers, Templars, and Teutonic Knights, together with the nobles of Palestine, entreated his presence with them. For several weeks there were almost daily councils, some, among them the king’s two surviving brothers, declaring that France, threatened by England, needed the king, while his presence almost without following in Palestine could be no help to the Christian cause, if it did not excite the everywhere victorious Moslems to greater rapacity. Others among them, like Prince Joinville, advocated remaining. Louis listened to the latter. The king’s brothers, the dukes of Anjou and Poitiers, returned to France.

The Moslems of Egypt, grown quickly tired of the Sultana Chegger-Eddour, made her yield up the 356sceptre. She shrewdly passed it to a favorite, Aibek, by marrying him, and thus retained the substance of power.

The new Sultan of Egypt and the Sultan of Damascus and Aleppo each invoked the aid of Louis against the other. Motives of vengeance would have inclined him to side with the latter, but dread for the fate of the French still left in Egypt, and regard for his treaty, hard as its terms had been, prevented this choice, except in the event of the Egyptians not speedily fulfilling their part of the contract in liberating the captives. The threat of such alliance brought from Egypt some instalments of prisoners. One band of two hundred knights carried with them to Acre, as their best contribution to the cause, the bones of several of their comrades for burial in the Holy Land. Louis was deeply afflicted by the news that many of his soldiers refused to return to him, having renounced the faith of Christ, who no longer extended to them His succor. Some of these renegades amassed wealth and rose to power in Egypt, but never, if we are to believe the Moslem writers, reached the confidence and respect of the true followers of the Prophet. This defection is hardly to be wondered at, since that age refused to believe the words of Christ, “My kingdom is not of this world, else would My servants fight.” The Christians partook too largely of the Moslem idea that religion would triumph by the sword; but they had not the reserve faith of the Mohammedans, which led them to take up the kismet, “It is decreed,” when they were forced to retreat.

357Europe sent an occasional knight to join the forlorn hope with Louis, but no organized force. The Pope exhausted his passion in pursuing with malediction the memory of Frederick II., who had just died. “Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad,” he wrote to the people of Sicily upon the death of his old enemy. Against the new emperor, Conrad, he proclaimed a crusade, offering indulgence to the German mothers and fathers who would induce their sons to become traitors to their sovereign.

The English King, Henry III., offered to take the cross for Palestine, but, having raised a large sum of money for the purpose of an expedition, found other uses for it. He forbade a large band of his people embarking for the Holy Land, guarding his ports against their departure. He even, as Matthew Paris says, “like a hurt or offended child, who runs to his mother with his complaints,” obtained a papal mandate enforcing obedience to his whim in this regard. Queen Blanche, the regent of France, did indeed send a ship laden with money to her son, but the vessel was sunk off the Syrian coast.

The chief occupation of Louis and his knights was in repairing the few remaining fortifications held by the Christians, and in making pious pilgrimages to the holy places at Nazareth, Tabor, and Cana. The Sultan of Damascus invited him to Jerusalem, but, having come to conquer it, he would not consent to enter it as a guest, having in mind the example of Richard Cœur de Lion, who sixty years before had refused to look upon the city he could not rescue. The Egyptians pressed Louis for alliance against the 358Sultan of Damascus. They pledged to liberate all captives remaining in Egypt, and further to send to Palestine the heads of the Christians which had been exposed on the walls of Cairo; they would also give up Jerusalem and nearly all the cities of Palestine. Under this immense lure Louis made treaty with the Egyptians for fifteen years.

The Sultan of Damascus did not let his resentment cool before he interposed an army between the Christians and their new allies. He was defeated February 3, 1251. The Egyptians were unable or unwilling to fulfil the promise to join Louis’s forces. At the expiration of a year the Moslems had made peace with each other and declared war upon Louis as their common enemy. The Turkomans also made raid upon Sidon and slaughtered two thousand of the Christian people. Louis ordered Joinville to retaliate by assaulting Baneas, or Cæsarea Philippi, where they took recompense in blood. As they returned to Sidon they saw the ground covered with putrefying corpses of their martyred kinsmen. Louis bade them bury the dead, but no one would touch spade for the disgusting task. “Come, my friends, let us bestow a little earth upon the martyrs of Jesus Christ,” said the king; and springing from his horse, he took one of the bodies in his hands and gently laid it beneath the dirt. His example was followed by his suite.

A few months later news came of the death of Queen Blanche. The pens of the historians, who are usually concerned only with great affairs of state and the issue of battles, linger over the page in which they 359describe the tender lamentation of the good Louis. For two days he spoke to no one; then sent for Joinville, to whom he outpoured his passionate grief.

The call for Louis’s return to France was renewed; the throne had no protector; England was threatening. There was no possibility of further service in the East, yet the king was undecided. Religious processions of prayer were organized and the altars in various holy places besieged with petitions for the divine guidance of the royal mind. At length Heaven seemed to concur in what had long been the judgment of men, and the king consented to abandon the field.

