The Crusades

The Pope is the bishop of Rome, and the traditions of the papacy delight in recalling the humble origin of his vast monarchy, at once spiritual and temporal, ecclesiastical and secular. If the poor Galilæan fisherman ever entered the Eternal City, it was as a stranger who had come to be the guide and friend of a small knot of men who saw and hated and wished to keep themselves aloof from the abominable corruption of Roman society. But if Christianity itself, as we have seen (p. 6), was, when it had once taken root in the West, modified by the popular feelings and old associations of the converts, the constitution of the church was in like manner insensibly modified by the political forms of the state with which it had at first to wage a terrible conflict. Rome was not as other cities: and the bishop of Rome could not long remain like the presidents of other churches. He was dealing with the subjects, and he lived in the heart, of the empire. It was inevitable that the imperial tradition should fasten on the object of their worship; nor was it long before the exulting cry went up to heaven, Christ lives, Christ rules, Christ is emperor (Christus vivit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat).

As the vicars of this invisible emperor, the popes acquired gradually a power which overshadowed that of the mightiest sovereigns. It was exercised with monastic austerity by Gregory the Great; it was wielded with the ability of a consummate general by Gregory VII., Hildebrand. The first Gregory was a monk, therefore also a Manichean; in other words, one who believed in the essential impurity of all matter; but this philosophy, if it had any attractions for Gregory VII., was wholly subordinate to the one absorbing passion of ecclesiastical dominion. His aim was to subdue the world by a spiritual army: but the issue of his conquest was not to be confined to spiritual influence. It was to give him power over kingdoms, dictation over princes, the command of their weapons and their wealth. It was to humble civil polity under priestly autocracy; it was to prove, what Hildebrand scrupled not to assert, that the civil rule was in itself the mere development and working of the evil principle. The foundations had long been laid; but Hildebrand left to his successors not much to do towards completing the fabric of papal empire. His predecessors had learnt to avail themselves dexterously of popular feeling or the ambition of princes, to direct wide-spread movements, if not to create them. It was the papal sanction which had aided to depose the degenerate Merovingian; it was the papal chrism which had anointed the first Carolingian king. It was the diadem of the ancient Cæsars, bestowed by the hand of Leo III., which rested on the head of Charles the Great. It was Hildebrand himself, who, by the hands of his instrument, Alexander II., had transferred the crown of England from the son of Godwine to William the Bastard of Normandy. It has been well remarked, that although the name had not yet been heard, yet in truth it was now that the first crusade was preached, and it was preached by the voice of Rome against the liberties of England. We may note further that the preacher was a pontiff, who, when he found it convenient to thank the Sultan of Morocco for some indulgences granted to Christians in his territories, could assure that infidel ruler that both worshipped the same God and held the same faith, though their modes of worship and their expressions of devotion might be different.

The popes had become capable of setting vast armies in motion, and of raising to a white heat the fire of a popular sentiment which had already been kindled. These two conditions were needed before the power of Europe could be precipitated on the infidel conquerors of Syria; and the inability of the popes to accomplish this end if they were not in accord with the prevalent feeling of the people is strikingly shown in the history of Gregory VII. Eight years after he had helped to slay Harold at Hastings, Hildebrand addressed a letter to all who loved and cared to defend the Catholic faith, beseeching them to put aside all other tasks in favour of the great work of chasing the hordes of the Seljukian Turks beyond the bounds of the Eastern empire. Constantinople, the new city of the Seven Hills, was even now threatened by these barbarians; nor could any say how soon the danger might not menace Rome itself. It could not be doubted that the faith, the energy, the warlike skill of Christendom would sweep away these undisciplined unbelievers; and the victory of the faithful would be followed by very solid gain to the popes. The price to be paid by the emperor for his deliverance from the Turks was his submission as a vassal to the see of Rome; in other words, the pope was to become absolute lord both of East and West, and the claims of the Byzantine patriarch to a co-ordinate dignity with the successor of St. Peter should no longer be made with impunity. But although the scheme thus carefully drawn out was to promote the interests of a spiritual power, for the great mass of Latin Christians it was purely a political enterprise. The fears and distresses of the Eastern emperor could excite no sympathy; the Cæsar of Constantinople was not a being who had exhibited the image of superhuman love or shed his blood for those who had taken delight in torturing him; and the excommunication which Hildebrand had imprudently hurled against the emperor Nicephorus (Nikephoros) III., had left behind it in the East a feeling not favourable to the designs of the Roman pontiff. The letter of Hildebrand appealed to no religious associations; it said nothing of abominations committed in the holy places, of terrible crimes wrought on the persons of faithful pilgrims; it was silent about the eternal reward which the bare act of pilgrimage would win for the believer. It was of little use to say in passing that more than 50,000 warriors longed to rise up under his guidance against the enemies of God and reach the sepulchre of their Lord. He had not struck the right chord, and Hildebrand failed to see the West gird itself for the great conflict with the enemies of the faith.

For a time he may have supposed that the great fire was already kindled, when with a fleet of 150 ships and an army of 30,000 men Robert Guiscard set sail from Brundusium (Brindisi). But the conqueror who had done so much in Italy was to do but little to the east of the Adriatic. While his army put forth its whole strength before the walls of Dyrrhachium (Durazzo), his fleet under the command of his son Bohemond was miserably defeated; and nothing but the wretched jealousy felt by the emperor Alexios for his general Paleologos saved the army of Guiscard from ruin and turned the threatened disaster into victory. When, being compelled to return to Italy, he left Bohemond to carry on his enterprise, the latter overran Epeiros and had well nigh succeeded in reducing the Thessalian Larissa, when he too was compelled to hasten to Italy for reinforcements both in men and money. In his absence his deputy, Brienne, the constable of Apulia, was constrained to abandon the siege of Kastoria and to bind himself not to invade again the territories of the Byzantine emperor. Not many months later Robert Guiscard gathered another armament for the conquest of the East. He raised the siege of Corfu (Korkyra), and had reached Cefalonia (Kephallenia), when his career was cut short by death and his scheme for the time seemed utterly brought to naught. The war which Hildebrand sought to stir up against the Mahomedan powers was not less vigorously preached by his successor Victor III., who promised remission of sins to all who might engage in it; but his words called forth no bands of warriors for the recovery of Jerusalem. The fleets of Genoa and Pisa swept the African coasts, and gained in the shape of booty a harvest which was to fall to the lot of few among the myriads who were soon to leave their homes for the Holy Land.

Ten years after the death of Hildebrand three or four thousand of the clergy and thirty thousand laymen were gathered to meet pope Urban II. at the council of Piacenza (Placentia). So vast a throng could find standing ground in no building, and the business of the council was transacted in the plain outside the city. The envoys of the Eastern emperor, Alexios Comnenos, were there to plead his distresses and beseech the strenuous aid of the faithful. The policy of checking the progress of the Turks while they were still at a good distance from Italy may have influenced the more statesmanlike of their hearers; the more vehement and enthusiastic among them were moved to tears by the pathetic recital of the Byzantine ambassadors, and demanded loudly to be led against the enemy. But Urban, with his heart more determinately set upon the enterprise than any man present, felt that the hour for the supreme decision had not yet come. He was in a country torn by intestine divisions, where his own claim to the papacy was disputed by an anti-pope whom with his adherents it was here his especial business to excommunicate. He had to deal with other matters also. Some of the clergy still refused to abandon their wives; and the wife of the emperor Henry IV. was present to complain of treatment unimaginably monstrous on the part of her husband. Both emperor and clergy must be condemned, and brought into obedience; and Urban felt that after such business as this it would be well to reserve his eloquence for another scene. He therefore dismissed the envoys of Alexios with the assurance that when the hosts of Western Christendom advanced to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre they would not forget that they had work to do near Constantinople.

From Piacenza Urban made his way across the Alps to the realm of the great Charles, whose intercourse with the ambassadors of the Caliph Harun-al-Reschid may have laid the foundation for the myth, expanded into a systematic fiction in the lying Chronicle of Turpin, that he had himself smitten down the unbelievers under the shadow of the Church of Constantine. On the northern side of the Alps Urban could breathe more freely. The sentence of excommunication was impending, it is true, over Philip the First, who called himself or was called King of France; but the great-grandson of Hugh Capet, powerful though he might be within his own dominion of Paris and Orleans, was little more than nominal lord of the vast throng of feudal chiefs who lay beyond its borders. From his old home in the great monastery of Clugny, Urban set off in the autumn for Clermont in the territories of the Count of Auvergne. Before he could reach the city, thousands of tents were pitched without the walls for those who could find no shelter within them; and the eight days during which the council held its sessions were spent in regulating the enterprise about which the pope had spoken with so much reserve at Piacenza, and in prescribing the measures to be taken for the safety of those who might remain at home during the absence of their natural protectors.

There was now no more need for hesitation. Popular feeling to the north of the Alps was far more deeply moved by the woes of the pilgrims and the conquests of the infidels than on the southern side of the great mountain barriers; and the wrath of the people had been fanned into an ungovernable flame by the preaching of the hermit Peter. This man, born at Amiens in Picardy, had forsaken his wife and laid aside the sword which he wielded in the service of the Counts of Boulogne, to follow the council of perfection in silence and solitude. Like others, he felt himself drawn by an irresistible attraction to the Holy Land; but if his passionate yearnings were rewarded by the privilege of offering up his prayers before the tomb of the Redeemer, his very heart was stirred by the sight of things, the mere recital of which had awakened his wrath at a distance. The Sanctuary was in the hands of the infidels; the patriarch was reduced practically to the state of a slave, and the pilgrim was happy who returned from the Holy City without undergoing humiliations and buffetings scarcely deserved by the worst of criminals. The murder of many Christian men, the deadly wrongs done to many Christian women, called aloud for vengeance, and the hermit made his vow that, with the help of God, these things should cease. His conversations with the patriarch Simeon brought out only confessions of the incapacity of the Greek Emperor and the weakness of his empire. ‘The nations of the West shall take up arms in your cause,’ said the hermit; and with the patriarchal benediction Peter hastened to obtain for the mission which he now saw before him the sanction of the man who claimed to be at the head of Eastern and Western Christendom alike.

Before the Roman pontiff Peter poured forth his story of the wrongs which called for immediate redress; but no eloquence was needed to stir the heart of Urban. The zeal of the pope was probably as sincere as that of any others who engaged in the enterprise; but it could not fail to derive strength from the consciousness that, whatever might be the result to the warriors of the cross, his own power would rest henceforth on more solid foundations. His blessing was therefore eagerly bestowed on the fervent enthusiast who undertook to go through the length and breadth of the land, stirring up the people to the great work for the love of God and of their own souls. His eloquence may have been as rude as it was ready; but its deficiencies were more than made up by the earnestness which gave even to the glance of his eye a force more powerful than speech. Dwarfish in stature and mean in person, he was yet filled with a fire which would not stay, and the horrors which were burnt in upon his soul were those which would most surely stir the conscience and rouse the wrath of his hearers. His fiery appeals carried everything before them. Wherever he went, rich and poor, aged and young, the knight and the peasant, thronged round the emaciated stranger, who with his head and feet bare rode on his ass, carrying a huge crucifix. That form, of which they beheld the bleeding sign, he had himself seen; nay, he had received from the Saviour a letter which had fallen down from heaven. He appealed to every feeling which may stir the heart of mankind generally, to every motive which should have special power with all faithful Christians. He called upon them for the deliverance of the land which was the cradle of their faith, for the punishment of the barbarian who had dared to defile it, for the rescue of the brethren who were the victims of his tyranny. The vehemence which choked his own utterance became contagious: his sobs and groans called forth the tears and cries of the vast crowds who hung upon his words, and who greedily devoured the harrowing accounts of the pilgrims whom Peter brought forward as witnesses to the truth of his picture. Motives more earthly may have mingled with his austere call in the minds of some who heard him. Of these motives the hermit said nothing: but there is no doubt that he made his last and most constraining appeal to that notion of mechanical religion which the prophet Micah puts into the mouth of Balak the king of Moab. The consciences of some amongst his hearers might be weighed down by the burden of sins too grievous almost for forgiveness. He besought them to remember that such fears were altogether misplaced, if only they made up their minds to take part in the redemption of the Holy Land. If they chose to become the soldiers of the cross, their salvation was at once achieved. There was no sin, however fearful, which would not be cancelled by the mere taking of the vow; no sinful habits which would not be condoned in those who might fall in battle with the unbelievers. The excitement of the moment, the frenzy which, having first unsettled the mind of the hermit, was by him communicated to his hearers, threw, we cannot doubt, a specious colouring over a degrading morality and a hopelessly corrupting religion; but as little can we doubt that the whole temper which stirred up and kept alive the enterprise left behind it a poisoned atmosphere which could be cleared only by the storms and tempests of the reformation.

The preaching of the hermit predetermined the results of the council of Clermont; but Urban and the throng of bishops and abbots who were gathered round him were well aware that something more was needed than the enlisting of an army of zealots for distant warfare. With our settled laws and orderly government it is almost impossible for us to realize the condition even of the most advanced states of Christian Europe in an age when the power of the king over his vassals meant simply that which the strength or the weakness of the vassals made it, and when the vassal, if he owed allegiance to his lord, was bound by no ties to his fellow vassals. The system of feudalism could not fail to feed the worst passions of human nature; and the absence of an authority capable of constraining all alike involved for those who felt or fancied themselves aggrieved an irresistible temptation to take the law into their own hands. But the practice of private war thus set up would sooner or later assume the form of a trade, and in the words of William of Malmesbury things had now come to so wretched a pass that feudal chiefs would take each other captive on little or no pretence, and would set their prisoners free only on the payment of an enormous ransom. This military violence of the laity was accompanied by corruption on the part of the clergy, showing itself in a shameless traffic of benefices and dignities which, in brief phrase, fell to the lot of the highest bidder. In such a condition of things to drain off to distant lands a large proportion of the men who at home might do something to check, if not to repress, the mischief, would be to leave those who remained behind defenceless. Decrees were therefore passed condemning private wars, confirming the Truce of God which suspended all hostilities during four days of each week, and placing the women and the clergy under the protection of the Church, which in an especial manner was extended to merchants and husbandmen for three years.

When, the business of the council being ended, Urban ascended a lofty scaffold and began his address to the people, he spoke to hearers for whom arguments were no longer needed, but who were well pleased to hear from the chief of Christendom words which carried with them comfort and encouragement. Three forms or versions of this speech have been preserved to us; one in the pages of William of Tyre, a second in those of William of Malmesbury, a third from a manuscript in the Vatican. It is possible that they may represent three different speeches: but the substance of all is the same, and we are left in no doubt of the general tenor of his words. With some inconsistency he dwelt on the cowardice of the barbarians who had contrived to conquer Syria and whose tyranny called forth the appeal which he now made to them. The Turk, shrinking from close encounters, trusted to his bow and arrow; and the venom of his poisoned shaft, not the bravery of a valiant warrior, inflicted death on the man whom it struck. Their fears, he added, were justified, for the blood which ran in the veins of men born in countries scorched with the heat of the sun was scanty in stream and poor in quality as compared with that which coursed through the bodies of men belonging to more temperate regions. ‘In these temperate regions you were born,’ he pleaded, ‘and you have therefore a title to victory which your enemies can never acquire. You have prudence, you have discipline, you have skill and valour, and you will go forth, through the gift of God and the privilege of St. Peter, absolved from all your sins. The consciousness of this freedom shall soothe the toil of your journey, and death will bring to you the benefits of a blessed martyrdom. Sufferings and torments may perhaps await you. You may picture them to yourselves as the most exquisite tortures, and the picture may perhaps fall short of the agony which you may have to undergo; but your sufferings will redeem your souls at the expense of your bodies. Go then on your errand of love, of love for the faithful who in the lands overcome by the infidel cannot defend themselves, of love which will put out of sight all the ties that bind you to the spots which you have called your homes. Your homes, in truth, they are not. For the Christian all the world is exile, and all the world is at the same time his country. If you leave a rich patrimony here, a better patrimony is promised to you in the Holy Land. They who die will enter the mansions of heaven, while the living shall behold the sepulchre of their Lord. Blessed are they who, taking this vow upon them, shall inherit such a recompense: happy they who are led to such a conflict, that they may share in such rewards.’

It was no wonder that words thus striking chords of feeling already stretched to intensity should be interrupted with the passionate cry ‘It is the will of God! It is the will of God!’ which broke from the assembled multitude. ‘It is, in truth, his will,’ added the pontiff, ‘and let these words be your war-cry when you unsheath your swords against the enemy. You are soldiers of the cross: wear, then, on your breasts or on your shoulders the blood-red sign of Him who died for the salvation of your souls. Wear it as a token that his help will never fail you: wear it as the pledge of a vow which can never be recalled.’

By these words the war now proclaimed against the Turks received the name which has become a general title for all wars or hostile undertakings carried on in the name of religion. Thousands hastened at once to put on the badge and so to take their place among the ranks of the crusaders. The rival claims of the anti-pope withheld Urban himself from taking the pledge to which he was clamorously invited; and worldly prudence alone may have suggested the wisdom of standing aloof from a conflict in which disaster to a Roman pontiff would certainly be regarded as a visible sign of the divine displeasure. Of the clergy, the first to assume the cross was Adhemar (Aymer), bishop of Puy, and as his reward he received the powers and dignity of papal legate. At the head of the laity Raymond, count of Toulouse, duke of Narbonne and marquis of Provence, promised through his ambassadors to be ready by the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, next following the council, the day fixed for the departure of the crusading hosts for Constantinople.

Thus was the die cast for a venture which in the eye of a keen-sighted general or a far-seeing statesman should have boded little good, but which held out irresistible attractions for the great mass of the people,—attractions which continued to draw hundreds and thousands still to the unknown and mysterious East, when a long series of disasters had proved that the journey to Jerusalem was in all likelihood a journey to the grave. For the really sincere and devout, whose lives had been passed without reproach and who could await the future with a clear conscience, there was the deep sense of binding duty, the yearning to be brought nearer whether on earth or in heaven to the Master whom they loved. For the feudal chieftain there was the fierce pastime of war which formed the main occupation and perhaps the only delight of his life, with the wild excitement produced by the thought that the indulgence of his passions had now become a solemn act of religion. There was also the prospect of vast and permanent conquest; and the duke or count who left a fair domain behind him might look forward to the chance of winning a realm as splendid as that which Robert Guiscard and his Normans had won in Apulia and Sicily. For the common herd and those whom gross living had rendered moral cowards, there was the offer of a method by which they might wipe away their guilt without changing their character and disposition. Not a few might be caught by the philosophy of the abbot Guibert, who boldly drew a parallel between the crusades and holy orders or monachism. That height of perfection which ecclesiastics might reach in their own sphere was now attainable by laymen through an enterprise in which their usual license and habits of life would win them the favour of God not less than the most unsparing austerity of the monk or the priest. It was, in short, a new mode of salvation, and they who were hurrying along the broad road to destruction now found that the taking of a vow converted it into the narrow and rugged path to heaven. Nor was the number few of those for whom this convenient arrangement was combined with some solid temporal advantages. The cross on the breast or shoulder set free from the clutches of his lord the burgher or the peasant attached to the soil, opened the prison doors for malefactors of every kind, released the debtor from the obligation of paying interest on his debts while he wore the sacred badge, and placed him beyond the reach of his creditors. Lastly, the episode of a crusade might be for the priest a pleasant interruption to the dull routine of parochial work, to the monk an agreeable change from the wearisome monotony of his conventual life. The usurer and the creditor might fancy himself to be somewhat hardly treated. Yet they were amongst the few to whom the crazy enterprise (crazy not from the impracticability of its objects, but from the way in which these were followed,) brought a solid benefit. The unthinking throng might rush off to Palestine without making the least preparation for their journey or their maintenance, in the blind faith that they would be fed and clothed like the fowls of the air or the lilies of the field. But for those who could judge more soberly, and for those who were not willing to forego their luxuries or their pleasures, there was the need of providing a store of the precious metals by means of which alone their wishes could be gratified. The duke, who had to maintain a vast and brilliant retinue, was compelled to mortgage his dominions; and thus for the sum of ten thousand marks, wrung from the lower orders in the English state, William Rufus obtained from his brother Robert the government of his dukedom for five years, and took care that the prize so won should not slip again from his grasp. Nobles and knights, setting off on the crusade, all wished to sell land, all wished to buy arms and horses. The arms and horses therefore became ruinously dear, the lands ridiculously cheap. It is easy to see that the prudent trader, the cautious merchant, the landowner whose eye was fixed on the main chance, would stand at an enormous advantage.

But if these were gainers, the gains of the pope and the sacerdotal army of which he was the chief were greater still. If the proclamation of the crusader rendered all private warfare a treason against Christendom, if it set free even the noble from the power of the overlord, and made the latter incapable of summoning his vassal to his standard, if the crusader, as the soldier of the Church, was released from every other obligation, these tremendous changes had been wrought wholly by the power of the pope and his hierarchy. In placing the dominions of all crusading princes under the protection of the Church, the council of Clermont may have provided for those chiefs a most inadequate defence; but it placed the pope on a level above all earthly princes, and the power which withheld the arm of the creditor from falling upon his debtor became a vast dispensing authority, the possession of which would have delighted the heart and realized the highest longings of Hildebrand. Urban did not go to Palestine: but even there he was present in the person of his legate Adhemar, and thus claimed the guidance of a war sanctified by his blessing and undertaken in the cause of the Church. The vows of the crusader were taken, again, by many who had no present intention of fulfilling them. Sickness, or misfortune, or qualms of conscience might lead them to assume the fatal sign; but from that moment until they set off on their journey they put themselves in the power of the pope, who sometimes used with cruel effect the hold thus obtained over emperors and kings.

Kings, it is true, reaped no small benefit from the impulse which drove their vassals to the Holy Sepulchre; and the absorption of the smaller into larger fiefs and of these again into royal domain, tended to that extension of the sovereign power which ultimately broke up the feudal system. But these results were far distant: the immediate harvest was gathered by the pope.