Fourteen vessels were sufficient to convey his forces. Each was fitted with an altar for hourly service during the voyage. They raised anchor in the port of Sidon, April 24, 1254. Off Cyprus the king’s ships were nearly wrecked, but the courage of the sailors was revived by his words, if the sea did not subside at his prayer, as some say it did. A frightful tempest seems to have felt the spell of Queen Marguerite’s vow of a silver ship to St. Nicholas of Lorraine. After two months and a half (July 8th) the fleet reached Hyères. The king at first refused to land, as this place was not yet a French possession; but he was persuaded to yield his patriotic prejudice on account of his disgust for the water. His piety also triumphed over his worldly chagrin, for, “See,” said he, “if God has not proved to us how vast is His power, when by means of a single one of the four winds the King of France, the queen, their children, and so many other persons have escaped 360drowning.” After a journey of two months more, not a long one for the best mounted in that age, the royal party reached Paris, September 7, 1254. The king at once repaired to St. Denis to recognize the protection of his patron saint. Then, with universal welcome, he entered his capital. The popular enthusiasm was not altogether of joy as the people contrasted the little band of lords and knights returning to their wasted estates with the splendid retinue that six years before had gone forth to conquer a new empire for France and Christ. But one thing comforted them as they contemplated the disaster—the piety of their monarch. This was the more marked as the age had lost much of its religious zest. This crusade was very unlike the first in that it was sustained by the new spirit of Chivalry rather than of mere sanctity. Cross-wearing was no longer thought to be necessarily the emblazoning of Heaven. The haughtiness, the worldliness, not to say the wickedness, of the popes, who should have been its spiritual leaders, but who were engrossed in the gratification of their own jealousies, almost lost the church the respect of the nations. The beauty of Louis’s devotion, its unselfishness and spirituality, somewhat redeemed the character of the movement upon which Christ Himself seemed to frown through His adverse providence.

CHAPTER XLIV.
DEATH OF ST. LOUIS—FALL OF ACRE.

For sixteen years the crusading impulse seemed dead, under the general belief in the hopelessness of further efforts. The songs of the Troubadours even were turned to lamentations, and were burdened with the refrain that Christ had fallen asleep and no longer regarded His people. In the meanwhile there was rising in the East the new power of the Mamelukes, which was destined to accomplish the fears of Christendom.

It will be recalled that Chegger-Eddour, the slave Sultana of Egypt, had continued her power by marrying Aibek, the Mameluke, and thus installing him as Sultan of Cairo. Whatever Aibek’s ability to rule men, he utterly failed to master a woman’s heart. Learning that he whom she had created her lord was proposing additional matrimonial alliance with a princess of Mosul, Chegger-Eddour stabbed 362him to death. While his dead body was lying at her feet she sent for the emir Saif Eddin, and offered him her hand and kingdom. Horrified at the bloody throne he was invited to sit upon, Saif fled away. Chegger-Eddour, with versatile affection, the same day lured two other emirs to look upon her bloody charms, but, as even a bird will flee the fascination of a serpent when once it sees its mate disappear in the devouring jaws, the emirs did not wait for the embrace of the beautiful enchantress. That night Chegger-Eddour’s body, red with her own blood, was tossed into the castle ditch, and the son of Aibek, a lad of fifteen years, came to the throne.

But the news of the progress of the Tartars, who had already overthrown the caliphate of Bagdad and were marching through Syria upon Egypt, led the Mamelukes to put the reins into stronger hands. They chose for their leader Koutouz, renowned for ability and success on many a field. Koutouz met the advancing Tartars and utterly defeated them in a great battle on the plain of Tiberas. The Christians, having endeavored to make alliance with the Tartars as against the Egyptians, roused the Moslem spirit of retaliation. Koutouz for a while restrained his people in the name of Moslem fidelity to vows, since the treaty with the Christians was still in effect. Bibars, the victorious leader against Louis IX. in the affair of Mansourah, opposed the policy of Koutouz. Meeting him while hunting, he slew the sultan and claimed the throne on the ground of having thus made room for himself. Such was the reverence for brute power that the assassin’s stroke was recognized 363as the indication of the will of Allah. The preparations which had been made at Cairo for the triumphal return of Koutouz, the conqueror of the Tartars, were utilized for the coronation of Bibars as his successor.

The elevation of Bibars was an omen of woe for the Christian cause. Pope Alexander IV. confessed that it would now be impossible for any Christian power to maintain itself in the Holy Land.

Bibars inaugurated his reign over the Moslems by ravaging Palestine, destroying Nazareth, Cæsarea, Arsuf, and Safed, murdering the inhabitants, and dividing the land among his emirs. Returning to Egypt, he recuperated his army and made an incursion into Armenia, taking Jaffa and Antioch on his way (1268). So many were his captives that the Arabian chronicler says, “There was not a slave of a slave that did not possess a slave.”

But one heart in Europe seemed still to throb with either faith or courage. The pious Louis IX. was worn with cares, harassed with the memory of his previous disaster, and depressed by a wasting disease. One day he entered his parliament hall in the Louvre, carrying the “crown of thorns.” In presence of the princes and nobles he resumed the cross; for three years he incessantly labored amassing means and men. The despair of Europe, having exhausted its doleful sentiment, at the call of the saintly king changed to hope. The king’s sons, the English princes, Edward and Edmund, the earls of Pembroke and Warwick, John Baliol, with many nobles of Scotland, the kings of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal, emulated the piety of Louis. The zeal of most of 364these, however, evaporated in the long delay or under the influence of the dangers that threatened them at home in the distracted condition of their lands.

In March, 1270, Louis repaired to Notre Dame, barefooted, with scrip and staff, and placed his kingdom under care of the patron saint of France. He then traversed the land to the former port of departure, Aigues-Mortes, and on July 4, 1270, embarked upon the Mediterranean.

Tunis, on the North African coast, was the rendezvous of innumerable Moslem pirates, whose swift ships and desperate crews menaced all the passable water between France and the Holy Land. The city itself was regarded as an inestimable prize, stored as it was with the riches of commerce and plunder. But most priceless, in the thought of Louis, was its king, of whom it was rumored that he inclined to the Christian faith. Louis declared that he would willingly die in a dungeon if by any means he might be the hand of Providence leading so noble a convert to the foot of the cross.

It was decided to make a descent upon the African coast. A landing was easily effected. The Tunisians, not daring to make attack, endeavored to lure the invaders inward. All hopes of the conversion of their king disappeared when the dusky monarch sent a salutation in which he promised to come with a hundred thousand warriors and receive his baptism in the blood of battle, a prelibation of which would be in the slaughter of every Christian in his dominions.

365Meanwhile all North Africa, even to the Nile, was moving westward under the inspiration of Bibars and the faith of the Prophet. Nature, too, seemed to be allied with the Moslems. The fiery sirocco loaded the atmosphere. The enemy increased the torment by tossing the hot sands into the air near the Christian camps. The winds drove these fiery particles upon them, burying them as under the cinders from a volcano. Dysentery and the African plague soon added their horrors. The camp was reduced to the condition of a battle-field after slaughter. Men died faster than they could be buried, and fed the plague with their carcasses. The flower of the French army withered away. Tristan, the king’s son, he that was born amid the sorrows of Damietta, fell a victim, in spite of his father’s prayers and loving ministrations.

Louis himself was stricken. They reared the cross in front of his tent, that from its mystery of love and grace he might gather strength still to live or to die. Calling before him his eldest surviving son, Philip, he instructed him how to govern the kingdom that might soon be his. He bade him maintain the dignity and franchises of the throne, with justice to every class, to avoid warring upon Christian nations, and, above all, show himself the friend of the poor, the consoler of the suffering, and the avenger of the injured of whatever degree. He then turned to his daughter, the Queen of Navarre, with counsel befitting her station. Though realizing that his end was near, he did not refuse to listen to an embassage from the Greek emperor. Many hours he then spent in prayer. His mind at length began to waver; in his delirium 366he cried out, “Jerusalem! Jerusalem! We will go to Jerusalem!” Recovering a little, he bade his attendants place him upon a bed of ashes, the place of a penitent sinner; lying here, he cried, “O Lord, I shall enter into Thy house and shall worship Thee in Thy tabernacle.” Then, while uttering the words, “Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit,” he fell asleep. The beauty and calm of his features grew deeper until, immobile in death, they seemed to salute the passing world with a benediction from the heavenly (August 25, 1270).

With the breath of Louis IX. the crusading enterprise of Europe may be said to have finally expired. The movements that followed, whatever valor may have been displayed in them, were as the waves that continue to dash themselves to pieces on the rocky shore after the tempest that stirred them has died down.

A few weeks after Louis’s death Prince Edward of England (afterwards King Edward I.) arrived at Tunis with a brave troop of his young countrymen. The African coast offering no field for adventures, he went the following spring (1271) to Acre. After various raids upon the neighboring country, and narrowly escaping death by the poisoned dagger of an assassin, he made a ten years’ truce with the Moslems and returned home.

With the termination of this treaty the Christian strongholds fell one by one to the Moslems, and the dislodged inhabitants took final and fatal refuge in Acre. Here were gathered the heterogeneous remnants of Christian populations, together with as diverse 367bands from all parts of the world, who for greed or piety had taken the sword of the waning cause. The city was rent with dissensions, the various parties contending as a pack of dogs for the last bone. Even the Templars and Hospitallers fought in the streets for such shadows of military honor as might be left in the general disgrace. Thus for twenty years Acre remained a monument of the mercy or indifference of the Moslems.

In 1291 Pope Nicholas IV. sent a band of seventeen hundred mercenaries to protect the place. These men, failing to receive the pay promised them, looted the stores of Saracen merchants. The Sultan Khalil, second successor of Bibars, demanded redress; it was refused. Khalil marched his troops beneath the walls.

The capture of the place was inevitable. The certain destruction that awaited them affected the inhabitants as once the people of Jerusalem, who cried, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” The revelry of the self-abandoned multitude ceased only in their ruin. The assault of the foe was quickly rewarded. Just a century after its recovery from the Moslems through the valor of Richard Cœur de Lion, Acre fell back again to their possession. Sixty thousand Christians were borne away to slavery or put to death.

Thus faded from the land of the Christ the last ray of hope of its occupation by His people, until it shall be conquered by the weapon which He appointed—“the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.”

CHAPTER XLV.
KINGSHIP—UNITY OF EUROPE—THE PAPACY—LIBERAL THOUGHT—INCREASED KNOWLEDGE—ARTS—LITERATURE—COMMERCE—THE TURKISH POWER.

The picture of Europe at the inauguration of the crusades in the eleventh century, with which our volume opened, is very different from that in which we would portray the thirteenth century, when the militant faith had practically ceased its conflict for the possession of the Holy Land. In government, in popular morals, in education, in industrial methods, and in reasonable piety the world had greatly advanced; but as it was difficult to definitely trace the causes of the crusades in the earlier era, so it would be unwise to attribute to their influence all the changes that had taken place during their continuance. When a broad river debouches into a fertile valley it is natural to point to that irrigating 369current as the cause of the abundant vegetation; yet much of the new life and beauty may be due to other springs on the hillsides and to better conditions of soil and climate. There were certainly at work in society other forces than those which either illustrated or resulted from the military movements. The great law of social evolution wrought steadily, sometimes using, and often in ways aside from, the crusading projects. The spirit of humanity—or, we may more wisely say, the Spirit of God in humanity—is a self-developing power, which must not be overlooked by the student of history.