Thus far he had appeared by his representatives in general or local councils; by these he had interfered in the settlement of disputes, through these he had negotiated with princes. But the preaching of the crusades furnished a reason or a pretext for sending his legates into every land. Their primary business was to stir up the hearts of the faithful or to keep them up to fever heat: but scarcely less important was the task of collecting money for the support of the crusading armies. On the clergy, whether secular or regular, and on the monastic orders, the pope had a claim which they dared not to call into question, and the subsidies exacted or enjoined for this purpose were paid with a real or a feigned cheerfulness. To the laity the prayer for voluntary alms assumed practically the form of a demand. Refusal would imply lukewarmness in the faith, if not positive heresy; and the imputation could not be incurred without peril of temporal and even of eternal ruin. Both for the clergy and the laity the charge for a special and temporary purpose became a permanent tax, the proceeds of which the pope might expend on any objects, and in the theory of the time he could spend them on none which were not good.

But for the impost thus laid upon them the clergy had a compensation which by the nature of the case could not be enjoyed by the laity. If a bishop put on the cross he might lay a burden on his estates, but he could not alienate them, as his right over them ceased with his death; but in point of fact it was chiefly the prelates and the monastic houses that became guardians or mortgagees of lands belonging to men who had betaken themselves to the Holy Land. The Jews, who amassed immense profits on their loans to needy crusaders, had nothing to do with the cultivation of the soil, and in most countries could not be owners of it. But the Church was everywhere ready with its protection and its money; nor were there wanting enthusiasts who, as they fixed the blood-red cross on their garment, gave up all their lands and worldly goods to the spiritual body whose prayers they regarded as a more than sufficient recompense. Even they who left the Church merely the guardian of their estates in their absence might die in the East; and if they died without heirs the guardians became absolute owners. If they came back, toil and disappointment had often so worn them down that they took refuge in a cloister and handed over to the fraternity whatever of their property might still remain to them. The vast gains thus accruing were all over and beyond the accumulations amassed from the bequests of ordinary or extraordinary penitents on their death-beds or the gifts of enthusiastic devotees during their lifetime; and all the land so gained to the Church was withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the sovereign who professed to rule the country, and thus formed a kingdom within a kingdom, the spiritual domain threatening constantly to absorb that of the secular monarch. A collision, followed by violent and iniquitous spoliation, became inevitable; and when the time was come the great fabric of ecclesiastical wealth was plundered and demolished.

In the enterprise to which Latin Christendom thus stood committed, the several nations or countries of Europe took very equal parts; or, rather, no nation, as such, took any part in it at all; and in this fact we have the explanation of that want of coherent action, and even decent or average generalship, which is commonly seen in national undertakings. For the crusade there was no attempt at a commissariat, no care for a base of supplies; and the crusading hosts were a collection of individual adventurers who either went without making any provisions for their journey or provided for their own needs and those of their followers from their own resources. The number of these adventurers were naturally determined by the political conditions of the country from which they came. In Italy the struggle between the pope and the anti-pope went far towards chilling enthusiasm; and the recruits for the crusading army came chiefly from the Normans who had followed Robert Guiscard to the sunny southern lands. The Spaniards were busied with a crusade nearer home, and were already pushing back to the south the Mahomedan dominion which had once threatened to pass the barriers of the Pyrenees and carry the Crescent to the shores of the Baltic Sea. About ten years before the council of Clermont the Moslem dynasty of Toledo had been expelled by Alfonso, king of Gallicia: the kingdom of Cordova had fallen twenty years earlier (1065), and while Peter the Hermit was hurrying hither and thither through the countries of northern Europe, the Christians of Spain were winning victories in Murcia, and the land was ringing with the exploits of the dauntless Cid, Ruy Diaz de Bivar. By the Germans the summons to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre was received with comparative coldness; the partisans of emperors, who had been humbled to the dust by the predecessors of Urban, if not by himself, were not vehemently eager to obey it. The bishops of Salzburg, Passau, and Strasburg, the aged duke Guelf of Bavaria, had undertaken the toilsome and perilous journey: not one of them saw their homes again, and their death in the distant East was not regarded by their countrymen as an encouragement to follow their example. In England the English were too much weighed down by the miseries of the Conquest, the Normans too much occupied in strengthening their position, and the king, William the Red, more ready to take advantage of the needs of his brother Robert than to incur any risks of his own. The great movement came from the lands extending from the Scheldt to the Pyrenees. Franks and Normans alike made ready with impetuous haste for the great adventure; and tens of thousands, who could not wait for the formation of something like a regular army, hurried away, under leaders as frantic as themselves, to their inevitable doom.

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Little more than half the time allowed for the gathering of the crusaders had passed away, when a crowd of some sixty thousand men and women, neither caring nor thinking about the means by which their ends could be attained, insisted that the hermit Peter should lead them at once to the holy city. Mere charity may justify the belief that some even amongst these may have been folk of decent lives moved by the earnest conviction that their going to Jerusalem would do some good; that the vast majority looked upon their vow as a license for the commission of any sin, there can be no moral doubt; that they exhibited not a single quality needed for the successful prosecution of their enterprise, is absolutely certain. With a foolhardiness equal to his ignorance, Peter undertook the task, in which he was aided by Walter the Penniless, a man with some pretensions to the soldier-like character. But the utter disorder of this motley host made it impossible for them to journey long together. At Cologne they parted company; and 15,000 under the penniless Walter made their way to the frontiers of Hungary, while Peter led onwards a host which swelled gradually on the march to about 40,000.

Another army or horde of perhaps 20,000 marched under the guidance of Emico, count of Leiningen, a third under that of the monk Gotschalk, a man not notorious for the purity or disinterestedness of his motives. Behind these came a rabble, it is said, of 200,000 men, women, and children, preceded by a goose and a goat, or, as some have supposed, by banners on which, as symbols of the mysterious faith of Gnostics and Paulicians, the likeness of these animals was painted. In this vile horde no pretence was kept up of order or of decency. Sinning freely, it would seem, that grace might abound, they plundered and harried the lands through which they marched, while 3,000 horsemen, headed by some counts and gentlemen, were not too dignified to act as their attendants and to share their spoil.

But if they had no scruple in robbing Christians, their delight was to prove the reality of their mission as soldiers of the cross by plundering, torturing, and slaying Jews. The crusade against the Turk was interpreted as a crusade directed not less explicitly against the descendants of those who had crucified the Redeemer. The streets of Verdun and Treves, and of the great cities on the Rhine, ran red with the blood of their victims; and if some saved their lives by pretended conversions, many more cheated their persecutors by throwing their property and their persons either into the rivers or into the consuming fires. Thus auspiciously began the mighty enterprise on which pope Urban had insisted as the first duty of all Christians; and thus early did the result of his preaching tend to revive the waning power of the emperor, who interposed his authority to this merciless onslaught on a peaceable and useful class of his subjects. The Jews were taken under the protection of the empire, and for the time the change was a real relief. Their posterity found to their cost that their guardian might in his turn become their plunderer and tormentor.

A space of six hundred miles lay between the Austrian frontier and Constantinople; and across the dreary waste the followers of Walter the Penniless struggled on, destitute of money, and rousing the hostility of the inhabitants whom they robbed and ill-used. In Bulgaria their misdeeds provoked reprisals which threatened their destruction; and none perhaps would have reached Constantinople, if the imperial commander at Naissos had not rescued them from their enemies, supplied them with food, and guarded them through the remainder of their journey. These succours involved some costs; and the costs were paid by the sale of unarmed men amongst the pilgrims, and especially of the women and children, who were seized to provide the necessary funds. Of those who formed the train of the hermit Peter, seven thousand only, it is said, reached Constantinople.

Of such a rabble rout the Emperor Alexios needed not to be afraid. He had already seen and encountered far larger armies of Normans, Turks, and Romans; and he now extended to this vanguard of the hosts of Latin Christendom a hospitality which was almost immediately abused. They had refused to comply with his request that they should quietly await the arrival of their fellow crusaders; and consulting the safety of his people not less than his own, he induced them to cross the Bosporos, and pitch their camp on Asiatic soil, the land which they had come to wrest from the unbelievers.

Alexios wished simply to be rid of their presence: they had to deal with an enemy still more crafty and formidable in the Seljukian Sultan David, whose surname Kilidje Arslan marked him out as the Sword of the Lion. The vagrants whom Peter and Walter had brought thus far on the road to Jerusalem were scattered about the land in search of food; and it was no hard task for David to cheat the main body with the false tidings that their companions had carried the walls of Nice (Nikaia), and were revelling in the pleasures and spoils of his capital. The doomed horde rushed into the plain which fronts the city; and a vast heap of bones alone remained to tell the story of the great catastrophe, when the forces which might more legitimately claim the name of an army passed the spot where the Seljukian had entrapped and crushed his victims. In this wild expedition not less, it is said, than 300,000 human beings had already paid the penalty of their lives.

Still the first crusade was destined to accomplish more than any of the seven or eight crusades which followed it; and this measure of success it achieved probably because none of the great European sovereigns took part in it. The Western emperor, Henry IV., the representative of Charles the Great was the enemy of the pope; Philip I., king of France, had been excommunicated by Urban in the council of Clermont; the sovereigns of Denmark, Scotland, Sweden and Poland were as yet scarcely brought within the community of European monarchs; the Spanish kings had their crusades ready made at home; and we have already seen that the English William II., was more intent on acquiring dukedoms than on running the risk of a blessed martyrdom at the gates of Jerusalem. The task of setting up a Latin kingdom in Palestine was to be achieved by princes of the second order.

Of these the foremost and the most deservedly illustrious was Godfrey, of Bouillon in the Ardennes, a kinsman of the counts of Boulogne, and duke of Lothringen (Lorraine). In the service of the emperor Henry IV., the enemy or the victim of Hildebrand, he had been the first to mount the walls of Rome and cleave his way into the city; he might hope that his crusading vow would be accepted as an atonement for his sacrilege. Speaking the Frank and Teutonic dialects with equal ease, he exercised by his bravery, his wisdom, and the uprightness of his life, an influence which brought to his standard, it is said, not less than 80,000 infantry and 10,000 horsemen, together with his brothers Baldwin and Eustace, count of Boulogne.

Among the most conspicuous of Godfrey’s colleagues was Hugh, count of Vermandois, whose surname the Great has been ascribed by some to his birth as the brother of Philip I., the French king, by others merely to his stature as ‘Hugh the long.’ With him may be placed the Norman duke Robert, whose carelessness had lost him the crown of England, and who had now pawned his duchy for a pittance scarcely less paltry than that for which Esau bartered away his birthright. The picture drawn of him is indeed not unlike that of the forefather of the Edomite tribes. Careless of the future, open in his friendship or his enmity, free from duplicity in himself and unsuspicious of treachery in others, charming others and injuring himself by his light-hearted cheerfulness and his lavish generosity, Robert was a man whom the total lack of the qualities which marked his iron-hearted father brought to a horrible captivity and death in the dungeons of Cardiff Castle.

The number of the great chiefs who led the pilgrims from northern Europe is completed with the names of Robert, count of Flanders, whom his followers lauded as the Sword and Lance of the Christians, and of Stephen, count of Chartres, Troyes, and Blois, the possessor, if we choose to believe the tale, of 365 castles, and as rich in his eloquence as in his fortresses. The same arithmetic would have us think that the minor chiefs were more numerous than the champions whom Agamemnon led to the Trojan war; and the assertion is perhaps as much and as little to be credited as the catalogue of Greek warriors in the Iliad.

Foremost, by virtue of his title and office, among the leaders of the southern bands, was the papal legate Adhemar (Aymer) bishop of Puy—a leader rather as guiding the counsels of the army than as gathering soldiers under his banner. A hundred thousand horse and foot attested, we are told, the greatness, the wealth, and the zeal of Raymond, count of Toulouse, lord of Auvergne and Languedoc, who had grown old in warfare, and won for himself a mingled reputation for wisdom and haughtiness, obstinacy and greed.

Less tinged with the fanatical enthusiasm of his comrades, and certainly more cool and deliberate in his ambition, Bohemond, son of Robert Guiscard, whom we have seen fighting at Dyrrhachium and victorious at Larissa (p. 23), looked to the crusade as a means by which he might regain the vast regions extending from the Dalmatian coast to the northern shores of the Egean. Nay, if we are to believe William of Malmesbury, he urged Urban to set forward the enterprise for the very purpose, partly, of thus recovering what he was pleased to regard as his inheritance, and in part of enabling the pontiff to suppress all opposition in Rome. Guiscard had left his Apulian domains to a younger son, and Bohemond was resolved, it would seem, to add to his principality of Tarentum a kingdom which would make him a formidable rival of the Eastern emperor.

Far above his companion Bohemond, rises his cousin Tancred, the son of the marquis Odo, surnamed the Good, and of Emma, the sister of Robert Guiscard; and his reputation comes not from his wealth or the greatness of his following, but from the qualities of mind and person which raised him indefinitely nearer than his fellows to the standard of the ‘very gentle perfect knight’ of Chaucer. In Tancred was seen the embodiment of those peculiar sentiments and modes of thought which gave birth to the crusades, and to which the crusades in their turn imparted marvellous strength and splendour.

When in the council of Clermont pope Urban dwelt on the cowardice and ignoble fears of the Turks, he probably touched a chord which grated on the more generous and enthusiastic amongst his hearers, and was in fact speaking as a priest when with greater wisdom he should have used the language of a general. There can be little doubt that the finer spirits of the age were moved by the eager desire of rescuing a crowd of helpless Christians from conquerors whose might it was impossible for them to resist, and who were worthy antagonists even for the noblest knights of Latin and Teutonic Christendom. The rescue of this feeble multitude could be effected only at the cost of a great sacrifice,—the sacrifice of houses and lands, of luxuries and pleasures: and the consciousness of large sacrifices, cheerfully made for the weak and suffering, is amongst the highest feelings which may be awakened in the human heart. Thus in the most noble-minded and disinterested of the crusading champions there was distinctly a combination of two ideas, seemingly discordant, yet working together to produce one definite moral result. These were the indignation with which they regarded the tyranny exercised over the Christians of the East, and the involuntary respect and even admiration which they felt for the conquerors as the most redoubtable warriors of the age next to the foremost knights of Christendom. The former feeling would impel them to the most desperate efforts for the recovery of the Holy Land and the Holy Sepulchre; the latter would place checks dimly recognized and not always heeded on the ferocious warfare with which they would without scruple seek to sweep away all meaner or more savage enemies. So far as he was actuated by such motives, the crusader was cultivating in himself the germs of forbearance and toleration which must at once to whatever extent soften the horrors of war and which would in the end yield more solid and satisfying fruits. In this same direction the influence of the Church was felt with constantly increasing power. It had been her aim to curb, when she could not repress, the violence of her children, and to establish by a solemn sanction that Truce of God which prevented the practice of private war from becoming a burden too heavy for the earth to bear. But in the expedition for the delivery of the Holy Land war itself was sanctified; and the knight, initiated even in past years by rites, which, heathen in their origin, had been made sacred by the Church, was raised almost to the level of the priest and the monk. Henceforth the young aspirant for the knightly dignity and office was treated much as the catechumens had been treated in the first Christian centuries. He must enter on his work with clean thoughts and pure conscience, and the spotless garment of the catechumen, purified by his long fast, was reproduced in the white robe which the young squire put on after cleansing his body in the bath, while the profession of baptism was repeated in the knightly vow which (after a special confession of sin followed by absolution) pledged the young man to deal justly, truly, and generously, defending the oppressed, succouring the needy and helpless, and everywhere showing himself the unsparing antagonist of all tyrants and evil-doers. In an especial degree he was to be the champion of women, the protector of children; and he rose from his knees before the assembled clergy, dubbed a knight by the sword of his godfather in the names of God, of our Lady, and of St. Michael, or St. George. The nearest to the heart of those who uttered this formula, as to that of the young knight, was the name of the Virgin Mother, whose name, it would seem, has fascinated multitudes without curing them of savage treachery and bloodthirsty ferocity. In feudal phrase she was his Lady (Notre Dame), as the crucified Jesus was his Lord (Notre Seigneur); and the adoring and humble love which he bore for her was held to sanctify and to be reflected in the devotion which he felt for every noble lady and more especially for the one favoured dame who became the idol of his heart, a star to be worshipped at a distance, if not a queen at whose feet he might throw himself in an ecstacy of passion. This being whom he delighted to picture to himself as the peerless ideal of womanhood might be the wife of another man; and these extravagant fancies produced not unfrequently the most lamentable and ruinous results. But the knightly or chivalrous spirit, thus sometimes led astray, tended nevertheless to impose moral checks on rude and savage minds which had never felt them before; and the growth of this spirit was ensured chiefly by the crusaders. The iniquities wrought by the soldiers of the Cross were fearful indeed; but the horrors of the warfare were in some small measure softened by the honour which the foremost warriors on both sides paid each to the bravery and good faith of the other; and this feeling expressed itself in a word which even now has by no means lost its meaning. The quality of courtesy so named displayed itself in the readiness to give place to another where strength and power might have refused all concessions. It was closely allied to the Christian qualities of meekness and mercy, and any approach to this heavenly temper was a gain indeed in a brutalized and ferocious age. The highest glory of the crusading knight was to be a mirror of courtesy: and this glory is especially associated with the name of Tancred. Tancred lived, fought, and conquered: the Rinaldo whom Tasso paints in his epic poem on the deliverance of Jerusalem is a being of cloudland like the Greek Achilleus, the Trojan Hektor, and the Persian Rustam.

The miserable remnant of 3,000 men who escaped from the field of blood before the city of the Seljukian Sultan (p. 41), found a refuge in Byzantine territory about the time when the better appointed armies of the crusaders were setting off on their eastward journey. The most disciplined of these troops set out with a vast following from the banks of the Meuse and the Moselle under Godfrey of Bouillon who led them safely and without opposition to the Hungarian border. Here the armies of Hungary barred the way against the advance of a host at whose hands they dreaded a repetition of the havoc wrought by the lawless bands of Peter the Hermit and his self-chosen colleagues. Three weeks passed away in vain attempts to get over the difficulty. The Hungarian king demanded as a hostage Baldwin, the brother of the general: the demand was refused, and Godfrey put him to shame by surrendering himself. He asked only for a free passage and a free market; but although these were granted, it was not in his power to prevent some disorder and some depredations as his army or horde passed through the country. The mischief might have been much worse, had not the Hungarian cavalry, acting professedly as a friendly escort but really as cautious warders kept close to the crusading hosts.

At length they reached the gates of Philippopolis, and here Godfrey learnt that Hugh of Vermandois, whose coming had been announced to the Greek emperor Alexios by four-and-twenty knights in golden armour, and who styled himself the brother of the king of kings and lord of all the Frankish hosts, was a prisoner within the walls of Constantinople. With Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders, with Stephen of Chartres and some lesser chiefs, Hugh had chosen to make his way through Italy; and the charms of that voluptuous land had a greater effect, it seems, in breaking up and corrupting their forces than the delights of Capua had in weakening the soldiers of Hannibal. With little regard to order the chiefs determined to cross the sea as best they might. Hugh embarked at Bari; and if we may believe Anna Comnena, the historian and the worshipper of her father Alexios, his fleet was broken by a tempest which shattered his own ship on the coast between Palos and Dyrrhachium (Durazzo), of which John Comnenos, the nephew of the emperor, was at this time the governor. The Frank chief was here detained until the good pleasure of Alexios should be known. That wary and cunning prince saw at once how much might be made of his prisoner, who was by his orders conducted with careful respect and ceremony to the capital. Kept here really as a hostage, but welcomed to outward seeming as a friend, Hugh was so completely won by the charm of manner which Alexios well knew how and when to put on, that, paying him homage and declaring himself his man, he promised to do what he could to induce others to follow his example.

From Philippopolis Godfrey sent ambassadors to Alexios, demanding the immediate surrender of Hugh. The request was refused, and Godfrey resumed his march, treating the land through which he passed as an enemy’s country, until by way of Adrianople he at length appeared before the walls of the capital at Christmastide, 1096. The fears of Alexios were aroused by the sight of a host so vast and so formidable: they quickened into terror as he thought of the armies which were still on their way under the command of Bohemond and Tancred. Of Godfrey, beyond the fact of his mission as a crusader, he knew little or nothing: but in Bohemond he saw one who claimed as his inheritance no small portion of his empire. This gathering of myriads, whom a false step on his part might convert into open enemies, was the result of his own entreaties urged through his envoys before Urban II. in the council of Piacenza; and his mind was divided between a feverish anxiety to hurry them on to their destination and so to rid himself of their hateful presence, and the desire to retain a hold not only on the crusading chiefs but on any conquests which they might make in Syria.

Hugh was sent back to Godfrey’s camp; but the quarrel was patched up, rather than ended. It was easier to rouse suspicion and jealousy than to restore friendship. But it was of the first importance for Alexios that he should secure the homage of the princes already gathered round his capital before the arrival of his ancient enemy Bohemond. In this he succeeded, and a compact was made by which Alexios pledged them his word that he would supply them with food and aid them in their eastward march, and would protect all pilgrims passing through his dominions. On the other hand the crusading chiefs, as already subjects of other sovereigns, gave their fealty to the emperor as their liege lord only for the time during which they might remain within his borders, and undertook to restore to him such of their conquests as had been recently wrested from the empire. In order to secure this treaty Alexios had been compelled to go through the fatigue of interminable audiences with the Western warriors and to put up with not a little insolence. The effrontery of a crusader, who flinging himself on the imperial throne declared that he saw no reason for standing while one rustic remained seated, was denounced as intolerable rudeness even by his companions; but Robert, count of Paris, if indeed it was he, closed a brief career not many weeks later, and is more conspicuous in modern romance than in the pages of mediæval historians.