We have already observed the influence of the crusades upon the growth of kingship, especially in France. The French people supplied the majority of the warriors, and their sovereigns were the foremost in leading and supporting the great endeavor. Quite naturally leadership in the field compacted the power of the French throne. The lords who followed the king abroad were less disposed to dispute his authority at home. When the crusades began, as we have seen, the sway of the king was limited to the neighborhood of Paris. During the reign of Louis IX., which witnessed their close, there were ceded to the crown by their feudal lords the section of Toulouse between the Rhone, the sea, and the Pyrenees, Chartres, Blois, Sancerre, Mâcon, Perche, Arles, Forcalquier, Foix, and Cahors, while at the same time England relinquished its claim to Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, and northern Saintonge, thus presenting to the eye almost the present map of France. The various feudal courts, 370where they still held separate jurisdiction, yielded the right of final appeal to the king before the enforcement of their decisions. Anciently the barons and clergy of France had been accustomed to meet in general assembly for the support of the monarchy. For over a century preceding the first crusade such assemblies had not been held, but when Louis VII. embarked upon the second crusade the great men of all sections resumed these loyal conventions. It may therefore be said that modern France was born amid the throes of the mediæval holy wars. In Germany the case was different. The incessant quarrel of Pope and emperor, to which the various crusading projects gave fuel, weakened imperialism in central and southern Europe. The English throne doubtless profited by the part taken by the people in the foreign adventures, which diverted the ambition of the most restless, who would otherwise have more seriously assailed the sovereign authority. Spain was still occupied largely by the Moors, and was thus prevented from sharing to any great extent in the Eastern wars upon the Infidels; but the engagement of so much of the Moslem energy in defending its distant lands allowed the Spaniards to slowly accrete their strength for the final expulsion of the Moors and the establishment of an undivided Spanish government, two centuries later, under Ferdinand and Isabella.

Another effect of the crusades was the birth of a distinctly European sentiment. Men, however diverse in blood and country, could not live for a generation among common dangers, and be daily actuated by 371common purposes, without realizing brotherhood. The Celt, the Frank, the Italian, and the Teuton saw that they were more alike than diverse when facing the Asiatic. The followers of barons from either side the Rhine or the opposite slopes of the Apennines dropped their peculiar war-cries and adopted the universal “Deus vult!” In time the Frankish language, the speech of the greater number of the crusaders, came to be the universal medium of commercial, military, and diplomatic intercourse. It no longer belonged exclusively to the subjects of a French king, but was in a measure continental. The title “Frank” meant anybody from the lands north of the Mediterranean and west of the Greek provinces. The various nations of Europe came to feel less jealousy of the dominant race than fear of the hostile civilization whose armies were massed along the eastern boundaries of the Continent. Thus the project of Hildebrand to unite Christendom by means of a crusade was successful in a way he did not contemplate—the gathering of European peoples into a secular as well as an ecclesiastical unity.

The papal power, however, was that chiefly affected by the crusades, both to its advantage and its disadvantage.

Great wealth came to the Papacy from the many estates which departing crusaders left in either its possession or trusteeship. Thus Godfrey of Bouillon alienated large parts of his ancestral holdings by direct gift to the ecclesiastics. Many returning home from Palestine, broken in health and spirit by their trials, insanely depressed with the “vanity of life,” 372ended their days in monasteries, which they endowed with the remnant of their estates. The Pope, having acquired charge of and responsibility for the crusading venture, affixed a tax upon the secular clergy and religious houses. This was at first spent legitimately in maintaining the enterprises afield, but the immense revenues were gradually diverted to the general uses of the church. In the year 1115 the great Countess Matilda deeded all her domain to the Pope. This addition to the landed wealth of the Papacy amounted to perhaps one quarter of Italy, and constituted the bulk of the modern temporal possessions of the holy see. To its own local property the Papacy had also added acquisitions in all countries, until it held throughout Europe a large part, if not the greater proportion, of the land.

The political influence of the Pope was at the same time greatly extended by the appointment of papal legates. Heretofore the Holy Father had on occasion delegated representatives, who in his name should investigate causes and settle disputes at a distance from Rome. During the crusades this legatine authority was systematized by the organization of a definite body of men. The Pope was thus impersonated at every court and in every emergency. A controversy in London or Jerusalem was settled by one who on the spot spoke as the Vicegerent of God. If at times the mistakes of legates imperilled faith in the papal infallibility, as a rule they kept the world in awe by the terror of the imagined ubiquity of the divine presence.

Another great advantage accruing to Rome from 373the crusades was in the establishment of a closer bond between the church and the individual. Urban II. had absolved all crusaders from accountability to their secular lords during their absence at the seat of war. In the enthusiasm of the moment the lords had acquiesced in this as a temporary arrangement; but they soon lamented their unwisdom in this concession. The spirit of ecclesiastical obedience was sedulously cultivated by priest and legate, who pledged temporal and eternal blessings to those who, whatever their attitude to their former masters, were now faithful to the Pope. Loyalty to the secular lord was never restored as of old. In the common thought the pontiff was the great king and the real commandant of armies. Providence was not more omnipresent than the care of the Holy Father, and the judgment-seat of heaven was seemingly transferred to every camp and every home that was accessible to a Roman agent.