The spirit of Bohemond was stirred deeply within him when on reaching Constantinople he found that his colleagues, instead of remaining independent chiefs, had made themselves vassals of the Byzantine monarch. But Alexios was vigorously aided by Robert of Flanders, whose friendly offices were the result of an alliance made with his father eight years before; and Bohemond soon saw that he must in appearance follow the example of his comrades, whatever course it might suit him to take hereafter. He became the guest of the emperor, listened with complacency to his flatteries, accepted a magnificent gift or bribe, and accompanied his submission with a request for the office of Grand Domestic, or general of the East. The emperor put him off with the promise of an independent principality, and turned with more genuine warmth to the honest simplicity of Godfrey. This disinterested crusader was anxious only to fulfill his vows; and Alexios felt that he was making no sacrifice and entering into no inconvenient engagements by adopting him as his son.

The policy and the bribes of Alexios had overcome the opposition of Bohemond. He was to experience a stouter resistance from Raymond of Toulouse, who, though he had been the first to enlist, was the last to set out on his crusade. He should never make another journey, he said, and he was determined to be well prepared. Wishing to avoid, so far as he could, the lines of march chosen by the chiefs who had preceded him, he took the road through Lombardy. Thus far his march was easily accomplished: but things wore a different look when he reached the savage mountains and desolate valleys of Dalmatia and Slavonia. The people had driven their cattle (and their cattle formed practically their whole property) into inaccessible glens: and instead of plundering others the crusaders found themselves harassed and their stragglers cut off by thieves and murderers. Raymond retaliated by cutting off the hands and noses of all who were taken prisoners and putting out their eyes; and the wrath of the natives was roused to desperate resistance. At Scodra he entered into some sort of agreement with the Servian chief Bodin; but the country could yield little for the support of this vast army, which was compelled to struggle onwards under dire difficulties. It is astonishing to hear that Raymond could still speak of himself as the leader of a hundred thousand warriors, when he refused flatly to do homage to the Greek emperor.

The count of Toulouse scarcely regarded himself as the vassal even of the French king. He was ready, he said, to be the friend of Alexios on equal terms; but he would not declare himself to be his man. On this point he was immovable, although Bohemond tried the effect of a threat, which was never forgiven, that if the quarrel came to blows, he should be found on the side of the emperor. But Alexios soon saw that in Raymond he had to deal with an enthusiast as sincere and persistent as Godfrey. He took his measures accordingly, and winning the heart of the old warrior, although he failed to compel his obedience, he confessed to him his dislike of the rude and noisy habits of the Franks and his deep-seated fears of Bohemond. The admiration of Anna Comnena was as great as the esteem professed for him by her father. Raymond in her fervent language shone among the barbarians as the sun among the stars of heaven.

While Alexios was thus busied in dealing with Godfrey and Raymond, Bohemond and Tancred, he was not less anxiously occupied with the task of sending across the Bosporos the swarms which might soon become an army of devouring locusts round his own capital. It was easier to give them a welcome than to get rid of them: and more than two months had passed since Christmas, when the followers of Godfrey found themselves on the soil of Asia. It was well to place even a narrow strait of sea between himself and these dangerous friends, who had threatened him at first with all the horrors of savage war. The rumour had got abroad that Alexios meant to hem them in among marshes, and leave them there to starve; and an assault of the crusaders on the suburbs showed the emperor what he might expect, if these suspicions were not quieted. Probably he had not intended to entrap them to their death: but he had felt less scruple in submitting them to cheatings with debased coin and to extortions which carried with them no sense of novelty for his own people. Even these he found it politic to abandon, and so zealously did he employ an opposite method that for the time the crusaders seemed to have become his mercenaries.

Godfrey’s men had no sooner been landed on the eastern side of the Bosporos, than all the vessels which had transported them were brought back to the western shore. With great astuteness, and at the cost of large gifts, Alexios in like manner freed the neighbourhood of his capital from the invading multitudes. As fast as they came, they were hurried across, and the emperor breathed more freely when, on the feast of Pentecost, not a single Latin pilgrim remained on the European shore.

The danger of conflict had throughout been imminent; and the danger arose, not so much from the fact that the crusaders were armed men, marching through the country of professed allies, but from the thorough antagonism between Greeks and Latins in modes of thought and habits of life, in the first notions of civilization, law, and duty. For the Greeks feudalism was a thing of the remote past; in other words, was a thing unknown. To get at a state resembling that of Western Europe they would have had to go back for nearly twenty centuries—to the days of Solon and of the Thessalian and Theban nobility, who were among the most efficient allies of Xerxes. For the crusading armies or rather for their chiefs (of the common herd there was no need to take any account), nothing was so hateful as a central authority which pressed on all orders in the state alike: nothing was so precious as local tyranny and the right of private war, which respected neither person nor property. For the subjects of the Eastern empire the protection of person and property was everything, and in order to secure this they were willing to put up with a large amount of oppression and of corruption in their governors. In a sense not so high perhaps as that which the words bore in the days of Herodotos, law was still their king; and of public law the Latins could scarcely be said to have any conception. Nor must we forget the vast gulf which separated the Eastern from the Western clergy. The latter were now becoming well broken into the yoke of celibacy which had been finally thrust upon them by Damiani and Hildebrand; for the former marriage was a condition for the very reception of their orders. The Latin clergy had by this change been converted into a close order or caste, which looked up to the Roman pontiff as their head and hated the thought of allegiance to any temporal ruler. This empire within an empire was an idea which had not dawned on the Greek or the Eastern mind; and the clergy of the West despised their brethren of the East for their cowardly submission to the secular arm. These, in their turn, shrunk with horror from the sight of bishops, priests, and monks riding with blood-stained weapons over fields of battle, and exhibiting at other times an ignorance equal to their ferocity. Harmony between nations and races under such conditions is as hopeless as the voluntary mingling of oil and water; and the result of contact was an exasperation of the suspicion, jealousy, and hatred which the one side felt instinctively for the supposed treachery, lying, and violence of the other.

Thus was gathered on the eastern shores of the Hellespont and the Bosporos a host, we may well believe more vast than that which Xerxes drove before him for the invasion of Europe, and leaving behind it in utter insignificance the scanty force with which Alexander attempted and achieved the conquest of Asia. When tribes or a nation pour out their whole population, men, women, and children alike, there is practically no limit to the numbers which may be set in motion; nor is it any tax on our credulity to believe that a hundred thousand horsemen, fully armed in the light coats of mail worn during the first crusading age, were marshalled on the Bithynian plains, even if we put aside as an absurd exaggeration the notion of the chaplain of Count Baldwin, that the whole body of the crusaders amounted to not less than six millions.

Their strength and valour were soon to be tested. They were now face to face with the Turks on whose cowardice Urban II. had enlarged with so much complacency before the council of Clermont. The Sultan David, or Kilidje Arslan (p. 41), placed his family and treasures in his capital city of Nice (Nikaia), and retreated with 50,000 horsemen to the mountains, whence he swooped down from time to time on the outposts of the Christians. By these his city was formally invested; and for seven weeks it was assailed to little purpose by the old instruments of Roman warfare, while some of the besiegers shot their weapons from the hill on which were mouldering the bones of the fanatic followers of Peter. It was protected to the west by the Askanian lake, and so long as the Turks had command of this lake they felt themselves safe. But Alexios sent thither on sledges a large number of boats, and the city, subjected to a double blockade, submitted to the emperor, who was in no way anxious to see the crusaders masters of the place. The crusaders were making ready for the last assault, when they saw the imperial banner floating on the walls. Their disappointment at the escape of the miscreants, or unbelievers, for so they delighted to speak of them, was vented in threats which seemed to bode a renewal of the old troubles: but Alexios, with gifts, which added force to his words, professed that his only desire now, as it had been, was to forward them safely on their journey. Nor had they to go many stages before they found themselves again confronted with their adversary. The conflict took place near the Phrygian Dorylaion, and seemed at first to portend dire defeat to the crusaders. More than once the issue of the day seemed to be turned by the indomitable personal bravery of the Norman Robert, of Tancred, and of Bohemond; and when even those seemed likely to be borne down, they received timely succours from Godfrey, and Hugh of Vermandois, from bishop Adhemar of Puy and from Raymond, count of Toulouse. Still the Turks held out, and it seemed likely that they would long hold out, when the appearance of the last division of Raymond’s army filled them with the fear that a new host was upon them.

The crusaders had won a considerable victory. Three thousand knights belonging to the enemy had been slain, and Kilidje Arslan was hurrying away to enlist the services of his kinsmen. Meanwhile the Latin hosts were sweeping onwards, passing Cogni (Ikonion, Iconium), Erekli (Herakleia), and the Pisidian Antioch. Their dangers were great; their sufferings terrible. The son of Kilidje Arslan had hurried on before them with ten thousand horsemen, and declared before the gates of each city that they came as conquerors, not as fugitives. They had ravaged the lands as they came along; in the town they sacked the churches, plundered the houses, emptied the granaries; and the crusaders who followed them had to journey over a naked soil under the burning Phrygian sun. Hundreds died from the heat: and dogs or goats took the place of the baggage horses which had perished. At length Tancred with his troop found himself before Tarsus, the birthplace and the home of that single-hearted apostle who long ago had preached a gospel strangely unlike the creed of the crusaders. Following rapidly behind him, Baldwin saw with keen jealousy the banner of the Italian chief floating on its towers, and insisted on taking the precedence. Tancred pleaded the choice of the people and his own promise to protect them; but the intrigues of Baldwin changed their humour, and the rejection of Tancred by the men of Tarsus was followed by an attempt at private war between Tancred and Baldwin, in which the troops of Tancred were overborne. So early was the first harvest of murderous discord reaped among the holy warriors of the cross. It was ruin, however, to stay where they were; and the main army again began its march, to undergo once more the old monotony of hardship and peril.

A very small force would have sufficed to disorganize and rout them as they clambered over the defiles of Mount Taurus; nor could Raymond, recovering from a terrible illness, or Godfrey, suffering from wounds inflicted by a bear, have done much to help them. But for the present their enemies were dismayed; and Baldwin, brother of Godfrey, hastened with eagerness to obey a summons which besought him to aid the Greek or Armenian tyrant of Edessa. As Alexios had done to his brother, so this chief welcomed Baldwin as his son; but Baldwin, having once entered into the city, cared nothing for the means which had brought him thither, and the death of his adoptive father was followed by the establishment at Edessa of a Latin principality which lasted for fifty-four, or, as some have thought, forty-seven years. Baldwin had anticipated the unconditional surrender of Samosata; but the Turkish governor had some of the Edessenes in his power, and he refused to give up the city except on the payment of ten thousand gold pieces. The Turk shortly afterwards fell into Baldwin’s hands, and was put to death.

Meanwhile the main army of the crusaders was advancing towards the Syrian capital, that ancient and luxurious city whose fame had gone over the whole Roman world for its magnificence, its unbounded wealth, its soft delights, and its unholy pleasures. The days of its greatest splendour had passed away. Its walls were partially in ruins; its buildings were in some parts crumbling away or had already fallen; but against assailants utterly ignorant and awkward in all that relates to the blockade of cities it was still a formidable position. Nor could they invest it until they had passed the iron bridge (so called from its iron-plated gates) of nine stone arches, which spanned the stream of the Ifrin at a distance of nine miles from the city. This bridge was carried by the impetuous charge of Robert of Normandy, aided by the more steady efforts of Godfrey; and in the language of an age which delighted in round numbers, a hundred thousand warriors hurried across to seize the splendid prize which now seemed almost within their grasp.

But the city was in the hands of men who had been long accustomed to despise the Greeks, and who had not yet learnt to respect the valour of the Latins. Preparing himself for a resolute defence, the Seljukian governor Baghasian had sent away, as useless, if not mischievous, most of the Christians within the town; and the crusading chiefs had begun to discuss the prudence of postponing all operations till the spring, when Raymond of Toulouse with some other chiefs insisted that delay would imply fear, and that the imputation of cowardice would ensure the paralysis of their enterprise. The city was therefore at once invested, so far as the forces of the crusaders could suffice to encircle it; and a siege began which in the eyes of the military historian must be absolutely without interest, and of which the issue was decided by paroxysms of fanatical vehemence on the one side, and by lack not of bravery but of generalship on the other. Of the eastern and northern walls the blockade was complete; of the west it was partial; and the failure to invest a portion of the western wall, with two out of the five gates of the city, left the movements of the Turks in this direction free.

But the besiegers were in no hurry to begin the work of death. The wealth of the harvest and the vintage spread before them its irresistible temptations, and the herds feeding in the rich pastures seemed to promise an endless feast. The cattle, the corn, and the wine were alike wasted with besotted folly, while the Turks within the walls received tidings, it is said, of all that passed in the crusading camp from some Greek and Armenian Christians to whom they allowed free egress and ingress. Of this knowledge they availed themselves in planning the sallies by which they caused great distress to the besiegers, whose clumsy engines and devices seemed to produce no result beyond the waste of time, and who felt perhaps that they had done something when they blocked up the gate of the bridge with huge stones dug from the neighbouring quarries.

Three months passed away; and the crusaders found themselves not conquerors but in desperate straits from famine. The winter rains had turned the land round their camp into a swamp, and lack of food left them more and more unable to resist the pestilential diseases which were rapidly thinning their numbers. A foraging expedition under Bohemond and Tancred filled the camp with food: it was again recklessly wasted. The second famine scared away Tatikios, the lieutenant of the Greek emperor Alexios; but the crusading chiefs were perhaps still more disgusted by the desertion of William of Melun, called the Carpenter, from the sledge-hammer blows which he dealt out in battle. Hunger obtained a victory even over the hermit Peter, who was stealing away with William of Melun, when he with his companion was caught by Tancred and brought back to the tent of Bohemond.

For a moment the look of things was changed by the arrival of ambassadors from Egypt. To the Fatimite caliph of that country the progress of the crusading arms had thus far brought with it but little dissatisfaction. The humiliation of the Seljukian Turks could not fail to bring gain to himself, if the flood of Latin conquests could be checked and turned back in time. His generals besieged Jerusalem and Tyre; and when the Fatimite once more ruled in Palestine, his envoys hastened to the crusaders’ camp to announce the deliverance of the Holy Land from its oppressors, to assure to all unarmed and peaceable pilgrims a month’s unmolested sojourn in Jerusalem, and to promise them his aid during their march, on condition that they should acknowledge his supremacy within the limits of his Syrian empire.

The arguments and threats of the caliph were alike thrown away. The Latin chiefs disclaimed all interest in the feuds and quarrels of rival sultans and in the fortunes of Mahomedan sects. God Himself had destined Jerusalem for the Christians, and if any held it who were not Christians, these were usurpers whose resistance must be punished by their expulsion or their death. The envoys departed not encouraged by this answer, and still more perplexed by the appearance of plenty and by the magnificence of a camp in which they had expected to see a terrible spectacle of disorder and misery.

The resolute persistence of the besiegers convinced Baghasian of the need of reinforcements. These were hastening to him from Cæsarea, Aleppo, and other places, when they were cut off by Bohemond and Raymond, who sent a multitude of heads to the envoys of the Fatimite caliph, and discharged many hundreds from their engines into the city of Antioch. The Turks had their opportunity for reprisals when the arrival of some Pisan and Genoese ships at the mouth of the Orontes drew off the greater part of the besieging army. The crusaders were returning with provisions and arms, when their enemies started upon them from an ambuscade. The battle was fierce: but the defeat of Raymond which threatened dire disaster was changed into victory on the arrival of Godfrey and the Norman Robert, whose exploits equalled or surpassed, if we are to believe the story, even those of Arthur, Lancelot, or Tristram. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Turks fell. Their bodies were buried by their comrades in the cemetery without the walls: the Christians dug them up, severed the heads from the trunks, and paraded the ghastly trophies on their pikes, not forgetting to send a goodly number to the Egyptian caliph, by way of showing how his Seljukian friends or enemies had fared. The picture is disgusting; but if we shut our eyes to these loathsome details, the truth of the history is gone. We are dealing with the wars of savages, and it is right that we should know this.

The next scene exhibits Godfrey and Bohemond in fierce quarrel about a splendid tent, which, being intended as a gift for the former, had been seized by an Armenian chief and sent to the latter. But there was now more serious business on hand. Rumour spoke of the near approach of a Persian army, and the besieged under the plea of wishing to arrange terms of capitulation obtained a truce which they sought probably only for the sake of gaining time. The days passed by, but no offers were made; and their disposition was shown by seizing a crusading knight in the groves near the city, and tearing his body in pieces. The Latins returned with increased fury to the siege: but the defence, although more feeble, was still protracted, and Bohemond began to feel not only that fraud might succeed where force had failed, but that from fraud he might reap not safety merely but wealth and greatness. His plans were laid with a renegade Christian named Phirouz (high in the favour of the governor), with whom he had come into contact either during the truce or in some other way. By splendid promises he ensured the zealous aid of his new ally, and then came forward in the council with the assurance that he could place the city in their hands, but that he could do this only on condition that he should rule in Antioch as Baldwin ruled in Edessa. His claim was angrily opposed by the Provençal Raymond: but this opposition was overruled, and it was resolved that the plan should be carried out at once.

There was need for so doing. Rumours spread within the city that some attempt was to be made to betray the place to the besiegers, and hints or open accusations pointed out Phirouz as the traitor. Like other traitors, the renegade thought it best to anticipate the charge by urging that the guards of the towers should on the very next day be changed. His proposal was received as indubitable proof of his innocence and his faithfulness; but he had made up his mind that Antioch should fall that night, and that night by means of a rope ladder Bohemond with about sixty followers (the ropes broke before more could ascend) climbed up the wall. Seizing ten towers of which all the guards were killed, they opened a gate, and the Christian host rushed in. The banner of Bohemond rose on one of the towers; the trumpets sounded for the onset, and a carnage began in which at first the assailants took no heed to distinguish between the Christian and the Turk. In the awful confusion of the moment some of the besieged made their way to the citadel, and there shut themselves in, ready to resist to the death. Of the rest few escaped: ten thousand, it is said, were massacred. Baghasian with some friends passed out beyond the besiegers’ lines; but fainting from loss of blood he fell from his horse, and his companions hurried on. A Syrian Christian heard his groans, and striking off his head, carried the prize to the camp of the conquerors. Phirouz lived to be a second time a renegade, and to close his career as a thief.

The victory was for the crusaders a change from famine to abundance; and their feasting was accompanied by the wildest riot and the most filthy debauchery. But if heedless waste may have been one of the most venial of their sins, it was the greatest of their blunders. The reports which spoke of the approach of the Persians were not false. The Turks within the citadel suddenly found that they were rather besiegers than besieged, and that the Christians were hemmed in by the myriads of Kerboga prince of Mosul and the warriors of Kilidje Arslan. The old horrors of famine were now repeated, but in greater intensity; and the doom of the Latin host seemed to be sealed.

Stephen count of Chartres had deserted his companions before the fall of the city; others now followed his example, and with him set out on their return to Europe. In Phrygia Stephen encountered the emperor Alexios, who was marching to the aid of the crusaders, not only with a Greek army, but with a force of well appointed pilgrims who had reached Constantinople after the departure of Godfrey and his fellows. The story told by Stephen drove out of his head every thought except that of his own safety. The order for retreat was given; and the pilgrim warriors not less than the Greeks were compelled to turn their faces westwards. In vain Guy, a brother of Bohemond, pleaded his duty and his vow. His words were unheeded; and his indignation wrung from him the desperate assertion that if the Divine Being were omnipotent, He would not suffer such things to be done.

In Antioch the crusading soldiers were fast sinking into utter despair. Discipline had well nigh come to an end, and so obstinate was their refusal to bear arms any longer, that Bohemond resolved to burn them out of their quarters. These were consumed by the flames, which spread so rapidly as to fill him with fear that he had destroyed not only their dwellings but his whole principality. His experiment brought the men back to their duty: but so despondingly was their work done that but for some signal succour the end, it was manifest, must soon come. In a credulous age such succour at the darkest hour, if obtained at all, will generally be obtained through miracle. A Lombard priest came forward, to whom St. Ambrose of Milan had declared in a vision that the third year of the crusade should see the conquest of Jerusalem; another had seen the Saviour Himself, attended by his Virgin-Mother and the Prince of the Apostles, had heard from his lips a stern rebuke of the crusaders for yielding to the seductions of pagan women (as if the profession of Christianity altered the colour and the guilt of a vice), and lastly had received the distinct assurance that in five days they should have the help which they needed. The hopes of the crusaders were roused; with hope came a return of vigorous energy; and Peter Barthelemy, chaplain to Raymond of Toulouse, seized the opportunity for recounting a vision which was to be something more than a dream. To him St. Andrew had revealed the fact that in the church of St. Peter lay hidden the steel head of the spear which had pierced the side of the Redeemer as He hung upon the cross; and that Holy Lance should win them victory over all their enemies as surely as the spear which imparted irresistible power to the Knight of the Sangreal. After two days of special devotion they were to search for the long-lost weapon: on the third day the workmen began to dig; but until the sun had set they toiled in vain. The darkness of night made it easier for the chaplain to play the part which Sir Walter Scott, in the ‘Antiquary,’ assigns to Herman Dousterswivel in the ruins of St. Ruth. Barefooted and with a single garment the priest went down into the pit. For a time the strokes of his spade were heard, and then the sacred relic was found, carefully wrapped in a veil of silk and gold. The priest proclaimed his discovery; the people rushed into the church; and from the church throughout the city spread the flame of a fierce enthusiasm.

Nine or ten months later Peter Barthelemy paid the penalty of his life for his fraud or his superstition. A bribe taken by his master Raymond brought that chief into ill odour with his comrades, and let loose against his chaplain the tongue of Arnold, the chaplain of Bohemond. Raymond had traded on fresh visions of his clerk; and Arnold boldly attacked him in his citadel by denying the genuineness of the Holy Lance. Peter appealed to the ordeal of fire. He passed through the flames, as it seemed, unhurt. The bystanders pressed to feel his flesh, and were vehement in their rejoicings at the result which vindicated his integrity. He had really received fatal injuries. Twelve days afterwards he died, and Raymond suffered greatly in his dignity and his influence.

The infidel was doomed; but the crusaders resolved to give him one chance of escape. Peter the Hermit was sent as their envoy to Kerboga to offer the alternative of departure from a land which St. Peter had bestowed on the faithful, or of baptism which should leave him master of the city and territory of Antioch. The reply was short and decisive. The Turk would not embrace an idolatry which he hated and despised, nor would he give up soil which belonged to him by right of conquest. The report of the hermit raised the spirit of the crusaders to fever heat; and on the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul they marched out in twelve divisions, in remembrance of the mission of the twelve apostles, while Raymond of Toulouse remained to prevent the escape of the Turks shut up in the citadel. The Holy Lance was borne by the papal legate, Adhemar, bishop of Puy; and the morning air laden with the perfume of roses was now regarded as a sign assuring them of the divine favour. They were prepared to see good omens in everything; and they went in full confidence that departed saints would, as they had been told, take part in the battle and smite down the infidel. The fight (one of brute force on the Christian side, of some little skill as well as strength on the other) had gone on for some time when such help seemed to become needful. Tancred had hurried to the aid of Bohemond who was grievously pressed by Kilidje Arslan; and Kerboga was bearing heavily on Godfrey and Hugh of Vermandois, when, clothed in white armour and riding on white horses, some human forms were seen on the neighbouring heights. ‘The saints are coming to your aid,’ shouted the bishop of Puy, and the people saw in these radiant strangers the martyrs St. George, St. Maurice, and St. Theodore. Without awaiting their nearer approach the crusaders turned on the enemy with a force and fury which were now irresistible. Their cavalry could do little. Two hundred horses only remained of the sixty thousand which had filled the plain a few months before. But the hedge of spears advanced like a wall of iron, and the Turks gave way, broke, and fled. It was rout, not retreat; and with the crusaders victory was followed by the massacre of men, women, and children. The garrison in the citadel at once surrendered. Some declared themselves Christians and were baptized; those who refused to abandon Islam were taken to the nearest Mohamedan territory. The city was the prize of Bohemond; and in his keeping it remained, although Raymond of Toulouse had made an effort to seize it by hoisting his banner on the walls. The work of pillage being ended, the churches were cleansed and repaired, and their altars blazed with golden spoils taken from the infidel. The Greek patriarch was again seated on his throne: but he held his office at the good pleasure of the Latins, and two years later he was made to give place to Bernard, a chaplain of the bishop of Puy.

Ten months had passed away after the conquest of Antioch when the main body of the crusading army set out on its march to Jerusalem. They had wished to depart at once, but their chiefs dreaded to encounter waterless wastes at the end of a Syrian summer, and for the present they were content to send Hugh of Vermandois and Baldwin of Hainault as envoys to the Greek emperor, to reproach him with his remissness or his want of faith. But the miseries endured by Christians and Turks were the pleasantest tidings in the ears of Alexios, for in the weakening of both lay his own strength; and he saw with satisfaction the departure of Hugh, not for Antioch, but for Europe, whither Stephen of Chartres had preceded him.

Winter came; but the chiefs still lingered at Antioch. Some were occupied in expeditions against neighbouring cities: but a more pressing care was the plague which punished the foulness and disorder of the pilgrims. A band of 1,500 Germans, recently landed in strong health and full equipments, were all, it is said, cut off; and among the victims the most lamented perhaps was the papal legate Adhemar. A feeling of discouragement was again spreading through the army generally. The chiefs vainly entreated the pope to visit the city where the disciples of St. Peter first received the Christian name; the people were disheartened by the animosities and the selfish or crooked policy of their chiefs. Raymond still hankered after the principality of Antioch, and insisted that Bohemond and his people, like the men of the three trans-jordanic tribes in the days of Joshua, should share in the last great enterprise of the crusade. More disgraceful than these feuds were the scenes witnessed during the siege and after the conquest of Marra. Heedlessness and waste soon brought the assailants to devour the flesh of dogs and of human beings. The bodies of Turks were torn from their sepulchres, ripped up for the gold which they were supposed to have swallowed, and the fragments cooked and eaten. Of the besieged many slew themselves to avoid falling into the hands of the Christians; to some Bohemond, tempted by a large bribe, gave an assurance of safety. When the massacre had begun, he ordered these to be brought forward. The weak and old he slaughtered; the rest he sent to the slave-markets of Antioch.

A weak attempt made by Alexios to detain the crusaders only spurred them to more vigorous efforts. They had already left Antioch, and Laodicea was in their hands, when he desired them to await his coming in June. The chiefs, remembering the departure of Tatikios (p. 62) with his Byzantine troops for Cyprus, retorted that he had broken his compact, and had therefore no further claims on their obedience. Hastening on their way, they crossed the plain of Berytos (Beyrout), overlooked by the eternal snows of Lebanon, along the narrow strip of land whence the great Phenician cities had sent their seamen and their colonists, with all the wealth of the East, to the shores of the Adriatic and the gates of the Mediterranean. Having reached Jaffa, they turned inland to Ramlah, a town sixteen miles only from Jerusalem. Two days later the crusaders came in sight of the Holy City, the object of their long pilgrimage, the cause of wretchedness and death to millions. As their eyes rested on the scene hallowed to them through all the associations of their faith, the crusaders passed in an instant from fierce enthusiasm to a humiliation which showed itself in sighs and tears. All fell on their knees, to kiss the sacred earth and to pour forth thanksgivings that they had been suffered to look upon the desire of their eyes. Putting aside their armour and their weapons, they advanced in pilgrim’s garb and with bare feet towards the spot which the Saviour had trodden in the hours of his agony and his passion.

But before their feelings of devotion could be indulged, there was other work to be done. The chiefs took up their posts on those sides from which the nature of the ground gave most hope of a successful assault. On the northern side were Godfrey and Tancred, Robert of Flanders, and Robert of Normandy; on the west Raymond with his Provencals. On the fifth day, without siege instruments, with only one ladder, and trusting to mere weight, the crusaders made a desperate assault upon the walls. Some succeeded in reaching the summit, and the very rashness of their attack struck terror for a moment into their enemies. But the garrison soon rallied, and the invaders were all driven back or hurled from the ramparts. The task, it was manifest, must be undertaken in a more formal manner. Siege engines must be made, and the palm and olive of the immediate neighbourhood would not supply fit materials for their construction. These were obtained from the woods of Shechem, a distance of thirty miles; and the work of preparation was carried on under the guidance of Gaston of Bearn by the crews of some Genoese vessels which had recently anchored at Jaffa. So passed away more than thirty days, days of intense suffering to the besiegers. At Antioch they had been distressed chiefly by famine: in place of this wretchedness they had here the greater miseries of thirst. The enemy had carefully destroyed every place which might serve as a receptacle of water; and in seeking for it over miles of desolate country they were exposed to the harassing attacks of Moslem horsemen. Nor had visions and miracles improved the morals or discipline of the camp; and the ghost of Adhemar of Puy appeared to rebuke the horrible sins which were drawing down upon them the judgments of the Almighty. Better service was done by the generosity of Tancred, who made up his quarrel with Raymond; and the enthusiasm of the crusaders was again roused by the preaching of Arnold (p. 68) and the hermit Peter. The narrative of the siege of Jericho in the book of Joshua suggested probably the procession in which the clergy singing hymns preceded the laity round the walls of the city. The Saracens on the ramparts mocked their devotions by throwing dirt upon crucifixes: but they paid a terrible price for these insults. On the next day the final assault began, and was carried on through the day with the same monotony of brute force and carnage which marked all the operations of this merciless war. The darkness of night brought no rest. The actual combat was suspended, but the besieged were incessantly occupied in repairing the breaches made by the assailants, while these were busied in making their dispositions for the last mortal conflict. In the midst of that deadly struggle, when it seemed that the Cross must after all go down before the Crescent, a knight was seen on Mount Olivet, waving his glistening shield to rouse the champions of the Holy Sepulchre to the supreme effort. ‘It is St. George the Martyr who has come again to help us,’ cried Godfrey, and at his words the crusaders started up without a feeling of fatigue and carried everything before them. The day, we are told, was Friday, the hour was three in the afternoon (the moment at which the last cry from the cross announced the accomplishment of the Saviour’s passion), when Letold of Tournay stood, the first victorious champion of the cross, on the walls of Jerusalem. Next to him came, we are told, his brother Engelbert: the third was Godfrey. Tancred with the two Roberts stormed the gate of St. Stephen; the Provencals climbed the ramparts by ladders, and the conquest of Jerusalem was achieved. The insults offered a little while ago to the crucifixes were avenged by Godfrey’s orders in the massacre of hundreds; the carnage in the mosque of Omar swept away the bodies of thousands in a deluge of human blood. The Jews were all burnt alive in their synagogues. The horses of the crusaders, who rode up to the porch of the temple, were (so the story goes) up to the knees in the loathsome stream; and the forms of Christian knights hacking and hewing the bodies of the living and the dead furnished a pleasant commentary on the sermon of Urban at Clermont.

From the duties of slaughter these disciples of the Lamb of God passed to those of devotion. Bareheaded and barefooted, clad in a robe of pure white linen, in an ecstasy of joy and thankfulness mingled with profound contrition, Godfrey entered the church of the Holy Sepulchre and knelt at the tomb of his Lord. With groans and tears his followers came, each in his turn, to offer his praises for the divine mercy which had vouchsafed this triumph to the armies of Christendom. With feverish earnestness they poured forth the vows which bound them to sin no more, and the excitement of prayer and slaughter, perhaps of both combined, led them to see everything which might be needed to give effect to the closing scene of this appalling tragedy. As the saints had arisen from their graves when the Son of Man gave up the ghost on Calvary, so the spirits of the pilgrims who had died on the terrible journey came to take part in the great thanksgiving. Foremost among them was Adhemar of Puy, rejoicing in the prayers for forgiveness and the resolutions of repentance which promised a new era of peace upon earth and of good will towards all men. With departed saints were mingled living men who deserved all the honour which might be paid to them. The backsliding of the hermit Peter was blotted out of the memory of those who remembered only the fiery eloquence which had first called them to their now triumphant pilgrimage, and the zeal which had stirred the heart of Christendom to cut short the tyranny of the Unbeliever in the birth-land of Christianity. The assembled throng fell down at his feet, and gave thanks to God who had vouchsafed to them such a teacher. His task was done, and in the annals of the time Peter is heard of no more.

On this dreadful day Tancred had spared three hundred captives to whom he had given a standard as a pledge of his protection and a guarantee of their safety. Such misplaced mercy was a crime in the eyes of the crusaders. The massacre of the first day may have been aggravated by the ungovernable excitement of victory: but it was resolved that on the next day there should be offered up a more solemn and deliberate sacrifice. The men whom Tancred had spared were all murdered; and the wrath of Tancred was roused not by their fate but by an act which called his honour into question. The butchery went on with impartial completeness, old and young, decrepit men and women, mothers with their infants, boys and girls, young men and maidens in the bloom of their vigour, all were mowed down, and their bodies mangled until heads and limbs were tossed together in awful chaos. A few were hidden away by Raymond of Toulouse; his motive, however, was not mercy, but the prospects of gain in the slave-market. After this great act of faith and devotion the streets of the Holy City were washed by Saracen prisoners; but whether these (like the women servants whom Odysseus strung up like sparrows after the slaughter of the suitors) were butchered when their work was ended we are not told.

Four centuries and a half had passed away, when these things were done, since Omar had entered Jerusalem as a conqueror and knelt outside the church of Constantine, that his followers might not trespass within it on the privileges of the Christians (p. 13). The contrast is at the least marked between the caliph of the Prophet and the children of the Holy Catholic Church.

When, the business of the slaughter being ended, the chiefs met to choose a king for the realm which they had won with their swords, one man only appeared to whom the crown could fitly be offered. Baldwin was lord of Edessa; Bohemond ruled at Antioch; Hugh of Vermandois and Stephen of Chartres had returned to Europe; Robert of Flanders cared not to stay; the Norman Robert had no mind to forfeit the duchy which he had mortgaged; and Raymond was discredited by his avarice, and in part also by his traffic in the visions of Peter Barthelemy. But in the city where his Lord had worn the thorny crown, the veteran leader who had looked on ruthless slaughter without blanching and had borne his share in swelling the stream of blood would wear no earthly diadem, nor take the title of king. He would watch over his Master’s grave and the interests of his worshippers under the humble guise of Baron and Defender of the Holy Sepulchre; and as such, a fortnight after his election, Godfrey departed to do battle with the hosts of the Fatimite caliph of Egypt, who now felt that the loss of Jerusalem was too high a price for the humiliation of his rivals. The conflict took place at Ascalon, and the Fatimite army was miserably routed. Godfrey returned to Jerusalem, to hang the sword and standard of the sultan before the Holy Sepulchre and to bid farewell to the pilgrims who were now to set out on their homeward journey. He retained, with 300 knights under Tancred, only 2,000 foot soldiers for the defence of his kingdom; and so ended the first act in the great drama of the crusades.

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The reign of Godfrey fell short by five days even of the brief period of a single year; but it sufficed not only for the discomfiture of the Egyptian sultan, but for the foundation of a kingdom resting on an elaborate system of carefully defined laws. His conflict with the Fatimite caliph was followed by a conflict with Daimbert, bishop of Pisa, the new Latin patriarch of Jerusalem. As legate of the pope Pascal II., (Urban had died a fortnight after the fall of the Holy City, in other words, before he could hear of the victory of the crusaders,) Daimbert had invested Godfrey and Bohemond with their feudal possessions, and he lost no time in asserting the papal claim by demanding immediate recognition as the lord of Jerusalem and Jaffa. In each of these cities a quarter was at once assigned to him, and the whole was to pass into his hands if Godfrey should die without children. Such was the compact made by the Baron and Defender of the Holy Sepulchre; but it was not to pass unchallenged.

We have seen Godfrey in the siege and conquest of Jerusalem wading with exultation through a sea of human blood, seizing infants by their feet and dashing them against the walls or whirling them over the battlements, or aiding and abetting those who did so. But a few days or a few weeks later this man was to be seen seated as an impartial judge among men whom he, the king and sovereign, regarded as his equals, setting about the grave task of compiling a code of laws on the only basis which can serve as the foundation of true constitutional government,—the sanction, namely, of the laws by the men who are to obey them. There was little enough of freedom in the feudal system; and the system embodied in the code popularly known as the Assize of Jerusalem was but a reflection of the general body of law in force throughout Western Christendom. Still the legislation of Godfrey and his successors is full of instruction, not merely as showing with what success the system of one country may be transferred to another, but even as throwing a clearer light on the working of feudalism in Western Europe. The story went that the code thus drawn up with the advice of the Latin pilgrims was deposited in the Holy Sepulchre and was lost with the fall of the city. The tale lies open to grave suspicion. The whole code would form no heavy weight for a beast of burden, while it would be an object utterly valueless in the eyes of the Mahomedan conquerors. It is of more importance to remark that the traditions which this lost record was supposed to have preserved continued to guide the Latin principalities of the East, until in A. D. 1369, having undergone a final revision, they became the laws of the Latin kingdom of Cyprus.

The legislation of this code on the relation of vassals to their overlords, on the subject of wardship, of judicial combats, of villenage and slavery, may have been more minute and definite than the laws of Western Europe; but it laid down no new principles. A more important feature is to be found in the judicial courts which owed their institution to the first Latin king of Jerusalem. In the court of the barons or peers the king himself was the president; in that of the burgesses he was represented by the viscount, and it is in this court that we find the popular element which was hereafter to give a new character to the history of Europe. It consisted of a number of the citizens chosen for their trustworthiness and their wisdom. Popular election, indeed was wanting; but an assembly of burgesses sworn to judge according to the laws in all the concerns of their equals was a germ from which good fruit might have been looked for, if the seed had been sown in fitting soil. Not less wise was the institution of a third court which dealt with Syrian Christians through the Syrians themselves. But although the legislative work of Godfrey and his successors was not wholly in vain, it was an exotic which could live only with the ascendency of the Latins. It was sown in blood, nursed amid storms, and uprooted by the tempest which swept the Western Christians from Palestine.

The death of Godfrey raised in the patriarch Daimbert hopes which were to be disappointed. The subjects of Godfrey had no mind to be governed by a priest, and Tancred offered the throne to Bohemond. But Raymond was now a captive, and popular favour inclined to Baldwin, Godfrey’s brother, the lord of the Mesopotamian Edessa. Resigning his principality to his kinsman of the same name, Baldwin hastened to Jerusalem, and was there chosen king. At first Daimbert held aloof in sullen displeasure; but his opposition was at length overcome, and the patriarch poured the anointing oil over the sovereign. Baldwin reigned for eighteen years, and long before those years had come to an end, the great chiefs of the first crusade had all passed away. In his second year he was compelled to resist an Egyptian invasion; but his army was defeated in a battle near Ramlah, in which Stephen earl of Chartres was taken prisoner and slain. He had been driven back from Europe by the reproaches of his wife Adela, a daughter of the Norman conqueror of England, and in her judgment at least he thus redeemed his fame. Four years later Raymond of Toulouse died in old age on the sea-coast, having satisfied probably neither his ambition nor his avarice. He had conquered Tortosa and there founded a principality: but the possession of Tripolis which he had coveted was reserved for his son Bertrand. Bertrand enjoyed his new fief for two years only, and was succeeded by his son Pontius, to whom Tancred left his widow as a bride.

The return of Bohemond to Antioch was soon followed by his capture in a petty expedition for the enlargement of his principality; but his place was well filled by Tancred; and when after two years of imprisonment Bohemond came back in spite of all the efforts of Alexios to get possession of his person, he found himself master not only of Antioch but of Laodicea and Apameia. In the open war which followed with the Byzantine emperor, Bohemond was defeated by land, but with the aid of the Pisans was victorious at sea. His thoughts were running probably on another crusade when his help was invoked by Daimbert the patriarch of Jerusalem, who took refuge at his court from what he chose to call the tyranny of Baldwin. With the prelate, Bohemond sailed for Italy, leaving Tancred to rule at Antioch. His name had gone before him, and Philip I. the French king hastened to invite to his court the most redoubtable of the champions of Christendom. Bohemond became the son-in-law of Philip, and sailed again for the land of his old exploits with 5,000 horse and 40,000 foot. Once more he attacked Durazzo; but the bribes of Alexios foiled his enterprise, and Bohemond was constrained to content himself with a treaty which admitted him to the imperial presence as the peer of the Byzantine sovereign. He went back to Italy and was making ready the next year for his return to Antioch when death cut short his vehement and stormy career. Tancred remained lord of his principality. He was still in the prime of his manhood, and a disposition which, as compared with that of his fellows, was generous and merciful, might promise a long time of righteous government for his people. But before three years had passed Tancred died childless, of a wound received in battle, and left his power to his kinsman Roger.

The only man who had derived permanent benefit from these crusading expeditions was the man to whom it might be supposed that they had caused the greatest mischief and annoyance. It was of the first importance to the safety of the Byzantine empire that the Turks should be drawn away from the nearer countries of Bithynia and Phrygia. This great result the crusade fully achieved. The capital of the Turkish sultan of Roum was transferred from Nice to the remote and obscure city of Cogni (Iconium, Ikonion;) the authority of the Greek emperor was re-established over all the maritime regions of Asia Minor; and the existence of his empire prolonged for nearly 350 years. But Alexios, with his crafty and scheming temper to which incessant occupation in tasks serious or trifling brought a sense of self-importance, was pre-eminently a man to think more of annoyances than of grave disasters. For him accordingly it was grief of spirit that Latin chiefs should fail to do him homage for distant conquests, the possession of which could bring him no good; and he had a standing ground of quarrel and complaint in the trouble given or the alarm caused by the hosts of pilgrims which Europe poured out upon the East as soon as the tidings were brought that Jerusalem was in the hands of the Christians. It certainly cannot be said that the pilgrims left Alexios much time for idleness. A rabble more disorderly than that of Walter the Penniless followed the armies of Godfrey and his confederates. These were Lombards headed by the archbishop of Milan; and when Alexios insisted on their crossing the Bosporos before more should come, they broke out into open war and attempted to storm the quarter of Blachernai. These were followed by a better appointed force under the count of Blois and the constable of the emperor of Germany, who spoke with confidence of attacking Bagdad and destroying the caliphat. But the dress of the Greek clergy in some Phrygian town excited their wrath. Priests and others were massacred; and the sequel of the expedition was as disastrous as that of the hordes cut off by Kilidje Arslan at the hill of bones (p. 42). No better success attended the companies gathered under the standards of the count of Nevers, the count of Poitiers, and Hugh of Vermandois. With the last of these chiefs came hundreds of ladies who looked for nothing less than a triumphal march from Constantinople to Jerusalem: for almost all of these a journey of unspeakable misery came to an end in the slave-markets of Bagdad and other great cities of the East. The counts of Nevers and of Poitiers reached Antioch on foot with a few followers: Hugh of Vermandois managed to escape to Tarsus, and there he died.

An endless series of wars, some of which were forced upon him while others were mere blunders, was to occupy the life of Alexios to its close. Throughout it may be said that successful dissimulation and even successful treachery brought him greater delight than the most decisive victory in the field. Some of his worst faults are recorded as constituting his greatest merits in the turgid pages of his daughter Anna: but she and her mother Irene were to learn, as he lay almost at the last gasp, that they too could be sufferers by his astuteness. He allowed his son John to frustrate at the last moment their most cherished scheme, and his wife bade him farewell with the plain-spoken phrase, ‘You die, as you have lived,—a hypocrite.’

While the days of Alexios were drawing to an end at Constantinople, Baldwin king of Jerusalem was dying in Egypt, whither he had gone in the hope of crippling the power of the Fatimite sultan. His body was embalmed, brought back to Jerusalem, and laid in the sepulchre of Godfrey. On the day of his funeral the great council met to elect his successor. His brother Eustace was absent in Europe; and the crown was offered to his kinsman, Baldwin du Bourg, who had been recommended for the post by the first king, and whose claim was urged by Joceline of Courtenay. In his gratitude Baldwin invested Joceline with the principality of Edessa.