The crusades against the Eastern Infidels inspired audacity and presumption in the church, which suggested crusades elsewhere. Whoever was not Catholic was regarded as the Christians’ prey. Preachers authorized by Rome stirred up the faithful in Saxony and Denmark to convert by the sword the pagans living along the shores of the Baltic. An army of one hundred and fifty thousand, wearing upon their breasts a red cross on the background of a circle, symbolizing the universality of Christ’s kingdom, devastated pagan cities and burned idolatrous temples, and after three years secured from the leaders a promise to make their people Christian—a task more difficult than it had been before, since the half-savage 374people had now learned that Christianity could be as cruel as their own paganism. Indeed, everything that was not consecrated to Roman Christianity became the lawful spoil of whoever, wearing the cross upon his breast, dared to take it. The crusading zeal became thus a habit of the Christian mind, and led to the horrors of the Inquisition in later days.

While Rome thus profited in many ways by the crusades, it must also be noted that the Papacy failed to maintain to the end the prestige it had acquired in the earlier period of the movement. Pope Innocent III. (1198-1216) carried the Hildebrandian policy to its highest realization. The emperor was forced to accept his crown from the hands of the Holy Father, and also to demit the right he had long contended for of electing the papal incumbent. The entire episcopacy in Europe was in the Pope’s control and wrought his will, even in England. But with Gregory IX. (1227-41) the pile of papal autocracy began to totter. This Pope, notwithstanding he had twice excommunicated the emperor, was ultimately obliged to yield to the secular will. His unchristian hauteur, and the rancor with which his successor, Innocent IV., pursued the emperor, lost the papal chair much of the respect of the Catholic world. Soon the various governments came to resent the absolutism of the throne on the Tiber. In 1253 Robert Grosseteste protested against the papal exactions in England, notwithstanding the king was utterly subservient to Rome, and thus he merited the title, which history has given him, of one of the great fathers of English liberty. Twenty-six years later 375(1279) England enacted the Statute of Mortmain, which forbade the alienation of property to religious bodies without the consent of the secular authority.

A similar sentiment was working in France. Probably what is known as the Pragmatic Sanction of Louis IX. (1268) is not genuine, but the revolt of that royal saint against the assessments of Rome without consent of the throne is undoubted, and Louis may be said to have revived the ancient Gallican liberties, which for a century and a half had apparently been dead. A bull of Boniface VIII. in 1298 caused open rupture between France and Rome.

With Boniface the Papacy was utterly humiliated. In 1309, within eighteen years of the fall of Acre into the hands of the Moslems, the popes were in exile at Avignon, and the government of the church became the foot-ball of secular ambition. Clement V. (1305-12) ascended the papal throne as the creature of Philip the Fair of France, and was forced to lend himself to that monarch’s cruel and unjust persecution of the Templars, which order was abolished and its Grand Master burned at the stake in 1312.

With the diminished prestige of the Papacy came the renaissance of freer thought throughout the world. The failure of the crusades to conquer the Moslem, and the futile experiments of war upon heretical sects like the Waldenses and Albigenses, led to a partial suppression of the epidemic for forceful conversions, and to a healthful recollection of our Saviour’s command to Peter, “Put up thy sword.” 376In this better condition of the human mind germinated the modern evangelical methods, the first-fruit of which was to appear in the Protestant Reformation.

There was something in the life of the crusaders that was favorable to the growth of a new political sentiment, a popular, not to say a democratic, impulse, which directly conduced to our modern civil liberties. In their long and adventurous marches, in the common camp and fighting together within or beneath the same fortresses, the lord and his retainers came close to one another. The common man saw that his muscles were as strong, his mind as astute, his character as good, as that of his crested superior. Manhood rediscovered itself on those Eastern plains. The returned knight could no longer disdain intercourse with the brave men whose hamlet nestled beneath his castle walls. Their common courage, the many scenes with which both classes were familiar, the dangers they had shared, were repeated in story and song about the castle gate. Aristocratic presumption more than once evoked insurrection among the brawny fellows, who sang:

In their home forays there were to be seen, together with the ensigns of the feudal lords, the popular banners of the parishes. Indeed, the new power of the people came to be the reliance of the king in his contest with rebel lords. Thus everywhere were 377silently germinated the forces of the commune and of the Third Estate in France, whose first assembly was held in 1302. In 1215 England secured for itself Magna Charta, the central regulation of which was that no freeman should “be taken, imprisoned, or damaged in person or estate but by the judgment of his peers” and “by laws of the land,” a grant to liberty which stood in spite of the fact that the Pope declared it to be null and void. In 1265 there came together the first regular Parliament of England with the House of Commons a constituent branch.

To the crusades we must attribute much of the increased knowledge of men and the quickening of inquiry into every department of human welfare. The crusaders mingled with their enemies in the lull of active warfare, and especially became familiar with the arts and customs of the Greeks, their pseudo-allies. The immense treasures of art secured by the capture of Constantinople, and displayed in every centre of Western population, inspired æsthetic taste. Such buildings appeared as the Palazzo Vecchio, Santa Croce, and the Duomo at Florence (about 1290), Westminster Abbey and Salisbury Cathedral (1220) and Cologne Cathedral (1248). Pisano (died 1270) revived sculpture; Cimabue (1240-1300) was the first of modern painters; the new impulse to scientific study produced Roger Bacon (1214-92). The Troubadours enlarged the romance of the lady’s chamber to that of the field of exploit, where Europe strove with Asia, and were followed by the great poets Dante (1265-1321) and Petrarch (1304-74). Splendid seats of learning sprang up, like the universities of 378Oxford (revived in 1200), Paris (1206), Padua (1222), and Cambridge (1229). The march of the soldier prompted the voyage of the peaceful traveller, like Marco Polo, who in 1272 explored the world as far as eastern China. The crusader learned something of the science of government from the Moslem, especially in matters relating to municipalities, for he was compelled to note that Cairo and Damascus were better governed than Paris and London. The wars suggested improvements in military equipment and manœuvre; indeed, the art of handling immense multitudes of men as a single body was learned by the knights, who, fighting in independent groups, were often overwhelmed by the massed forces of their enemies.

Commerce during this time began to spread its white wings upon all seas. For two hundred years an almost incessant line of vessels passed to and fro between the ports of the eastern and western Mediterranean, conveying supplies to the soldiers. As we have seen, an English fleet transported the army of Richard I. along the Atlantic coast. Men learned how to lade ships with utmost economy of space and to take advantage of all winds in sailing them. Roads were opened which converged to the point of departure from the surrounding country, where the produce was gathered for shipment. Agents were scattered throughout Europe to purchase the needed articles in small quantities, and prepare them in bulk for the voyage. War thus fostered the commercial habit and skill which were utilized in times of peace.

Between 1255 and 1262 the Hanseatic League or 379Trade Guild of the Baltic maritime cities was formed, and within a century it numbered in its membership a hundred ports and inland towns. The league organized merchants for common defence against pirates, the settlement of disputes by arbitration, and the acquisition of commercial favors in distant parts of the world. Maritime laws were codified during the thirteenth century, under the title of “Il Consolato del Mare,” and were generally enforced along the Mediterranean. According to a tradition, the code called “The Laws of Oleron” was compiled by Richard I. during his expedition to Palestine, but with more probability it may be ascribed to the reign of Louis IX. of France. Bills of exchange were in vogue as early as 1255.

Commerce brought wealth in place of the sordid poverty which had marked castle and cottage in the eleventh century. Trade introduced new articles of food and adornment, at first to gratify the palate and eye of the rich, but soon to elevate the scale of living everywhere. Such is the power of habit that luxuries easily acquired quickly become necessities. People learned no longer to look upon “man’s life as cheap as beast’s.” Industries sprang up for the home manufacture of what had originally been brought from abroad. Invention was stimulated, and the domestic arts took their place in the foremost line of the new civilization. The Dark Ages had given way, and at least the gray light of the dawn of a better era illumined the horizon.

We may note in conclusion the influence of the crusades in staying the progress of that gigantic 380power which for two centuries had contested with Christendom the possession of western Asia. So rapid had been the rise and spread of the new Mohammedan tide of Turkish invasion that, but for the barrier presented by the crusaders, it would have quickly submerged the Balkan peninsula, as it had already done the plains of Asia Minor; and possibly it would have poured its desolation into central Europe at a time when Europe was not prepared to resist, as it did four hundred years later when the Turks besieged Vienna. The appeal of the Greek emperors for the help of their Western Christian brethren in the eleventh century was warranted by the seriousness of the menace. The empire was then too demoralized to withstand alone the onset of these daring hordes, who possessed superior powers of physical endurance, great mental activity quickened by the enterprises they planned for their swords, and courage as yet undaunted by defeat. What they might have speedily accomplished but for their enforced halt of two hundred years on the eastern shores of the Marmora is suggested by what they did almost immediately after the crusaders withdrew their wall of swords. The same decade that witnessed the fall of Acre saw the founding of the present dynasty of Ottoman Turks in Nicomedia (1299). In 1355 they crossed the sea and planted their first European stronghold at Gallipoli. In the next century (1452) Mohammed II. was enthroned as sultan in Constantinople, where his successors have for four hundred years repelled the arms, and still baffle the diplomacy, of Europe.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The age of the crusades

The Age of the Crusades

CONTENTS.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

I. PRINTED COLLECTIONS OF THE SOURCES OF THE HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES.

II. THE PRINCIPAL SOURCES OF THE HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES.

A. Chronicles of Eye-witnesses.

B. Letters of the Crusaders.

C. Contemporary and Very Early Writers.

III. WORKS ON THE CRUSADES WRITTEN FROM THE SOURCES.

IV. GENERAL HISTORIES IN WHICH THE PERIOD OF THE CRUSADES IS INCLUDED.

V. POETICAL TREATMENT OF THE HISTORY OF THE FIRST CRUSADE.

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY—OUTLINE OF STUDY.

CHAPTER II. STATE OF SOCIETY—IGNORANCE—DULNESS OF LIFE—SUPERSTITION—LOW SENSE OF JUSTICE—CRUELTY—TASTE FOR WAR.

CHAPTER III. CHIVALRY—RULES—EDUCATION OF KNIGHT—CEREMONIES—INFLUENCE ON CHARACTER.