It may be enough to say of this king that during his reign, as in that of his predecessor, the limits of the Latin power were being gradually extended, the new acquisitions being bestowed on princes who held them as fiefs of the kingdom of Jerusalem. After a siege of six weeks Sidon had fallen, in the days of the first Baldwin. In this blockade the Latins were aided to good purpose by the fleet and army of the Norwegian Siward. Nine years later the Venetian doge Michael came to worship at the Holy Sepulchre, and offered the help of his fleet for the reduction of Ascalon or Tyre. The choice fell upon Tyre, and the doge stipulated that one half of that city should remain to himself in absolute sovereignty, while the Venetians should also have a church, a street, and other privileges in Jerusalem. The siege lasted five months, when the still great, and once peerless, Phenician city was compelled to yield and become the seat of a Christian archbishopric. But if the crusading dominions were thus enlarged, it is perhaps of little use to speak of the greatest extent reached by a kingdom almost as restless and as changeful as the sea.

The third successor of Godfrey on the throne of Jerusalem was Fulk of Anjou, whose lot on the whole was more tranquil than that of his predecessors, although in attempting to aid Raymond count of Tripoli against Zenghis, sultan of Aleppo, he was shut up in the castle of Barin or Montferrat, and compelled to purchase his safety with gold. He was succeeded by his son Baldwin, a boy thirteen years of age, who was soon to see what the prowess of the West could do in a second crusade. The feuds of the Christian princes of Antioch and Edessa gave to Zenghis an opportunity of attacking the principalities of Joceline of Courtenay. For eighteen days the inhabitants of Edessa awaited in terrible suspense the result of a siege in which for them surrender meant death. The deeds of Godfrey and his fellows on the fall of Jerusalem were still fresh in the memory of their enemies, and the heralds of Zenghis were not slack in teaching his men that conquest brought with it the right of pillage. The Turks learnt the lesson in spirit as well as in letter; and on the fall of Edessa the deeds of blood and cruelty showed that Moslems might be apt pupils in the horrible school in which the Christians had attained a standard of ideal excellence. The story told once needs not to be told again. The murder of Zenghis awakened in Joceline of Edessa the hope that the lost city might be recovered. The attempt issued in a second disaster; and nothing remained but an appeal to the religious enthusiasm of Western Christendom.

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What Peter the Hermit had been for the first crusade, that St. Bernard was for the second; and on Peter, Bernard looked down with undisguised contempt. The failure of that first great enterprise he ascribes to the wretched councils of the fanatical guide whose name he supposes that his hearers or correspondents have sometimes heard. To the holy war which he felt himself called upon to kindle, he looked forward without the least misgiving, and the proud confidence which he feels and everywhere expresses may be taken as a special characteristic of Western monachism in its palmiest days. While the monks of the East were losing themselves more and more in the mists of dreamy or useless speculation, the cell of the Western monk became an imperial chamber from which went forth the letters which were to cheer or counsel the Vicar of Christ, to rebuke kings and statesmen, to warn and guide the faithful, to recall the wanderer to the fold, and to confound the unbeliever. For these high offices he had a commission higher than that of any earthly authority. They fell within the range of his duty as the member of a society, the soldier of an army, which was to fight the battles of the King of kings. He was the knight sheathed in the impenetrable armour of the Spirit, and he bore in his hand the invincible sword of faith. He had learnt the language, and transferred to his monastic life the images and terms, of feudalism. For him action was everything; solitude with its essential idea of rest was in comparison of this as nothing. He fled from his home to the cloister, because he could there fight better against material and spiritual corruption. He chose the most severe schools which he could find for the exercise of his self-discipline. He withdrew from these into wilder deserts, if they failed to meet his ideal of self-mortification. He established what he called a reform, if existing rules appeared to him too indulgent to human weakness. Such was the life of St. Bernard. He was from first to last a crusader, and the most pertinacious and successful of his crusades was against the peace and quiet of his own family. His mother had made a secret vow to devote all her children to God; and Bernard held it among the first of his duties to see that her vow should be fulfilled. Power, wealth, and dignity in the world were within his grasp: he threw them all aside. The holy house of Molesme had sent forth some of its most austere members under an Englishman named Stephen Harding, and these found a ruder and more savage home on the borders of Champagne and Burgundy, at Citeaux, the cradle of the great Cistercian order. Thither came Bernard in his early manhood, and there he remained until he in his turn went forth to found a new house in the gloomy and ill-famed valley to which he gave a name associated for ever with his memory. Here at Clairvaux his father took the habit of a monk, and died in his arms. His brothers and his sisters had made their profession before him,—not all without a struggle; but who should resist the Divine Will? The wife of one of his brothers refused to make the sacrifice of her husband’s love: but a sudden illness convinced her of the perils of disobedience, and like her husband she found her home in a convent.

This was the man whom the tidings of the fall of Edessa filled with profound emotion. He could no more doubt the duty of ridding the Holy Land of unbelievers than he could call into question his own mission against all ungodliness and sin. But if it had been right to rush to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre when it was still in the hands of the infidel, it was still more right, it was indispensably necessary, to keep that sacred place and the land in which it lay from falling again under the old despotism. For Bernard, when his mind was once fixed on any enterprise, there could be no rest, as there could also be no measure in the vehemence of his eloquence. The energy with which he espoused the cause of Innocent II. against a rival pope had invested him with an influence second to that of no other man of his age; and he had wielded this power with tremendous effect against Abelard, the keenest and most daring thinker of Latin Christendom.

Three years before the council of Sens, which under the direction of Bernard condemned the propositions or heresies of Abelard, died the French king Louis VI., surnamed the Fat, the monarch (if so he might be called) of a scanty kingdom the enlargement of which would best be promoted by advantageous marriages. Of such an opportunity Louis the Fat eagerly availed himself when William, lord of Poitou and Guienne, the wide region lying between the Loire and the Adour, offered his daughter and heiress Eleanor as the wife of the heir to the French crown. By right of this marriage Louis VII. found himself on the death of his father and of his father-in-law possessed of a far larger kingdom and greater resources than he had expected to inherit; and he might have made it the business of his life to guard and extend his dominions at home, had he not felt himself suddenly called to take up his cross and follow the example of his great-uncle, Hugh of Vermandois. In a war with Theobald, count of Champagne, he had stormed and set fire to the castle of Vitry. To escape from his soldiers the people had taken refuge in a neighbouring church. To this building the flames spread, and all within it, men, women, and children, 1,300, it is said, in number, were burnt. The sight of the scorched and charred bodies filled the king with horror and grief: sickness followed, and he determined to work out his repentance by leading his armies to the Holy Land. His remorse was quickened by the eloquence of Bernard, and Louis put on the blood-red cross in the council of Vezelay.

From this council the pope, Eugenius III., was absent. His place was more than supplied by his friend and adviser, whose voice stirred the depths of every heart. The letter of Eugenius held out to the crusaders all the promises which had been assured to them by Urban at Clermont, and warned them against the vices which had brought disaster and disgrace on the arms of Christendom. But for the moment every other feeling than that of fierce yearning for conflict was swept away by the furious torrent of Bernard’s oratory. He preached to the Knights Templars, the members of that splendid order which was already astonishing the world with its valour and its haughtiness. Associated at first for the protection of pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem, they had established themselves in the Holy City itself, and received from Baldwin II. some ground to the east of the Temple; and the mosque of Omar, purified from its defilements, became the church of the order. The fiery warriors who professed themselves the humble guardians of the Holy Sepulchre needed no stimulus of rhetoric to spur them on: and the rhetoric of Bernard was fierce enough to stir even the most peaceable. In this new philosophy butchery was the surest means of grace, and carnage imparted indelible sanctity. ‘The Christian who slays the unbeliever in the Holy War is sure of his reward, more sure if he is slain. The Christian glories in the death of the Pagan, because by it Christ is glorified; by his own death both he himself and Christ are still more glorified.’ The floodgates of enthusiasm were once again opened wide; and the scenes of the council of Clermont were reproduced with little change. Accompanied by the French king who wore the cross conspicuously on his dress, Bernard mounted a wooden platform and addressed the impassioned multitude. His speech was scarcely ended when all with one voice cried aloud for the cross. The saint gave or scattered the badges which had been provided. When these were exhausted, he tore up his own dress to furnish more.

But if Louis was eager to depart, Conrad of Germany hung back. The Emperor felt more anxious about the reduction of refractory princes than for the slaughter of unknown infidels. Christmas came; and at Spires first, afterwards at Ratisbon, Bernard strove to impress on him the paramount duty of the crusade. Conrad promised to give his answer on the following day; and on that day Bernard preached a sermon, painting in awful colours the terrors of the Great Assize when all the kindreds of the nations should be gathered before the judgment-seat of the Son of Man. He implored the emperor to think of the account which he would then have to give, and of the infinite shame and endless agony which would be his portion, if he should then stand convicted of unjust stewardship. Conrad was melted to tears, and promised to take the cross. Bernard was prepared for him and for all, and fastened the badge on their shoulders at once. Taking from the altar the consecrated banner, he delivered it to the emperor, and the hand of God was seen in the crowd of thieves and ruffians who thronged to enlist themselves as champions of the cross. Four months later Louis welcomed the pope at St. Denys, and received from Eugenius at the altar the wallet and staff of the pilgrim, with the banner which was to lead him to victory. The wishes of the devout turned naturally to Bernard rather than to others of whose earnestness they could not have equal assurance; but to their prayers that he would head the enterprise he replied that he was no general and that they must find some one to lead them who was skilled in the handling of earthly armies.

When the followers of Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless began their march along the Rhinelands, their crusading zeal vented itself first in horrible cruelties practised on the Jews (p. 40). That vile example was followed by the bands now gathered round the standard of the emperor. The appetite for blood was whetted by the wolfish howlings of the monk Rodolph; and the spell of bigotry enlisted on his side a man otherwise well deserving the reverence of all ages, Peter the Venerable, abbot of Clugny. But the fanaticism of Bernard could not fasten itself on men against whom not even a semblance of wrong could be charged; and he refused to punish them now for the crimes of their forefathers in the days of Pontius Pilate. ‘God has punished the Jews,’ he said, ‘by their dispersion; it is not for man to punish them by murder.’ Rodolph was sent back to his monastery: but it was no easy task to repress the fury of a multitude already drunk with the blood of hundreds of victims in all the great Rhine cities.

Conrad and Louis had met at Mainz. With Louis came his wife Eleanor; and here he was joined by the counts of Toulouse, Nevers, Flanders and other chiefs of the crusade, among these being, it is said, Robert de Mowbray and the earl of Warren and Surrey from England. The story of the enterprise is soon told. The numbers of the host were vast, but numbers, never easily ascertained, are least of all to be depended upon in such expeditions as these. The order of disciplined armies may have lessened the perils and lightened the hardships of the passage across Europe; and the troop of women who with spear and shield, headed by the Golden-footed Dame, marched on, as they thought, to conquest, may have congratulated themselves on the pleasantness of their task. The real danger began when they had passed from Europe into Asia. The suspicions of Conrad had been soon and vehemently excited against the Greek emperor Manuel, grandson of Alexios. These suspicions were so much strengthened before he reached Constantinople that he refused all interviews with him and crossed the Bosporus without coming into his presence.

The French king was more complaisant; but if he was satisfied with the welcome given to him by Manuel in person, he was alarmed and indignant at the news that the Byzantine sovereign was in secret correspondence with the Turkish sultan of Cogni (Iconium, Ikonion). His indignation was fully shared by his army; and while some held that the paramount duty which called them to Palestine should overbear the avenging of all private wrongs, others insisted that a power which had allowed the Holy Sepulchre and the Holy Land itself to slip from its grasp, and had only placed hindrances in the way of the pilgrims and champions of the cross, should be swept utterly away.

For the present the storm was lulled; and the crusaders went on their way, to find that the guides with which Manuel had furnished them led them into arid deserts or betrayed them directly to the enemy. Conrad had already lost thousands or tens of thousands in Lykaonia, when the French king, who had been cheated with false tidings of his triumphant progress, received on the shores of the Askanian lake (p. 57) the news of his great disaster. Conrad himself soon followed the miserable fugitives who had told his dismal story, and the two sovereigns resolved to strike off from the beaten path and make their way through the lands bordering the eastern shores of the Egean Sea. They had advanced as far as the Lydian Philadelphia, when the threatening appearance of things impelled many to return to Constantinople, and Conrad himself embarked near Ephesus. Louis with his people pressed on to the banks of the Meander, where the Turks who hastened to attack them were signally defeated. This defeat was more than avenged in the mountain passes beyond Laodicea whence after fearful slaughter the French reached the Pamphylian Attaleia. From this seaport it was proposed that all, whether soldiers or pilgrims, should go by sea to Antioch. It was decided that the latter only should take ship, as Louis urged that the warriors ought to follow in the steps of the conquerors of Jerusalem. But the ships promised by the governor of Attaleia proved to be wholly insufficient for this purpose. The king embarked with his army, and the pilgrims with the sick were left in charge of the count of Flanders. The guard was inadequate; the sick were murdered by the people of Attaleia; the Turks bore down hardly on the pilgrims. The count of Flanders escaped by sea, and seven thousand miserable wanderers struggled onwards on the road by which they hoped to reach Jerusalem. Their journey was soon ended by the martyrdom which according to the promise of Urban and Eugenius was to ensure their salvation.

The arrival of the French king with his forces at Antioch caused no slight alarm to the Turks of Cæsarea and Aleppo. But although he was earnestly pressed to take advantage of their dismay by striking a sudden blow, nothing could dissuade him to put off his journey to Jerusalem; and the entreaties of Eleanor, who was well content to stay where she was, excited in him mingled feelings of resentment and suspicion. After disasters so terrible his entrance into Jerusalem bore too much likeness to a triumph; and after a council with Conrad, who had reached Ptolemais, the project of rescuing Edessa, which had been the very purpose of the crusade, was for the time abandoned for the siege, and, as it was hoped, the conquest, of the more important and nearer city of Damascus.

With the aid of the Knights of the Temple and of St. John, the siege of this city was prosecuted with a skill and vigour which seemed to leave no doubt of the result. The Damascenes were in despair, and not a few turned their thoughts to flight as the only means of safety: but with incredible infatuation the king of the French and the German emperor took counsel not for the completion of the enterprise but for the disposal of the city when it should have been conquered. The decision that it should be given to Thierry, count of Flanders, roused the indignation of the barons of Palestine, who now scrupled not to add treachery to the long catalogue of their crimes. Bribed by the Turks, they assured the sovereigns that they would have better success by attacking the city from another quarter than from that on which their toil had been all but rewarded by its capture. Abandoning their former position in the rich gardens before the town, they soon found themselves on barren soil, with scanty supplies or none, and with a hopeless task before them. It was easier to suspect than to punish the treachery of their advisers; and possibly on account of this treachery the proposal that they should attack Ascalon was rejected. The army retreated to Jerusalem. Conrad went back with the remnant of his troops to Europe. A year later his example was followed by the French king and his wife, of whose conduct Louis had formed suspicions fully justified by certain judgments pronounced by her in Provençal Courts of Love. Only a few months more had passed before he obtained a divorce on the plea of consanguinity, and Eleanor transferred her vast inheritance to her second husband the Norman duke Henry, afterwards Henry II. of England.

So ended in utter shame and ignominy the second crusade. The event seemed to give the lie to the glowing promises and prophecies of St. Bernard. So vast had been the drain of population to feed this holy war that, in the phrase of an eye-witness, the cities and castles were empty, and scarcely one man was left to seven women; and now it was known that the fathers, the husbands, the sons, or the brothers of these miserable women would see their earthly homes no more. The cry of anguish charged Bernard with the crime of sending them forth on an errand in which they had done absolutely nothing and had reaped only wretchedness and disgrace. For a time Bernard himself was struck dumb: but he soon remembered that he had spoken with the authority of God and of his vicegerent, and that the guilt or failure must lie at the door of the pilgrims. Like those who had gone before them, these men had given loose to their passions and filled their camps with debauchery and confusion; and such abominations the Divine Righteousness could never tolerate. Nay, Bernard could even see now the folly, if not the iniquity, of allowing thieves and murderers to take part in an enterprise in which only the devout and faithful were worthy to share. But such considerations were too cold to satisfy permanently the temper of the age. The thoughts of the many, if not of the few, went back into the old channel, when the monk John declared that the slaughtered pilgrims had died with the exulting joy of martyrs at the thought of their deliverance from a wicked world; and that from the lips of St. Peter and St. John themselves he had the assurance that the ranks of fallen angels had been filled up with the spirits of those who had died as champions and pilgrims of the cross whether in the Holy Land or on the journey across the intervening countries. For Bernard also the saints and angels, he said, were impatiently waiting. Five years later it was in his power to add that their desires and his had been fulfilled.

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The second crusade not only failed in its purpose: it did nothing towards the maintenance of the waning ascendency of the Latins. Even victories brought with them no solid result, and in not a few instances victory was misused with a folly closely allied to madness. The success of Joceline of Courtenay in a battle with Noureddin, son of Zenghis and sultan of Aleppo, might have recovered for him his lost city of Edessa: he chose rather to indulge in the dangerous luxury of insult, and the renewed efforts of the enemy were rewarded by the capture of Joceline, his imprisonment and death. His widow, by the advice of Baldwin III., king of Jerusalem, surrendered to the Greek emperor for a stipulated sum such places as still remained in her possession; and the dangers gathering round the Latin kingdom were seen in an inroad of Turcomans who reached the Mount of Olives.

This inroad was, it is true, severely punished. The king was absent with his army: but the knights of the military orders who were in Jerusalem led out such of the people as could be got under arms and set fire to the camp of the enemy. These on their retreat were intercepted by Baldwin, and in the conflict 5,000 of their number, it is said, were slain. The tide seemed to have turned again in favour of the Christians, when, after an obstinate siege which at one moment was all but abandoned, the city of Ascalon fell into their hands.

But the change was one of appearance only. The interminable series of wars, or rather of forays and reprisals, went on; and amidst such contests the life of Baldwin closed in early manhood. He was thirty-three years of age: but in that short time he had won such love as his subjects had to bestow, together with the admiration of his enemies. He died childless, and although some opposition was made to the choice, his brother Almeric was elected to fill his place.

Almost at the beginning of his reign the affairs of the Latin kingdom became complicated with those of Egypt; and the Christians are seen fighting by the side of one Mahomedan race, tribe, or faction against another. The divisions of Islam may have turned less on points of theology, but they were scarcely less bitter than those of Christendom; and Noureddin, the sultan of Aleppo, eagerly embraced the opportunity which gave him a hold on the Fatimite caliph of Egypt, when Shawer the grand vizier of that caliph came into his presence as a fugitive. A soldier named Dargham had risen up and deposed him, and the deposition of the vizier was the deposition of the real ruler, for the Fatimite caliphs themselves were now merely the puppets which the Merovingian kings had been in the days of Charles Martel and Pepin.

Among the generals of Noureddin were Shiracouh and his nephew Saladin (Salah-ud-deen) of the shepherd tribe of the Koords. These Noureddin despatched into Egypt to effect the restoration of Shawer. His enemy Dargham had sought by lavish offers to buy the aid of the Latins: but the terms were still unsettled when he was worsted in a battle by Shiracouh and slain. Shawer again sat in his old seat; but with success came the fear that his supporters might prove not less dangerous than his enemies. He refused to fulfil his compact with Noureddin and ordered his generals to quit the country. Shiracouh replied by the capture of Pelusium, and Shawer, more successful than Dargham in obtaining aid from Jerusalem, besieged Shiracouh in his newly conquered city with the help of the army of Almeric. The Latin king after a fruitless blockade of some months found himself called away to meet dangers nearer home; and the besieged general, not knowing the cause, accepted an offer of capitulation binding him to leave Egypt after the surrender of his prisoners. But the Latin armies were transferred from Egypt only to undergo a desperate defeat at the hands of Noureddin in the territory of Antioch, and thus to leave Antioch itself at the mercy of the enemy.

Noureddin may have hesitated to attack Antioch from the fear that such an enterprise might bring upon him the arms of the Greek emperor. He was more anxious to extinguish the Fatimite power in Egypt,—in other words, to become lord of countries hemming in the Latin kingdom to the south as well as to the north; and it was precisely this danger which king Almeric knew that he had most reason to fear. To put the best colour on his design, Noureddin obtained from Mostadhi, the caliph of Bagdad, the sanction which converted his enterprise into a war as holy as that which the Norman conqueror waged against Harold of England. The story of the war attests the valour of both sides, under the alternations of disaster and success. The Latin king had already entered Cairo, when a large part of the force of Shiracouh was overwhelmed by a terrific sandstorm. But the retreat of Shiracouh across the Nile failed to reassure the Egyptians. Almeric received 200,000 gold pieces for the continuance of his help, with the promise that 200,000 more should be paid to him on the complete destruction of their enemies; and the treaty was ratified in the presence of the powerless sovereign whose consent was never asked for the alliances or treaties of the minister who was his master. The remaining events of the campaign were a battle in which a part of the army of Almeric was defeated by Shiracouh and his nephew Saladin; the surrender of Alexandria on the summons of Shiracouh; and the blockade of that city by Almeric, who at length obtained from the Turk the pledge that after an exchange of prisoners he would lead his forces away from Egypt, on the condition that the road to Syria should be left open to him.

The banners of Almeric and the Fatimite caliph waved together on the walls of Alexandria; but on either side the peace or truce was a mere makeshift for the purpose of gaining time. Neither the Latin king nor the sultan of Aleppo had given up the thought of the conquest of Egypt; and Almeric found a ready cause of quarrel in the plea that since his own return to Palestine the Egyptians had entered into communication with their enemy and his. The king of Jerusalem had lately married the niece of the Greek emperor, and the latter promised to aid the expedition with his fleet. The help of the Knights Hospitallers was easily obtained, while (some said, on this account) that of the Knights Templars was refused. At length with a large and powerful army Almeric left Jerusalem, pretending that his destination was the Syrian town of Hems: but after a while his march was suddenly turned. In ten days he reached Pelusium; and the storm and capture of that city were followed by a wanton carnage which served to increase, if anything could increase, the reputation of the Christians for merciless cruelty. The prayers of the vizir Shawer for help were now directed as earnestly to the Turkish sultan as they had once been to the Latin king of Jerusalem; but his envoys were also sent to Almeric offering him a million pieces of gold, of which a tenth part was produced on the spot. Almeric took the bribe; and when his army looked for nothing less than the immediate sack of Cairo, they were told that they must remain idle while the rest of the money was being collected. The vizir took care that the gathering should not be ended before the soldiers of Noureddin had reached the frontier; and Almeric found too late that he was caught in the trap which his own greed had laid for him. He could himself do nothing but retreat, and his retreat was as disastrous as it was ignominious. The Greek fleet had shown itself off the mouths of the Nile, and had sailed away again. The Greek emperor could not be punished; but a scapegoat for the failure of the enterprise was found in the grand-master of the Hospitallers, who was deprived of his dignity by his knights.

The triumph of Shiracouh brought with it the fall of the vizir Shawer, who was seized and put to death, while the man whose aid he had invoked, was chosen to fill his place. But Shiracouh himself lived only two months; and then, by way of choosing one whose love of pleasure and lack of influence seemed to promise a career of useful insignificance, the Fatimite caliph made the young Saladin his minister. The caliph was mistaken. Saladin brought back his Koords, and so used the treasures which his office placed at his command, that the new yoke became stronger than the old one.

To the Latins the exaltation of Saladin signified the formation of a really formidable power on their southern frontier. Their alarm prompted embassies to the court of the Eastern emperor and the princes of Western Christendom. But the time was not yet come for a third crusade; and only from Manuel was any help obtained. His fleet aided the Latins in a fruitless siege of Damietta; and a terrible earthquake which laid Aleppo in ruins and shattered the walls of Antioch saved them from attack by the army of Noureddin which was approaching from the north. Still, in spite of conspiracies or revolutions of the old nobility, the power of Saladin was growing, and at length he dealt with the mock sovereignty of the Fatimites as Pepin dealt with that of the Merovingians. The last Fatimite sultan, then prostrate in his last illness, never knew that the public prayer had been offered in the name of the caliph of Bagdad; but Saladin had the glory of ending a schism which had lasted two hundred years, and from Mostadhi, the vicar of the Prophet, he received the gift of a linen robe and two swords.

But the healing of one schism led only to the opening of another. Saladin was the servant of the sultan of Aleppo, and he had been recognized and confirmed in office by Mostadhi strictly on the score of this lieutenancy. But the new vizir of Egypt had no mind to obey any longer the summons of his old master; and to his threat of chastisement Saladin in his council of emirs retorted by a threat of war. His vehemence was cooled when his own father declared before the assembly that, were he so commissioned by Noureddin, he would strike his son’s head off from his shoulders. In private, he let Saladin know that his mistake lay not in thinking of resistance, but in speaking of it; and a letter sent by his advice sufficed for the present to smooth matters over. But the time of quietness could not last long. The designs of Saladin became continually more manifest, and Noureddin was on his way to Egypt when he was struck down by illness and died at Damascus.

In the sultan of Aleppo, as in the general who had risen to greatness through his favour, we have a man to whom the chronicles of the time and of later ages delighted to ascribe the magnanimity and simplicity of Omar. It must at the least be admitted that the ideal of Moslem courtesy and chivalry is more refined and generous than that of Western Christendom, and that the truth of the picture drawn of Noureddin receives some support from the enthusiastic eulogies of William, archbishop of Tyre. ‘I fear God,’ he replied to his queen who complained that she had not enough even for her wants; ‘I am but the treasurer of the people. But I have three shops in Hems; these you may take, and this is all that I have to give.’ He made it his business to provide everywhere mosques, hospitals, schools, and resting-places for travellers; and justice, it is said, was as impartially administered in his time as in the days of the English Alfred.

The widow of Noureddin held the fortress of Paneas; and her husband’s death encouraged Almeric to undertake the siege. A bribe to abandon it was at first refused. A fortnight later it was accepted: but Almeric returned to Jerusalem only to die. His life had lasted only five years longer than that of his predecessor Baldwin; but it had been long enough to win for him a reputation for consummate avarice and meanness. His son and successor, Baldwin IV., was a leper; and his disease made such rapid strides as to make it necessary to delegate his authority to another. His first choice fell on Guy of Lusignan, the husband of his sister Sibylla; but either the weakness of Guy or the quarrels of the barons brought everything into confusion, and Baldwin, foiled in his wish to annul his marriage, devised his crown to Baldwin, the infant son of Sibylla by her first marriage, Raymond II., count of Tripoli, being nominated regent and Joceline of Courtenay the guardian of the child. But within three years the leper king died, followed soon after by the infant Baldwin V.; and in the renewed strife consequent on these events Guy of Lusignan managed to establish himself by right of his wife king of Jerusalem. He was still quite a young man, but he had earned for himself an evil name. The murderer of Patric, earl of Salisbury, he had been banished by Henry II., from his dominions in France: and the opinion of those who knew him found expression in the words of his brother Geoffrey, ‘Had they known me, the men who made my brother king would have made me a god.’

Guy was king: but Raymond of Tripoli refused him his allegiance. Guy besieged him in Tiberias, and Raymond made a treaty with Saladin. But Saladin was now minded to seize a higher prey. He was master of Syria and Egypt: he was resolved that the Crescent should once more displace the Cross on the mosque of Omar. Pretexts for the war were almost superfluous; but he had an abundance of them in the ravages committed by barons of the Latin kingdom on the lands and the property of Moslems. Fifty thousand horsemen and a vast army on foot gathered under his standard, when he declared his intention of attacking Jerusalem: but their first assault was on the castle of Tiberias. On hearing these ominous tidings Raymond of Tripoli at once laid aside all thought of private quarrels. Hastening to Jerusalem he said that the safety of his own city was a very secondary matter, and earnestly besought Guy to confine himself to a strictly defensive war, which would soon reduce the invader to the extremity of distress. The advice was wise and good; but the grand-master of the Templars fastened on the very nobleness of his self-sacrifice and the disinterestedness of his counsel as proof of some sinister design which they were intended to hide.

Had it been Baldwin III. to whom he was speaking, the insinuation would have been thrust aside with scorn and disgust. To the mean mind of Guy it carried with it its own evidence; and it was resolved to meet the Saracen on ground of his own choosing. The troops of Saladin were already distressed by heat and thirst when they encountered the Latin army from Jerusalem. The issue of the first day’s fighting was undecided; but the heat of a Syrian summer night was for the Christians rendered more terrible by the stifling smoke of woods set on fire by the orders of Saladin. Parched with thirst, and well knowing that on the event of that day depended the preservation of the Holy Sepulchre, the crusaders at sunrise rushed with their fierce war-cries on the enemy. Before them the golden glory of morning lit up the radiant shores of the tranquil sea where the Galilæan fisherman had heard from the lips of Jesus of Nazareth the word of life. But nearer still was a memorial yet more holy, a pledge of divine favour yet more assuring. On a hillock hard by was raised the relic of the true cross, and this hillock was many times a rallying point during this bloody day. There was little of generalship perhaps on either side; and where men are left to mere hard fighting, numbers must determine the issue. The hosts of Saladin far outnumbered those of the Latin chiefs; and for these retreat ended in massacre. The king and the grand-master of the Templars were taken prisoners; the holy relic which had spurred them on to desperate exertion fell into the hands of the infidels.

The victory of Saladin was rich in its fruits. Tiberias was taken. Berytos, Acre, Cæsarea, Jaffa opened their gates; Tyre alone was saved by the heroism of Conrad of Montferrat, brother of the first husband of queen Sibylla. Not caring to undertake a regular siege, Saladin marched to Ascalon, and offered its defenders an honourable peace, which after some hesitation was accepted.

The rejection of Raymond’s advice had left Jerusalem practically at the mercy of Saladin. It was crowded with people: but the garrison was scanty, and the armies which should have defended it were gone. Their presence would not, probably, have availed to give a different issue to the siege; but it must have added fearfully to its horrors. Saladin had made up his mind that the Latin kingdom must fall, and he would have fought on until either he or his enemies could fight no longer. Numbers, wealth, resources, military skill, instruments of war, all combined to give him advantages before which mere bravery must sooner or later go down; and protracted resistance meant nothing more than the infliction of useless misery. Saladin may have been neither a saint nor a hero; but it cannot be denied that his temper was less fierce and his language more generous than that of the Christians who under Godfrey had deluged the city with blood. He had no wish, he said, so to defile a place hallowed by its associations for Moslems as well as Christians, and if the city were surrendered, he pledged himself not merely to furnish the inhabitants with the money which they might need, but even to provide them with new homes in Syria. But superstition and obstinacy are to all intents and purposes words of the same meaning. The offer, honourable to him who made and carrying no ignominy to those who might accept it, was rejected, and Saladin made a vow that entering the city as an armed conqueror he would offer up within it a sacrifice as awful as that by which the crusaders had celebrated their loathsome triumph. Most happily for others, most nobly for himself, he failed to keep this vow to the letter. Fourteen days sufficed to bring the siege to an end. The Christians had done what they could to destroy the military engines of their enemies; the golden ornaments of the churches had been melted down and turned into money; but no solid advantage was gained by all their efforts. The conviction of the Christian that death brought salvation to the champions of the cross, the assurance of the Moslem that to those who fell fighting for the creed of Islam the gates of paradise were at once opened, only added to the desperation of the combatants and to the fearfulness of the carnage. At length the besieged discovered that the walls near the gate of St. Stephen had been undermined, and at once they abandoned all hope of safety except from miraculous intervention. Clergy and laity crowded into the churches, their fears quickened by the knowledge that the Greeks within the city were treating with the enemy. The remembrance of Saladin’s offer now came back with more persuasive power; but to the envoys whom they sent the stern answer was returned that he was under a vow to deal with the Christians as Godfrey and his fellows had dealt with the Saracens. Yet, conscious or unconscious of the inconsistency of his words with the oath which he professed to have sworn, he promised them his mercy if they would at once surrender the city. The besieged resolved to trust the word of the conqueror, as they could not resist his power. The agreement was made that the nobles and fighting men should be taken to Tyre which still held out under Conrad; that the Latin inhabitants should be redeemed at the rate of ten crowns of gold for each man, five for each woman, one for each child; and that, failing this ransom, they should remain slaves. On the sick and the helpless he waged no war; and although the Knights of the Hospital were among the most determined of his enemies, he would allow their brethren to remain for a year in their attendance on the sufferers who could not be moved away.

In the exasperation of a religious warfare now extended over nearly a century these terms were very merciful. It may be said that this mercy was the right of a people who submitted to the invader, and that in the days of Godfrey and Peter the Hermit the defenders had resisted to the last. It is enough to answer that the capitulation of the Latins was a superfluous ceremony and that Saladin knew it to be so, while, if the same submission had been offered to the first crusaders, it would have been sternly and fiercely refused.

Four days were allowed to the people to prepare for their departure. On the fifth they passed through the camp of the enemy, the women carrying or leading their children, the men bearing such of their household goods as they were able to move. On the approach of the queen and her ladies in the garb and with the gestures of suppliants Saladin himself came forward, and with genuine courtesy addressed to them words of encouragement and consolation. Cheered by his generous language, they told him that for their lands, their houses, and their goods they cared nothing. Their prayer was that he would restore to them their fathers, their husbands, and their brothers. Saladin granted their request, added his alms for those who had been left orphans or destitute by the war, and remitted a portion of the ransom appointed for the poor. In this way the number of those who remained unredeemed was reduced to eleven or twelve thousand; and Saracenic slavery, although degrading, was seldom as cruel as the slavery which has but as yesterday been extinguished by the most fearful of recent wars.

The entry of Saladin into Jerusalem was accompanied by the usual signs of triumph. Amidst the waving of banners and the clash of martial music he advanced to the mosque of Omar on the summit of which the Christian cross still flashed in the clear air. A wail of agony burst from the Christians who were present as this emblem was hurled down to the earth and dragged through the mire. For two days it underwent this indignity, while the mosque was purified from its defilements by streams of rosewater, and dedicated afresh to the worship of the One God adored by Islam. The crosses, the relics, the sacred vessels of the Christian sanctuaries, which had been carefully stowed away in four chests, had fallen into the hands of the conquerors, and it was the wish of Saladin to send them to the caliph of the Prophet as the proudest trophies of his victory. Even this wish he generously consented to forego. The chests were left in the keeping of the patriarch, and the price put upon them, 52,000 golden byzants, was paid by Richard of England.

Conrad still held out in Tyre, nor was he induced to surrender even when Saladin himself assailed its walls. The siege was raised: and the next personage to appear before its gates was Guy of Lusignan, who, having regained his freedom, insisted on being admitted as lord of the city. The grand-master of the Templars seconded his demand. The reply was short and decisive. The people would own no other master than the gallant knight who had so nobly defended them. But the escape of Tyre had no effect on the general issue of the war. Town after town submitted to Saladin; and the long series of his triumphs closed when he entered the gates of Antioch.

Eighty-eight years had passed away since the crusaders of Godfrey and Tancred had stood triumphant on the walls of the Holy City; and during all those years the Latin kingdom had seldom rested from wars and forays, from feuds and dissensions of every kind. From the first it displayed no characteristics which could give it any stability; from the first it exhibited signs which foreboded its certain downfall. (1) It sanctified treachery, for it rested on the principle that no faith was to be kept with the unbeliever; and the sowing of wind by the constant breach of solemn compact made them reap the whirlwind. A right of pasturage round Paneas had been granted to the Mahomedans by Baldwin III. When the ground was covered with their sheep, the Christian troops burst in, murdered the shepherds, and drove away their flocks,—not with the sanction, we may hope, of the most high-minded of the Latin kings of Jerusalem. (2) It recognized no title to property except in those who professed the faith of Christ, and the power to commit injustice with practical impunity tended still further to demoralize the people. (3) It gave full play to the passions of men in random wars and petty forays, while it did nothing to keep up or to promote either military science or the discipline without which that science becomes useless. (4) It was marked by an almost total lack of statesmanship. In a country so circumstanced a wise ruler would strain every nerve to conciliate the conquered people, to strengthen himself by alliances which should be firmly maintained and by treaties which should be scrupulously kept, to weaken such states as he might fail to win over to his friendship by anticipating combinations which might bring with them fatal dangers for his power. That the history of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem presents a mournful and even ludicrous contrast to this picture, it must surely be unnecessary to say. In the case of Egypt alone did the Latin kings show some sense of the course which prudence called upon them to take; and even here this course was followed with miserable indecision, and at last disgracefully abandoned through mere lust of gold. (5) It had to deal with an immorality not of its own creating, but which in mere regard to its own safety it should have striven to keep well in check. No such efforts were made, and the words of William of Tyre (even if taken with a qualification), when he speaks of the Latin women, point to a state of things which must involve grave and imminent peril. (6) It was the misfortune of this kingdom that it was called into being by troops of adventurers banded together (it cannot be said, confederated) for a religious rather than a political purpose; in other words, for personal rather than for public ends. It started therefore without any principle of cohesion. The warriors who engaged in the enterprise might abandon it when they thought that they had fulfilled the conditions of their vow, and although the continuance of their efforts was indispensably needed for the military and political success of the undertaking. (7) The private and personal character of these enterprises led to the perpetuation and multiplication of private and personal interests, and thus to the endless divisions and feuds between the barons of the kingdom, which were a constant scandal and menace and which led frequently to deliberate treachery. (8) It encouraged, or permitted, or was compelled to tolerate the growth of societies which arrogated to themselves an independent jurisdiction, and thus rendered impossible a central authority of sufficient coercive power. The origin of the military orders may have been in the highest degree edifying. The Knights Templars might begin as the humble guardians of the Holy Places: the Knights Hospitallers may have been the poor brothers of St. John bound to the service of the sick and helpless among the pilgrims of the cross. But in a land where they might at any time encounter a merciless or at the least a detested enemy, they were justified in bearing arms; the necessity of bearing arms involved the need of discipline; and the discipline of an enthusiastic fraternity cut off from the world and centred upon itself cannot fail to become formidable. The natural strength of these orders was increased by immunities and privileges granted partly by the Latin kings of Jerusalem, but in greater part by the popes. The Hospitallers, as bestowing their goods to feed the poor and to entertain pilgrims, were freed from the obligation of paying tithe, or of giving heed to interdicts even if these were laid upon the whole country while it was expressly asserted that no patriarch or prelate should dare to pass any sentence of excommunication against them. In other words, a society was called into existence directly antagonistic to the clergy, and an irreconcilable conflict of claims was the inevitable consequence. Nor can we be surprised to find the clergy complaining that the knights, not content with the immunities secured to themselves, gave shelter to persons who, not belonging to their order but lying under sentence of excommunication, sought to place themselves under their protection. But if the Knights of the Hospital had thus their feuds with the clergy, they had feuds still more bitter with the rival order of the Templars. With different interests and different aims, the one sought to promote enterprises against which the other protested, or stickled about points of precedence when common decency called for harmonious action, or withheld its aid when that aid was indispensable for the very safety of the state. Thus we have the triple discord of the king and his barons struggling against the claims of the clergy, and the military orders in conflict with the barons and the clergy alike. Of a state so circumstanced the words are emphatically true that a house divided against itself shall not stand.

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A halo of false glory surrounds the third crusade from the associations which connect it with the lion-hearted king of England. The exploits of Richard I. have stirred to enthusiasm the dullest of chroniclers, have furnished themes for jubilant eulogies, and have shed over his life that glamour which cheats even sober-minded men as they read the story of his prototype Achilleus in the tale of Troy. They have done even more, for, if we may believe the narrative, they excited the same vehement admiration in his most redoubtable enemy; and the romance of youth or even of maturer age fastens on the picture which exhibits the brother of Saladin in the thick of mortal fight as sending to him two Arabian chargers by way of lauding the hero for dealing wounds and death on a multitude of his people.

When we turn from the picture to the reality, we shall see in this third crusade an enterprise in which the fiery zeal which does something towards redeeming the savage brutalities of Godfrey and the first crusaders is displaced by base and sordid greed, by intrigues utterly of the earth earthy, by wanton crimes from which we might well suppose that the sun would hide away its face; and in the leaders of this enterprise we shall see men in whom, morally, there is scarcely a single quality to relieve the monotonous blackness of their infamy, in whom, strategically, a very little generalship comes to the aid of a blind brute force, and in some of whom, personally, an animal courage or ferocity, which fears no danger and knows no fatigue, surmounts a thousand difficulties and charms the vast multitudes who find their highest delight in the worship or idolatry of mere power. As a military leader Richard I. of England is beneath contempt when compared with the first Napoleon; but he may fairly compete with him as a criminal. Alaric the Goth and Attila the Hun never professed to be sovereigns of a civilized people; but in no sense have they a better title to be regarded as scourges of mankind.

Undertakings which depend on the temper and resources of individual men are not likely to be carried out with unswerving persistence; and this ebb and flow of purpose and energy is especially manifest in the history of the crusades. With any marked success comes a feeling of self-complacency in the thought that a vow has been strictly fulfilled or a duty thoroughly discharged; and the result is either slackness or total indifference to matters which thus far seemed in their importance to leave everything else in the shade. Assuredly there was little indeed in the lives of the later Latin kings of Jerusalem to keep alive the enthusiasm which had been roused by the preaching of the hermit Peter; and for the time a change seems to pass over the spirit of the dream which for nearly a hundred years had been beguiling Western Christendom.

The impulse (it can scarcely be dignified with the name of policy) which led Almeric (p. 100) to fix his thoughts on the conquest of Egypt, is the nearest approach to the temper of the true statesman and general exhibited in the history of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. It aimed not only at preventing a combination of hostile powers to the north and south fraught with fatal dangers for any dominion which might lie between them, but it seemed to promise the possession of a country of immense importance to the merchant and the trader. This advantage was clearly seen and eagerly aimed at by the third Lateran council, which insisted that the conquest of Damietta should be the first object of every crusade, the maintenance of the kingdom of Jerusalem at best only the second. In short, these expeditions had in strictness of speech ceased to be crusades, unless an exception is to be made in the case of the sainted Louis IX. of France. With him, as with Godfrey and the first crusaders, the religious motive absorbed every other. In the rest the professed object of the scheme is made an excuse for roving forays or political conquests, or is feebly carried out as an irksome or even repulsive task, while the harmony indispensable for success is sacrificed for quarrels and deadly feuds which would do credit to the society of savages.

But until the Cross had been thrust aside for the Crescent on the mosque of Omar, the task of stirring up the Western princes for another crusade was neither easy nor successful. The crusading spirit was never strong in Henry II. of England, and even after the quarrel with Becket had come to an end with his death, he had a convenient excuse for staying at home in the dangers which menaced his dominions from the north. But with the captivity of his enemy William this pretext vanished. The Scottish king swore to hold his kingdom as a fief of the English crown; and Henry, unable any longer to resist the arguments or entreaties of the French king, Louis VII., promised to combine his forces as duke of Normandy with those of his liege lord for the succour of the Christians in the Holy Land. The death of Louis, which cut short this design, brought no bitter disappointment to Henry; but when, some five years later, Heraclius (Herakleios), patriarch of Jerusalem, kneeling before him with the count of Tripoli and the grand-master of the Hospitallers, placed in his hands the sceptre of his kinsman Fulk of Anjou and of the kings who had succeeded him, with the keys of the Holy City and the Holy Sepulchre, the English monarch was careful to address them in words which conveyed encouragement while they committed him to nothing. He would ask the advice of his council; and his question was so put as to show clearly what he would wish the answer to be. He desired to know whether his duty called him to govern and guard his subjects at home or to break lances with Saracens to prop up the tottering sway of a distant sovereign. There was no doubt in the mind of his barons and prelates that the nearer work had a paramount call on him; and the promise of Henry to contribute 50,000 marks for the needs of the Latin kingdom in Palestine was received by the patriarch with a dissatisfaction which manifestly excited the king’s anger. Not a whit abashed, Heraclius bade him deal with himself as he had dealt with the martyr Thomas of Canterbury, and expressed himself as not less ready to die by his hands than by those of the less cruel Saracens. This ridiculous taunt was allowed to pass without rebuke, and Heraclius departed unhurt after consecrating the church of the Knights Templars in the city of London.