CHAPTER IV. THE FEUDAL SYSTEM—GENERAL PRINCIPLES—INFLUENCE ON PEOPLE.

CHAPTER V. THE IMPOVERISHED CONDITION OF EUROPE.

CHAPTER VI. THE PAPAL POLICY—DEMORALIZATION OF THE WORLD AND THE CHURCH—HILDEBRAND’S PURPOSE INHERITED BY HIS SUCCESSORS.

CHAPTER VII. THE MOHAMMEDAN MENACE—THE RISE OF ISLAM—SARACENS—TURKS.

CHAPTER VIII. PILGRIMAGES—ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE CUSTOM—EXTENT.

THE STORY OF THE CRUSADES.

CHAPTER IX. THE SUMMONS—PETER THE HERMIT—POPE URBAN—POPULAR EXCITEMENT.

THE FIRST CRUSADE.

CHAPTER X. THE CRUSADE OF THE CROWD.

CHAPTER XI. THE CRUSADE UNDER THE CHIEFTAINS, GODFREY, RAYMOND, BOHEMOND, TANCRED, HUGH, ROBERT OF NORMANDY.

CHAPTER XII. THE FALL OF NICÆA.

CHAPTER XIII. BATTLE OF DORYLÆUM—TARSUS—DEFECTION OF BALDWIN.

CHAPTER XIV. BEFORE ANTIOCH.

CHAPTER XV. THE FALL OF ANTIOCH.

CHAPTER XVI. THE HOLY LANCE.

CHAPTER XVII. ON TO JERUSALEM.

CHAPTER XVIII. THE CAPTURE OF JERUSALEM.

CHAPTER XIX. GODFREY, FIRST BARON OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE—CONQUEST OF THE LAND—THE KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM.

CHAPTER XX. BALDWIN I., KING OF JERUSALEM.

CHAPTER XXI. KING BALDWIN II.—KING FOULQUE—KING BALDWIN III.—EXPLOITS OF ZENGHI—RISE OF NOURREDIN.

CHAPTER XXII. MILITARY ORDERS—HOSPITALLERS—TEMPLARS—TEUTONIC KNIGHTS.

CHAPTER XXIII. EUROPE BETWEEN THE FIRST AND SECOND CRUSADES—KINGSHIP IN FRANCE—PAPAL AGGRANDIZEMENT—ABÉLARD—ARNOLD OF BRESCIA—BERNARD.

THE SECOND CRUSADE.

CHAPTER XXIV. BERNARD—CONRAD III.—LOUIS VII.—SUGER—SIEGE OF DAMASCUS.

CHAPTER XXV. NOURREDIN—RISE OF SALADIN—KING GUY—QUEEN SIBYLLA.

CHAPTER XXVI. BATTLE OF TIBERIAS—FALL OF JERUSALEM.

CHAPTER XXVII. EUROPE BETWEEN THE SECOND AND THIRD CRUSADES—SUPERSTITION—THE WALDENSES—DEGRADATION OF THE PAPACY—FRANCE UNDER LOUIS—ENGLAND UNDER HENRY II.—RICHARD CŒUR DE LION.

THE THIRD CRUSADE.

CHAPTER XXVIII. WILLIAM OF TYRE—BARBAROSSA.

CHAPTER XXIX. SIEGE OF ACRE.

CHAPTER XXX. THE COMING OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS AND RICHARD—FALL OF ACRE.

CHAPTER XXXI. PALESTINE AFTER THE THIRD CRUSADE—HENRY VI.—SIEGE OF THORON.

THE FOURTH CRUSADE.

CHAPTER XXXII. HISTORY AND CONDITION OF CONSTANTINOPLE.

CHAPTER XXXIII. THE SUMMONS TO THE FOURTH CRUSADE—CONTRACT WITH VENICE—EGYPT THE DESTINATION—PHILIP OF SWABIA.

CHAPTER XXXIV. THE PLOT FOR THE DIVERSION OF THE CRUSADE—CAPTURE OF ZARA.

CHAPTER XXXV. ON TO CONSTANTINOPLE—CAPTURE OF GALATA.

CHAPTER XXXVI. CONSTANTINOPLE SECURED TO ISAAC AND YOUNG ALEXIUS—USURPATION OF MOURTZOUPHLOS.

CHAPTER XXXVII. CAPTURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE.

CHAPTER XXXVIII. FOUNDING THE LATIN KINGDOM OF CONSTANTINOPLE.

CHAPTER XXXIX. BETWEEN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH CRUSADES—CONDITION OF EAST AND WEST—THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE.

THE FIFTH CRUSADE.

CHAPTER XL. DISASTER OF MARIETTA.

THE SIXTH CRUSADE.

CHAPTER XLI. FREDERICK II. AND POPE GREGORY IX.

CHAPTER XLII. BETWEEN THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH CRUSADES—THE TARTARS—THE CARISMIAN INVASION.

THE SEVENTH CRUSADE.

CHAPTER XLIII. ST. LOUIS.

THE EIGHTH CRUSADE.

CHAPTER XLIV. DEATH OF ST. LOUIS—FALL OF ACRE.

RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES.

CHAPTER XLV. KINGSHIP—UNITY OF EUROPE—THE PAPACY—LIBERAL THOUGHT—INCREASED KNOWLEDGE—ARTS—LITERATURE—COMMERCE—THE TURKISH POWER.

INDEX.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY—OUTLINE OF STUDY.