But the fall of Jerusalem cast a new colour over questions of policy and duty. A few days after that event, and in all likelihood before he could have heard of it, pope Urban III. died at Verona, oppressed with grief not for a disaster of which he was ignorant, but for the death struggle which seemed imminent between the papal and the imperial power. His successor Gregory VIII., whose short pontificate was ended in less than two months, bewailed the event as a catastrophe affecting the whole of Christendom; but he was probably not unconscious that for the papacy it might create a diversion which might rescue it from dire peril, if not destruction. The few days of life which remained to him were spent in writing letters to reawaken the spirit which had been roused successively by the hermit Peter and the sainted Bernard. The divine wrath was to be appeased by a fast of five years, and the consciousness of shameless corruption and venality inspired the cardinals to promise that they would take no more bribes for the furtherance or perversion of justice, and that they would never mount again on horseback until the land once trodden by the Saviour should have ceased to be polluted by the feet of the unbeliever.

Pope Gregory died on a journey undertaken for the purpose of making peace between the republics of Genoa and Pisa, whose fleets were of the first importance for the carrying out of the scheme which he had at heart. A few weeks later the broad plain between Gisors and Trie witnessed the meeting of Henry of England and Philip Augustus, the young French king, to hear the cause of the Christians in Palestine pleaded by William, archbishop of Tyre, the historian of the first and second crusades. The two sovereigns assumed the cross, and their example was followed by the count of Champagne, the count of Flanders, and a crowd of barons and knights. It was agreed that the English cross should be white, and the Flemish green, the French retaining the red. Henry hastened to England, and obtained from a council held at Geddington in Northamptonshire the imposition of a tax called the Saladin tithe. Every one who refused to join the crusade was to pay a tenth of all his goods movable or immovable. The sum thus raised was 70,000l.; but it is astonishing to learn that a sum almost as large, 60,000l., was extorted from the scanty company of Jews settled in England. Whether the burden pressed heavily upon them, we cannot tell. Worse things were in store for them before many months should pass away.

It is possible that Henry may now have really intended to fulfil a promise with which thus far he had only dallied. He sent messengers to the Hungarian king Bela, and Isaac Angelus, the Eastern emperor, to request a safe transit and free market for his followers. The demand was granted: but Henry now had other concerns to occupy him. The wretched quarrels which were the inevitable consequence of petty principalities and the complicated tenures of feudalism had assumed their most hateful form among the princes of the house of Anjou. Of the legitimate sons of Henry II., Henry, Richard, and John, it is hard to say which led the most disgraceful life and earned the most shameful reputation. The tyranny of Richard in Aquitaine was monstrous even in an age notorious for its cruelty and its treachery; but it was probably no disinterested sympathy for his victims which brought against him the forces of his elder brother Henry, and of his half-brother Geoffrey, the son of that Rosamond Clifford into whose history the popular talk of that or of a later day introduced a tale common to the folklore of many lands. The strife was for the time appeased by their father, against whom these dutiful children now turned their arms. The day fixed for the battle was drawing nigh when the young prince or king Henry (he had been crowned A. D. 1169 by the bishops excommunicated by Thomas of Canterbury shortly before his martyrdom) was cut off by a sudden attack of fever; and Richard, as the eldest surviving son, looked on himself as heir to the crown of England. But it soon became plain that the affections of his father were fixed on his younger son John, one of the most despicable of cowards and most contemptible of traitors. The discovery led Richard to renew his intimacy with the French king, Philip Augustus, to whose sister Adelais or Alix he had long since been betrothed. That princess had passed into the custody of the English king, and had, it was said, borne him a child; but of this Richard for the present took no count, as backed by Philip Augustus, he insisted on her surrender and on receiving the fealty of the barons as his father’s heir-apparent. On this second point the king’s answer was ambiguous; and Richard, exclaiming indignantly that he now believed what before he had thought impossible, knelt down at the feet of Philip, and, demanding from him protection in his just rights, did homage to him for all his father’s dominions in France. In the war which followed Henry was driven from the castles of Mans, Amboise, and Tours. His body was wasted with disease, and he was induced to meet his son and the French king on a plain near Tours. A thunderstorm, in which the lightning twice fell near them, unnerved him still more. He agreed to pay 20,000 marks to Philip, to surrender Adelais, and to allow his vassals to swear fealty to Richard, and asked only to see the list of the names of barons who had joined the confederacy of the French king. At the head was the name of his own son John. He read no further. A raging fever came on, during which he heaped curses on his unnatural children; and in a week he died.

Richard was now king of England; but he was not the man to fix his thoughts on the wilder schemes which had filled the mind of his father. The power and wealth of his kingdom were things to be used for spreading his own renown, and this renown could be won and extended nowhere so well as in the Holy Land, and in no other way so gloriously as in cleaving the bodies of unbelievers with his deadly broadsword. It was the ambition of a ruffian, gilded over with a thin varnish borrowed from the chivalry of Tancred (p. 45); and he proceeded to gratify it at the expense of the real interests whether of the kingdom or of himself. The sum which he needed for his enterprise far exceeded the 100,000 marks which his father’s greed or economy had amassed in the treasury at Salisbury. Richard sold the earldom of Northumberland for 1,000l. to the bishop of Durham for the term of his life: for 3,000l. he received into favour his brother Geoffrey, now archbishop of York: for 10,000l. he resigned to William the Scottish king all the rights over Scotland which the latter had conceded to Henry, together with the castles of Roxburgh and Berwick; and then departed for Normandy on the same errand of plunder and exaction.

Both the first and the second crusade had been marked at their outset by persecutions and massacres of the Jews. The third was to furnish no exception. The Jews of England felt probably that a storm was gathering, and they hastened to conciliate the king with costly presents. Their eagerness unhappily outran their discretion. Richard, knowing the feeling of the people, had ordered that no Jews should appear before him on the coronation day. Disregarding this command, some of them, mingling with the crowd, entered the palace, were thrust out by the mob, and murdered. The fire, thus kindled, spread furiously. Every Jew in the streets was cut down: every house belonging to a Jew was plundered and burnt. Some attempt was made to check the slaughter. Three men were hanged; but they were charged, not with murdering Jews, but with robbing Christians under pretence that they were Jews, or with setting houses on fire to the danger or hurt of the property of Christians. The iniquity was not confined to London. The same things were done in all the great cities. At York, as at Lincoln, the wealthy Jews hurried with their goods into the castle. At Lincoln they found safety: at York they unhappily interpreted the departure of the governor from the castle as a sign that he was plotting against them with the Christians of the town, and closed the gates against him on his return. In his anger he induced the sheriff of the county to order his armed bands to the assault: and these were joined by the populace whose fury showed at once that they meant much more than the mere recovery of the castle. The besieged could hear the fierce cry of a canon regular, of the Premonstratensian order, who hounded on the mob to ‘destroy the enemies of Christ.’ They knew that their doom was sealed; but if they must die, they might still choose the mode of their death. In a council summoned to debate the matter, the rabbi urged that they should avoid frightful insults and barbarous torments for their wives and children as well as for themselves by voluntarily rendering up their souls to the Creator, and falling by their own hands. The deed, he urged, was both reasonable and sanctioned by their law, as well as made famous by the men who in the deadly struggle between Jerusalem and Rome had slain themselves at Massada. To some his counsel seemed wise, to others a hard saying. The rabbi cut the discussion short by bidding all to depart in peace who could not approve his counsel. A few only left the chamber. In a few hours the work of death was done, and the castle was left in flames. The few, who could not summon courage to follow the example of their brethren, offered from the walls to open the gates and submit to baptism, if their lives should be spared. The terms were granted and the surrender was made; and by way of keeping faith the Christians rushing in slaughtered every living thing within the walls. These were venial offences; but the men of York added to them an act which was a real crime, and one of the deepest dye, in the eyes of king Richard. They hastened to the cathedral, and seizing on all the bonds and obligations which had been laid up in the archives burnt them in the nave. These bonds on the death of those who held them would all have escheated to the king; and the bishop of Ely, the chancellor, was commissioned to search out and punish the offenders. But the ringleaders had made their escape across the Scottish border; and justice even in the matter of robbery was baffled.

Richard, having filled his coffers so far as he could, met Philip Augustus at Vezelai where, forty-four years before, the pleadings of St. Bernard had seemed to stir the heart of Christendom to efforts which must be successful. The voice which now had most power was not that of the priest, the hermit, or the saint. It was that of the troubadour; and if for the present his harp might be attuned to lofty measures, and his words might convey lessons almost as austere as those of pope Urban II., there was at least the danger that a very moderate measure of success might lead the minstrel to arouse emotions of a less devout sort and tempt his hearers to less exalted delights than those of prayer and meditation. The forces of the two kings amounted, it is said, to 100,000 men. The discipline which kept them together may be pictured from the rules which enacted that murderers should be tied to the bodies of their victims and hurled into the sea, that they who drew their swords in anger should lose their hands, and that thieves should be tarred and feathered and in that plight put on shore.

While Philip and Richard were on their way to Sicily, Frederick I., emperor of the West, commonly known as Barbarossa or Red Beard, was on his way to Constantinople. He had fought a long battle with the pope or the man who called himself pope. He had himself set up an anti-pope, as the imperialist popes were called; and with the sanction of this anti-pope, who styled himself Pascal III., he had attacked Rome, beaten down the gates of St. Peter’s with hatchets and axes, and seen his troops advance filling the church with blood as they fought their way to the high altar. In the midst of this carnage Pascal III. had placed the crown on the head of the empress Beatrice, and had blessed again the diadem of Frederick. He had had to contend with a mightier enemy than the pope in the fearful pestilence which broke out within his camp; and his flight from Rome had ensured the victory of pope Alexander III., the somewhat hesitating friend of Thomas of Canterbury. But although the warfare of previous years was succeeded by an apparent peace, Frederick lost no opportunity of strengthening himself against the papacy; and in the days of Urban III. he had gained much by securing for his son Henry the hand of Constantia, heiress of the kingdom of Sicily. The old strife might have been renewed; but the heart of Barbarossa was stirred by the tidings from the Holy Land or the letters of Gregory VIII., and his armies advanced under his standard through Hungary towards the capital of the Eastern empire. That capital Barbarossa, like his predecessor Conrad (p. 93), refused to enter. The Byzantine Cæsar had with scant courtesy allowed him the privilege of buying food for his men; he had studiously withheld from him the titles which implied a divided empire.

The steadier discipline, the more decent order which marked the army of Barbarossa seemed to promise a better result to his enterprise. They had defeated the Turks in a general battle, and had taken the Seljukian capital of Cogni (Iconium), (p. 82); but a great disaster, nothing less than the loss of their leader himself, awaited them. Frederick was drowned in a Pisidian river, as some said while he was crossing it; as others had it, from the effects of bathing. The misery and suffering which had fallen to the lot of the earlier crusaders now weighed heavily upon them: and the wretched story is sufficiently told, if it be true that not a tenth of the number which crossed the Bosporos lived to enter Antioch. The few who made their way thus far found a city almost deserted by the Turkish soldiers, and Antioch once more had a Christian government.

But while the sovereigns of the West were thus preparing for another great effort on their behalf, the Latins of Palestine were struggling hard to win back their lost supremacy, and were aided by crowds of armed pilgrims, whose immense numbers have to be taken into account if we wish to realize the extent of the drain to which the population of Europe was thus subjected. Too impatient to wait, these wanderers hurried, with whatever motives, to the scenes where, as they supposed, honour could not fail to be won, even if wealth and happiness should not be their portion. The conflict now turned on the possession of Acre, the key of the whole region lying to the west of the Jordan. It had opened its gates to Saladin soon after the battle of Tiberias; and before Richard of England and Philip Augustus set foot on the Holy Land it had been besieged for nearly two years by Guy of Lusignan, titular king of Jerusalem, with an army which the influx of pilgrims from Europe had raised, it is said, to 100,000 men. But the besiegers had little generalship, and the mischief done to their effectiveness by vice and debauchery was completed by a fearful pestilence which swept them away by thousands.

In the midst of this misery a few German merchants, from the coast of the Baltic, sought to mitigate suffering by running up the sails of their ships as tents for the sick and dying. The happy results which followed their work led to an organization similar to that of the orders of the Temple and the Hospital. Like those orders, the Teutonic knights rose to power and distinction, and in the history of the crusade of Frederick II., we shall find their grand-master, Herman of Salza, in high favour both with the emperor and with the pope, his implacable antagonist. With the failure of the crusades in the East the order was transferred to the more forbidding regions which had sent forth its founders, and their crusade was turned against the heathen of the Lithuanian, Prussian, Esthonian, and other tribes. They preached the gospel with the sword, and their efforts were followed at least by military success. Their grasp on the lands which they overran was never relaxed, and the last grand-master became the sovereign of a state which has grown into the modern kingdom of Prussia.

The sickness and vice which wasted the forces of the crusaders before Acre were powerfully aided by feuds among the chiefs. Sibylla, the sister of Baldwin IV., and wife of Guy of Lusignan, was carried off by the plague. Her two children died with her, and her husband found himself stripped of the privilege which had made him at least the shadow of a king. Isabel, the sister of his wife, still lived, and having got rid of her first husband Humphry, lord of Thoron, was now married to Conrad, marquis of Tyre. As thus wedded to the heiress of Almeric, Conrad claimed the sovereignty of Jerusalem, and the decision of the point was reserved for the kings of England and France.

These kings were now on their way to the East. Richard had journeyed by land to Genoa, while his fleet, having crossed the bay of Biscay, anchored at Lisbon, where his forces found a crusade ready to their hands. The town of Santarem, forty miles above Lisbon, was blockaded by the Saracen emir. With the aid of the English the Portuguese raised the siege and then found themselves compelled to fight with their deliverers in the streets of Lisbon. The crusaders thought that they carried with them a license for universal plunder and insult; and it was not without difficulty and much bloodshed that they were persuaded by their leaders to reserve the application of their theory for more distant lands. The summer was coming to an end when Richard, having joined his fleet on the Italian coast, entered Messina almost in the guise of a conqueror, to the terror of the Sicilians and the disgust of the French king Philip.

Then, as through almost the whole of its chequered history, Sicily was a prize for which contending kings and adventurers intrigued, or fought. It was now held by Tancred, an illegitimate son of the Apulian duke Roger. His sister Constantia, the legitimate daughter of Roger, was the wife of Henry, son of Frederick Barbarossa, who wished to make the island a portion of his own imperial realm (p. 125). He was foiled by Tancred, who took the further precaution of imprisoning Joanna, the widow of his predecessor William called the Good. Joanna was the sister of the English Richard, who was not slow in demanding her freedom, her dower, and the legacies which William the Good had left to his father Henry II. His demands were accompanied by robbery and violence, and his followers hastened to imitate his example. They came to open strife with the people in the streets of Messina; and the battle was followed by the plundering of the town. But the raising of the English standard on the walls was interpreted as an insult by Philip Augustus, and Richard was constrained to appease his wrath by placing the city in the charge of the Knights Templars and Hospitallers.

The dispute with Tancred was made up by the betrothal of his infant daughter to Arthur, duke of Brittany, that luckless victim of the cruelty of John whom Shakespeare has made famous. But the quarrels of these champions of the cross are tangled like links in a twisted chain. By way of showing his friendly feeling, Tancred placed in Richard’s hand a letter bearing the signature of the French king and inviting Tancred to a private alliance against Richard. The latter charged Philip Augustus with the treachery, and was charged in turn with producing forged letters by way of devising an escape from his engagement with his sister Adelais. Richard had offered to marry Berengaria, daughter of Sancho, king of Navarre, and with studied coarseness he told Philip that he could have nothing to do with the mother of his father’s child. So was changed into mortal hatred that alliance which in its early days had led them to eat at the same table and rest in the same bed.

Thus passed away the winter in disgraceful quarrels and in lavish outlays of money scarcely less disgraceful. In the spring the French king sailed for Acre. Richard went to Rhodes, and while he remained there sick, he heard that some of his people had been wrecked on the coast of Cyprus, robbed of their goods, and imprisoned by Isaac the Comnenian prince who called himself emperor of the island. His demand for compensation was unheeded. The English fleet appeared before Limasol, the southernmost town of the island: and the English troops were soon masters of the city. Isaac entered into a treaty which bound him to serve with 500 knights in the crusade, and in the event of good behaviour Richard promised him the restoration of his kingdom. But fear got the better of his prudence. He made his escape, and again met the English king in battle. The fight was followed by his surrender, and Richard ordered him to be kept in a castle on the coast of Palestine.

Here, in the town which under the name of Paphos had won for itself a pre-eminence in vice and folly, Richard was married to Berengaria of Navarre. Here also he received and promised to take up the cause of Guy of Lusignan, the weightiest argument for so doing being found in the fact that Philip Augustus had taken up that of Conrad. Thus the two kings reached Acre only to complicate old feuds with new strifes. The siege had lasted nearly two years. In the plain was gathered the crusading host, still magnificent in its appointments; on the heights were assembled the Turkish armies under the black banner of Saladin. Richard had loitered on the road as long as it suited his fancy or his ambition to do so; and he had overwhelmed with a torrent of reproach and abuse the envoys from the chiefs before Acre who dared to confront him at the Cyprian Famagosta with the reproof that his business was not to dethrone Comnenian princes and take their kingdoms, but to do battle with the Turk for the sacred heritage of Christendom. He reached Acre, prostrated with intermittent fever; but indifference to the enterprise had given way to a fiery zeal. He had himself carried out on a mattress to point the balistæ which by discharging stones served in some measures the purposes of modern artillery. But at first the two kings would not act together, and this division of forces enabled the besieged to stand out. Their reconciliation, whether real or seeming, led to a combined action which was soon rewarded by the offer of surrender. The terms now proposed were rejected, and Saladin cheered the besieged with the hope of succours to be received from Egypt. The help came not, and Saladin was compelled to assent to a harder compact. The piece of the true cross was to be given up, the Christian prisoners set free, and some thousands of hostages were to be detained for the payment, within forty days, of 200,000 pieces of gold. The surrender was made. Richard took up his abode in the palace, Philip went to the house of the Templars, and the flags of the two kings floated from the ramparts. Philip now regarded himself as absolved from his vow, and he announced his determination to return to France. Richard parted from his ally with undissembled anger and contempt, and Philip, sailing to Tyre, gave to Conrad that half of the city of Acre which had been reserved for himself.

The forty days wore on. Saladin would not or could not restore the relics of the true cross or make up the 200,000 pieces. Richard warned him what the consequences of neglect would be; and he kept his word. On the fortieth day two thousand seven hundred hostages were led to the top of a hill from which all that passed might be seen in the camp of Saladin; and at a signal from the king these two thousand seven hundred infidels were all cut down. The soldiers hacked open their bodies to search for the jewels and gold which they were supposed to have swallowed, and to obtain the gall which they kept as medicine. In such praiseworthy deeds as these the Christians could act with admirable concert. At the same hour hostages almost equalling in number the victims of Richard were slaughtered on the walls of the city by the duke of Burgundy, the representative of Philip Augustus.

The recovery of Acre was for these merciful and devout champions of the cross a sufficient reason for plunging into beastly debauchery and excess, from which it was no easy task to tear them away. At length the army of Richard moved southwards, marching in compact array along the coast, while the fleet, generally in sight, advanced along the shore. On their left hung the hosts of Saladin, whose policy it was to wear out his enemy, in a country the fortresses of which he had dismantled, without fighting any pitched battles. In this way the crusaders and their enemies had reached the neighbourhood of Azotus (Ashdod), when Richard resolved to face his adversary. The right wing was under Jacob of Avesnes; the left was held by the Duke of Burgundy; the English king was in the centre. The disposition of the battle showed some approach to generalship on his part; and his coolness was seen in the steadiness with which he reserved for the decisive moment the charge of his horsemen. Their tremendous onset broke the Turkish ranks. The victory was decisive: but it was purchased with the death of Jacob of Avesnes, which Richard mourned as a costly sacrifice.

His next move was to Jaffa, although he had wished to go on to Ascalon. The French barons insisted on the necessity of rebuilding the walls of Jaffa; and in spite of the sluggishness which with the crusaders almost always followed strenuous exertion, the task was at length completed. Richard resolved to renew the war with vigour, and announced to Saladin that nothing less would content him than the surrender of all the territory which had been included in the kingdom of Jerusalem under Baldwin the leper, (p. 104). Saladin replied by an offer to yield up all lands lying between the Jordan and the sea; but it soon became clear that the negotiations were a mere pretext for gaining time, and Richard determined to advance upon Jerusalem. The army reached Ramlah, encountering some hardships from rain and tempests. Still it seemed that they might soon win the prize to which they had looked forward as the adequate recompense of all human toil. It was not to be so, and the hindrance came from the military orders and from the men of Pisa. These asserted that the reconquest of Jerusalem would be the dissolution of the enterprise. The army would never be kept together, so soon as they had once paid their vows before the tomb of the Redeemer. The crusaders fell back to Ascalon, and there the winter was spent partly in restoring the fortifications, but for the more part in incessant feuds. The duke of Austria had learnt during the siege of Acre to look on Richard as an enemy. The cause, it was said, was an insult done to the Austrian banner, which Richard, on seeing it raised upon the ramparts, seized and flung into the ditch. The hatred thus excited was embittered, we are told, by the injunction or desire for the personal help of all in the camp for the rebuilding of the walls of Ascalon. The duke replied that he was neither a mason nor a carpenter; and the lion-hearted king retorted by a kick which threw him down. This may be romance or fiction; but the disorganization of the force is sufficiently shown by the facts that the claim of Conrad to the throne of Jerusalem was urged by the Genoese, that of Guy by the men of Pisa; that the French abandoned the camp because Richard was no longer able to pay them; and that the jealousy of Conrad could be satisfied with nothing less than an alliance with Saladin. The end had almost come. Richard knew that his presence in England was a matter of life and death, and he now in his offers to the Turkish sultan abated his claim to the mere possession of the holy city and the restoration of the true cross. To this last surrender Saladin had in the previous negotiations made no objection. He had now become more orthodox or more scrupulous, and he could not give even indirect encouragement to the idolatry which would worship a piece of wood. Nor was a treaty set on foot for the marriage of Richard’s sister Joanna to Saphadin the sultan’s brother more successful. The English king even consented to give up the cause of Guy and sanction the choice of Conrad of Tyre for the Latin crown. The murder of Conrad by two of the fraternity known as the Assassins drew on Richard a storm of indignation; but evidence for the crime there was none. A more popular claimant appeared in Henry, count of Champagne, whose election to the throne of Godfrey was followed by his marriage to the widow of Conrad. The grief of Guy was consoled by the sovereignty of Cyprus which was still in the hands of his descendants when the Crescent in 1453 displaced the Cross on Justinian’s church in Constantinople.