CHAPTER II.
STATE OF SOCIETY—IGNORANCE—DULNESS OF LIFE—SUPERSTITION—LOW SENSE OF JUSTICE—CRUELTY—TASTE FOR WAR.

CHAPTER III.
CHIVALRY—RULES—EDUCATION OF KNIGHT—CEREMONIES—INFLUENCE ON CHARACTER.

CHAPTER IV.
THE FEUDAL SYSTEM—GENERAL PRINCIPLES—INFLUENCE ON PEOPLE.

CHAPTER V.
THE IMPOVERISHED CONDITION OF EUROPE.

CHAPTER VI.
THE PAPAL POLICY—DEMORALIZATION OF THE WORLD AND THE CHURCH—HILDEBRAND’S PURPOSE INHERITED BY HIS SUCCESSORS.

CHAPTER VII.
THE MOHAMMEDAN MENACE—THE RISE OF ISLAM—SARACENS—TURKS.

CHAPTER VIII.
PILGRIMAGES—ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE CUSTOM—EXTENT.

CHAPTER IX.
THE SUMMONS—PETER THE HERMIT—POPE URBAN—POPULAR EXCITEMENT.

CHAPTER X.
THE CRUSADE OF THE CROWD.

CHAPTER XI.
THE CRUSADE UNDER THE CHIEFTAINS, GODFREY, RAYMOND, BOHEMOND, TANCRED, HUGH, ROBERT OF NORMANDY.

CHAPTER XII.
THE FALL OF NICÆA.

CHAPTER XIII.
BATTLE OF DORYLÆUM—TARSUS—DEFECTION OF BALDWIN.

CHAPTER XIV.
BEFORE ANTIOCH.

CHAPTER XV.
THE FALL OF ANTIOCH.

CHAPTER XVI.
THE HOLY LANCE.

CHAPTER XVII.
ON TO JERUSALEM.

CHAPTER XVIII.
THE CAPTURE OF JERUSALEM.

CHAPTER XIX.
GODFREY, FIRST BARON OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE—CONQUEST OF THE LAND—THE KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM.

CHAPTER XX.
BALDWIN I., KING OF JERUSALEM.

CHAPTER XXI.
KING BALDWIN II.—KING FOULQUE—KING BALDWIN III.—EXPLOITS OF ZENGHI—RISE OF NOURREDIN.

CHAPTER XXII.
MILITARY ORDERS—HOSPITALLERS—TEMPLARS—TEUTONIC KNIGHTS.

CHAPTER XXIII.
EUROPE BETWEEN THE FIRST AND SECOND CRUSADES—KINGSHIP IN FRANCE—PAPAL AGGRANDIZEMENT—ABÉLARD—ARNOLD OF BRESCIA—BERNARD.

CHAPTER XXIV.
BERNARD—CONRAD III.—LOUIS VII.—SUGER—SIEGE OF DAMASCUS.

CHAPTER XXV.
NOURREDIN—RISE OF SALADIN—KING GUY—QUEEN SIBYLLA.

CHAPTER XXVI.
BATTLE OF TIBERIAS—FALL OF JERUSALEM.

CHAPTER XXVII.
EUROPE BETWEEN THE SECOND AND THIRD CRUSADES—SUPERSTITION—THE WALDENSES—DEGRADATION OF THE PAPACY—FRANCE UNDER LOUIS—ENGLAND UNDER HENRY II.—RICHARD CŒUR DE LION.

CHAPTER XXVIII.
WILLIAM OF TYRE—BARBAROSSA.

CHAPTER XXIX.
SIEGE OF ACRE.

CHAPTER XXX.
THE COMING OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS AND RICHARD—FALL OF ACRE.

CHAPTER XXXI.
PALESTINE AFTER THE THIRD CRUSADE—HENRY VI.—SIEGE OF THORON.

CHAPTER XXXII.
HISTORY AND CONDITION OF CONSTANTINOPLE.

CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE SUMMONS TO THE FOURTH CRUSADE—CONTRACT WITH VENICE—EGYPT THE DESTINATION—PHILIP OF SWABIA.

CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE PLOT FOR THE DIVERSION OF THE CRUSADE—CAPTURE OF ZARA.

CHAPTER XXXV.
ON TO CONSTANTINOPLE—CAPTURE OF GALATA.

CHAPTER XXXVI.
CONSTANTINOPLE SECURED TO ISAAC AND YOUNG ALEXIUS—USURPATION OF MOURTZOUPHLOS.

CHAPTER XXXVII.
CAPTURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.
FOUNDING THE LATIN KINGDOM OF CONSTANTINOPLE.

CHAPTER XXXIX.
BETWEEN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH CRUSADES—CONDITION OF EAST AND WEST—THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE.

CHAPTER XL.
DISASTER OF MARIETTA.

CHAPTER XLI.
FREDERICK II. AND POPE GREGORY IX.

CHAPTER XLII.
BETWEEN THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH CRUSADES—THE TARTARS—THE CARISMIAN INVASION.

CHAPTER XLIII.
ST. LOUIS.

CHAPTER XLIV.
DEATH OF ST. LOUIS—FALL OF ACRE.

CHAPTER XLV.
KINGSHIP—UNITY OF EUROPE—THE PAPACY—LIBERAL THOUGHT—INCREASED KNOWLEDGE—ARTS—LITERATURE—COMMERCE—THE TURKISH POWER.