Disunion and bad generalship had practically sealed the doom of the crusade; but for Richard the capture of Jerusalem still had greater charms than the punishment of his brother John. In June, accordingly, the army once more began its march to the Holy City. The tidings of his approach caused almost panic terror among the Turks; but when they had reached Bethlehem the crusaders discovered that their forces were insufficient for the investment of the city; that to a commissariat they could scarcely make a pretence; that they ran an imminent risk of being cut off from their base of supplies; and, lastly, that the Turks had destroyed the wells and cisterns for miles round. It was impossible to resist the logic of these facts; and Richard made a last desperate effort to divert their joint forces to an invasion of Egypt and the attack of Cairo. He was led up a hill from which he was told that he might see Jerusalem; he held up his shield before his face as being unworthy to behold the city which he had failed to wrest from the power of the infidel. The army was broken up. Some went to Jaffa, more to Acre; and Saladin, advancing with rapid marches to the former city, so pressed it that the besieged pledged themselves to surrender if within twenty-four hours they should not be effectually succoured. Within that time Richard appeared upon the scene. His onset was more fierce, his valour and exploits more astonishing than ever. The besiegers retreated in confusion, to learn presently with greater shame that they had been scared by a mere handful of Christian horsemen. But if the splendid bravery of the English king struck terror into the multitude, there were not lacking some, it is said, in which it excited a chivalrous admiration. Richard was dismounted, we are told, in the thick of the fight, and Saladin’s brother Saphadin, whose son Richard had at his request knighted, sent him two horses to enable him to renew the struggle. The crusaders were victorious: but Richard had no wish to use the advantage thus gained except for the purpose of gaining the best terms from the enemy. The compact ultimately made pledged them to a truce of three years and eight months. Ascalon was to be dismantled: but the Christians were to remain in possession of Jaffa and Tyre with the country between them; and all pilgrims were to have the right of entering Jerusalem untaxed.

Of this privilege the French at Acre desired to avail themselves. Richard indignantly refused their request. They had done nothing to secure the peace or to deserve it; and their allies only should be suffered to enter the Sacred City. Among these pilgrims was the bishop of Salisbury, who became the guest of Saladin and heard from his lips praises of the valour of Richard which were not extended to his generalship. The thrust was rather evaded than parried by the reply that the earth could not produce two warriors who could be put into comparison with the Syrian sultan and the English king.

So ended the third crusade, with its work barely more than begun, or rather marred by the infatuated waste of splendid opportunities; yet not with an extremity of humiliation which would convince even devotees of the absurdity of further efforts. A large strip of coast bounded by two important cities still remained as a base of operations in any renewed contest, and much had been done to neutralize the effects which without doubt Saladin had anticipated from his victory at Tiberias and his conquest of Jerusalem.

On the morning after his embarkation at Acre, Richard turned to take a last look on the fading shores of Palestine. ‘Most holy land,’ he exclaimed with outstretched arms, ‘I commend thee to the care of the Almighty! May He grant me life to return and deliver thee from the yoke of the infidels!’ His fleet, carrying his wife and sister, had preceded him and reached Sicily in safety. He himself followed in a single ship, and at the end of a month of baffling winds found himself at Corfu, where he hired some trading vessels to take him to Ragusa and Zara. Sailing on, he was thrown by a storm on the Istrian coast between Aquileia and Venice, when the perils of his situation must have begun to force themselves upon him. The kinsfolk of Conrad of Tyre bore no love for his supposed murderer; the French king was in treaty with his brother John; and Henry VI., the emperor of Germany, and son of Barbarossa, owed him a grudge for his alliance with Tancred of Sicily (p. 128). Still Richard thought, it seems, that a pilgrim’s disguise and an unshorn beard would carry him through all dangers. Having reached the fortress of Goritz, which was held by Maynard, a nephew of Conrad, he sent his companion, Baldwin of Bethune, with the gift of a ruby ring, to ask a passport for himself and Hugh the merchant, pilgrims going home from Jerusalem. Maynard looked long at the ruby, and at length said, ‘This jewel can come only from a king; that king must be Richard of England. Tell him he may come to me in peace.’ Not trusting his promise, Richard fled during the night. Baldwin and seven others who remained with him were seized and kept as hostages. At Freisach six more of his companions were taken, although Richard himself escaped with one knight and a boy who knew the language of the country. This boy, sent to the market at Erperg, near Vienna, showed his money too freely, was caught, put to the torture, and revealed the name of his master. Surrounded in his house by troops of armed men, Richard refused to yield except to their chief; and that chief hastened to take charge of him. It was Leopold, who may have felt that he could now taste the sweets of revenge for the insults (whatever these may have been) which Richard had put upon him in Palestine. But Leopold was induced to compound with his feelings by a bribe of 60,000l.; and Richard, as the prisoner of Henry VI., was closely guarded in a Tyrolese castle.

The tidings of his captivity were received with sorrow by his subjects generally, with undissembled joy by his brother John and Philip Augustus of France. Of these two princes the former prepared to fight for the crown, and after the first reverse accepted an armistice: the latter, having sent to Richard to renounce his allegiance, invaded Normandy, and met with a complete repulse at Rouen. At length the place of Richard’s imprisonment was discovered by William Longchamp, bishop of Ely, the English chancellor; or, as the romance would have it, by his faithful minstrel Blondel. The pope was at once assailed with entreaties to come forward for his rescue. Peter of Blois, archdeacon of Bath, reminded Cælestine III. of his debt of gratitude to so faithful a son of the Church. His mother Eleanor wrote to him in less measured terms. Where, she asked, was the zeal of Elijah against Ahab, of John the Baptist against Herod, of Alexander III. against the father of the emperor who had wrought this iniquity in Christendom? ‘For trifling reasons your cardinals are sent in all their power to the most savage lands; in this great cause you have appointed not even a subdeacon or an acolyth. You would not have much debased the dignity of the holy see had you set out in person to rescue him. Restore to me my son, O man of God, if thou art indeed a man of God and not a man of blood. If you remain lukewarm, the Most High may require his blood at your hands.’ In later letters she asks him if he thinks that his soul can be safe while he is thus slack in rescuing the sheep of his fold, and tells him that he ought to be willing to lay down his life for one in whose behalf he was unwilling to speak or write a single word. The truth is that Cælestine was full of zeal for Richard’s cause: he was only waiting with true papal caution for Richard’s deliverance to express his zeal emphatically.

At length, after nearly four months, Richard was brought before the diet at Hagenau. The captive might have pleaded the incompetence of the tribunal; he chose to answer the charges brought against him with arguments which convinced his judges of his innocence and made the emperor willing to treat about his ransom. This ransom was raised by new taxes laid on his subjects, whose resources, even when taxed to the uttermost, seemed unlikely to satisfy imperial avarice; and there was the further danger that whatever might be the sum raised, John might outbid them. This upright and honourable prince had offered to pay to Henry VI. the sum of 20,000l. for every month during which the imprisonment of Richard might be prolonged; but there was a limit to the patience of the German barons, and their words convinced Henry that this limit had been reached. Richard was released, hostages being given for that portion of his ransom which was not paid on the spot. His deliverance set free the tongue of pope Cælestine, who now wrote to the Austrian duke as well as to the emperor, insisting that the ransom should be given back and the hostages restored. The emperor paid no heed to the command, but Leopold was brought to obedience by the discipline of excommunication and sickness, and Richard after four years’ absence landed in his own kingdom to impoverish his people by fresh exactions for quarrels as useless as the enterprise which had taken him across the seas.

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The story of the fourth crusade is soon told. It was an effort prompted by the policy of a pope to whom the diversion of forces which the German emperor might turn against himself was of supreme importance,—of an emperor whose consciousness of ill desert made him catch eagerly at an opportunity for winning the favour of his German subjects—and of chiefs who hoped to take advantage of the weakened condition of the Turks for the promotion of their personal interests against the wishes and even against the warning and protests of the Latin Christians in Palestine.

Saladin, the chivalrous antagonist of the lion-hearted Richard, was dead; and the fabric of his empire soon showed signs of decay. His brother Saphadin, upheld by Saladin’s soldiers, maintained his ground against the competition of Saladin’s children who ruled in Egypt, Damascus, and Aleppo. But although Christians and Mahomedans were alike weighed down by the pressure of a terrible famine, the Knights of St. John longed to strike a blow by which they thought that they could surely crush their enemies. Their efforts to stir up a crusade in England and in Europe were seconded by pope Cælestine III., who promised all the spiritual rewards which had called forth the heroism or the brutality of the earlier pilgrim warriors. On Philip Augustus all entreaties were thrown away. Richard of England, it is said, was nursing dreams of conquests which were to place him in the seat of the Byzantine Cæsars: but for the time he was busied with the less pleasing task of wringing money from impoverished subjects.

But if pope Cælestine hoped that by urging this crusade he should rid himself of his mortal enemy, he was doomed to disappointment. The death of Tancred, king of Sicily, and of his heir enabled the emperor Henry VI., the son of Barbarossa to claim the island by right of his wife Constantia (p. 128); and the force which Germany might bring together for the reconquest of the Holy Land could be made available for strengthening the imperial power in Southern Europe. Thus the enterprise received his strongest approval, and his encouragement stirred up a throng of barons, knights and prelates to assume the cross. But he had no intention of journeying to Palestine in person. Money and men he was ready to contribute; but his own task lay nearer home. He had levelled the walls of Capua and Naples, and was besieging a Sicilian castle, when his own imprudence brought on a fever which cut short at the age of thirty a career shameful for its merciless and wholesale tyranny.

His barons with their followers reached the Holy Land at a time when, although the truce made with Saladin (p. 135) had expired, the Latin Christians were not disposed to renew hostilities. But the Germans had come to fight, not to debate; and their energy was to be tested by Saphadin, who resolved to be first in striking a blow. Jaffa was taken before any succour could reach it from Acre, its inhabitants slaughtered by hundreds or by thousands, and its fortifications, the work on which Richard and his soldiers had toiled so hard (p. 132), utterly demolished. The arrival of a second body of German crusaders seemed to justify a fresh movement which was directed against Berytos. Saphadin compelled them to fight between Tyre and Sidon: but he did so to his grievous cost. His army was for the time broken, and Jaffa with Sidon and other cities came again into the possession of the Christians. In the town of Berytos they found, it is said, provisions stored up for three years, and the power and confidence of the conquerors were largely increased by the arrival of a third body of armed pilgrims led by Conrad, bishop of Hildesheim, chancellor of the empire.

The crusaders were, in all seeming, in the full career of victory; but the advantages which they had gained were lost almost in a moment by their own infatuated bloodthirstiness. They had besieged the castle of Thoron, and so undermined the rocks on which it rested, that the garrison, foreseeing the inevitable end, agreed to surrender on the single stipulation that they should be allowed a free passage into Moslem territory. The terms were accepted; but so loud were still the threats of vengeance, so persistent, it is said, the assurances which the Frenchmen gave to the besieged of the deadly intentions of the Germans, that the miserable garrison resolved to fight to the death rather than fall into their hands. They lined the passages which the besiegers had scooped out in the rock, and their desperate resistance filled with dismay the savages who but a little while ago had been crying out for their blood. The disorganization which had not once or twice disgraced the armies of the earlier crusaders was seen again in even greater degree. The chiefs fled from the camp in the night, and their followers woke to find themselves deserted. A confusion ensued so utter and helpless that an enemy might have won a victory almost without striking a blow; but the Saracens were scarcely less exhausted than the Christians, and these on being gathered after their dispersion were able to accuse each the other of obstinacy, cowardice, or treachery. Conrad of Hildesheim, hastening to Jaffa with the purpose of restoring its walls, had won a battle fought against Saphadin at a cost fully equal to any profit which might accrue from it. The tidings of the death of Henry VI. dealt the final blow to the enterprise, by recalling to Germany those princes who had an interest in the election of the emperor. Those who remained behind took refuge in Jaffa, only, however to meet their doom a few months later at the hands of a Moslem host which suddenly attacked and stormed the city, while the Germans were showing their devotion to St. Martin by drinking themselves into a state of helpless stupidity.

In spite of these disasters the mockery of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was still carried on. On the death of Henry of Champagne (p. 134), his widow Isabella was advised by the grand-master of the Hospitallers to marry Almeric of Lusignan who had recently succeeded his brother Guy as king of Cyprus. Isabella showed no unwillingness to follow this counsel, and with her fourth husband she added the title of queen of Cyprus to that of queen of Jerusalem. If the politics of the time represented Cyprus as a convenient retreat in cases of emergency, such considerations have little interest or none. The only valid plea for keeping up the fiction of the Latin kingdom in Palestine would be found in the likelihood that the abandonment of the title would be regarded throughout Europe as a confession of defeat, and would be followed by the complete extinction of the crusading impulse.

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At its outset, if not in its results, the fifth crusade exhibits something like a return to the spirit of the age which gave so vast a force to the preaching of the hermit Peter and the eloquence of Urban II. In the chair of St. Peter there was now seated a man of far greater power than the pope who stirred the Western world to a fever of enthusiasm at the council of Clermont. At the age of thirty-seven—an age without example, perhaps, in the annals of the papacy—Lothair, of the house of Conti, cardinal of St. Mark, had been chosen pope by the unanimous voice of all the cardinals who were present, at a time when every other power seemed to be tottering, if not in the very throes of dissolution. The Byzantine empire was in its decrepitude; the Latin kingdom of Palestine was reduced to a mere strip of coast; an infant was king of Naples; the French king Philip Augustus was paying in whatever measure the penalties of an evil life; the man who was hoping to wear the English crown was the vindictive and despicable John, whose treachery had slain his father. Everywhere was disunion, faction, and deadly hatred: and in the midst of this chaos appeared the one man whose serene tranquillity, based on the consciousness of a superhuman commission and on the sanction of a divine law, was undisturbed by the storms raging around him. The influence, righteously acquired by Leo and Gregory the Great, and vastly extended (not altogether by the most righteous means) by Gregory VII. (p. 20) was wielded with even greater effect by the youthful pontiff whose eye surveyed with calm yet exhaustive scrutiny the troubled scene of European politics.

To this exalted position the undefined claims of previous popes would probably never have raised Innocent III., had it not been for the crusades. In these enterprises the popes had a pretext ready to hand for interfering with the affairs of every nation and country, for suspending or annulling civil jurisdiction, for levying taxes under the name of alms, for releasing barons from the allegiance due to their sovereigns, inferior tenants from their chiefs, debtors from their creditors. The crusade became a task which the popes might impose for their souls’ health on refractory emperors and kings. All whose hearts were filled with the love of Christ must long to take part in the holy work of rescuing his sepulchre from the hands of the unbelievers. If any were careless or indifferent to a duty thus constraining, it must be because their lives were not as pure, their faith not so sound as it should be, and by such men the divine power for rebuke and even chastisement committed to the vicars of Christ and of the prince of the apostles must make itself felt. If kings and great feudal chiefs would prove themselves to be good Christians, they must put on the cross: and the assumption of the badge imposed an obligation from which, if the popes were bent on keeping them to it, it would be almost, if not altogether, hopeless for them to escape. If they resisted, their sentence was excommunication; and excommunication, not removed, meant death here and hereafter.

The effect of this policy (for such, however sincere some of the popes may have been, it assuredly must be called) showed itself especially in the weakening of the imperial power, without which such a supremacy as that of Innocent III. over the sovereigns of his age would have been an impossibility. The emperor Conrad had been driven to take the cross by the awful pictures which Bernard drew of the judgment day (p. 90): he came back shorn practically of all his power. Barbarossa had obeyed the papal bidding, only to die in a distant land; and the struggle was to be renewed in a later crusade with a sovereign who was only in his cradle when the cardinal Lothair began his career as pope.

But if the crusades and the undefined powers which they brought to the popes carried to its utmost height the fabric of their supremacy, they began at the same time to undermine it. At no time had the Roman court possessed a high reputation for pecuniary probity; more commonly it had been known as the seed-bed in which venality, jobbery, and corruption flourished with rank luxuriance. All at once, owing to the new impulse given to the energies of Christendom, the popes became the possessors or administrators of revenues more vast than any of which in earlier ages they could have ventured to dream. Then as in these enterprises failure followed on failure, and the results attained seemed wholly inadequate to the outlay, the suspicion was awakened that the funds obtained for the crusades were sometimes diverted to other purposes. The suspicion might be unjust, and the popes might appoint barons and bishops not belonging to their court to be trustees of revenues which were not even to be kept in Italy. Still in spite of these precautions the old sayings were repeated, and they came not unfrequently with chilling force just when the crusading enthusiasm had been fanned into the fiercest flame.

This suspicion threatened to be fatal to the new enterprise which Innocent sought to promote for the salvation of the Holy Land,—nay, for that of all Christians whether of the East or the West. Not even Urban II. had been more fervent in his exhortations, more lavish in his promises of eternal happiness, more stern in his threatenings of endless perdition. Still from these loftier regions he had to descend to defences against charges of personal corruption, and to appoint for the management of the crusading revenues committees to which it was supposed that suspicion could not possibly attach itself. More than this, the pope and his cardinals must show themselves ready to bear to the full the burdens which they sought to lay upon others. A tenth of all their revenues would be devoted to the rescue of the Holy Land from the power of the infidel. The clergy in all other countries were to contribute at least a fortieth part, and the laity should be everywhere urged to contribute to the utmost of their power. The funds so raised were to be put into a safe place, the amount only being notified at Rome: and hard-hearted indeed must he be who would hold aloof from such a work of love and mercy.

But the indifference with which his words were everywhere received furnishes a fresh proof that the work of a genuine crusade can be set in motion only by the combination of authority with the enthusiasm of the demagogue. So it had been in the days of the hermit Peter (p. 26), and of the saint who had tried to cover the hermit with contempt. So, happily for Innocent, it was now, when Fulk, a parish priest of Neuilly near Paris, was smitten with the crusading fever. Even as a priest he had for a time led a life of miserable slackness, if not of gross vice; but his heart was touched with the penitence which was kindled in Mary Magdalene or Mary of Egypt. He had striven to atone for his sins by the severest asceticism, and to remedy his deplorable ignorance by attending the lectures of Peter the Chanter, in whom Innocent hoped to find the most eloquent preacher of his crusade. This hope was not to be realized. Peter was seized by a fatal illness, but his last words bequeathed to Fulk the mission which he had himself received from the pope.

Even before the death of Peter, Fulk had preached in the streets and lanes of the great city, and his words had melted the most obdurate and evil-lived sinners to tears. Still the spell of his oratory seemed to be losing its power, and he had gone back to his parish work at Neuilly when the last charge of Peter the Chanter animated him with an irresistible impulse. He came forward now not merely as the preacher of a crusade, but as the stern reprover of vice and of spiritual wickedness in high places. Like Urban and Eugenius, Innocent saw his opportunity. He wrote to Fulk, expressing his hearty approbation of his work, and bidding him, in concert with some of the Black and White monks, and with the sanction of the legate Peter of Capua, go up and down the land calling on all men to repent and to give proof of penitence by hastening to the land of promise.

Soon the tidings spread from city to city that a preacher had appeared whose powers were not inferior to those of St. Bernard. His miracles were not indeed so numerous, nor, for the most part, of the sort which ascribed to Bernard the excommunication of troublesome flies, who under this potent sentence fell dead from the ceiling, and were swept up from the floor by shovelfuls. His humour was not less ready than his eloquence. His hearers strove for pieces of his clothing to be kept as sacred relics. One noisy bystander had caused him special annoyance. He turned to his audience, and told them that he had not blessed his own garments, but that he would bless those of this man. In a moment the man’s clothes were in tatters, and the fragments carried off in triumph as relics endowed with miraculous power.

Yet, taken at its best, the effect of Fulk’s preaching was not equal to that of Bernard or of Peter the Hermit. His words might enjoin high austerities: his appearance might not belie his words, but it did not convey indisputable evidence of their truth. He looked and lived much like other men; and, what was worse, he had to do battle with the fatal suspicion which Innocent had striven with the utmost earnestness to shake off. He became the receiver of vast sums of money; and murmurs would make themselves heard which asserted that all these moneys were not used as they ought to be. His influence was on the whole waning: but he was not to see the beginning of the enterprise which he had so strenuously promoted. Fulk died of a fever at Neuilly, while the crusaders were still at Venice, and his mantle seemed to fall on the Cistercian abbot Martin.

Other preachers also girded up their loins for the great work, and their words told especially on some of the younger men among the French princes. Foremost among these was Theobald, count of Champagne, who had seen only twenty summers, and whose goal was well nigh reached already. With him Louis, count of Blois and Chartres, cast in his lot, followed by Simon of Montfort, the infamous leader of the yet future Holy War against the Albigensians, Walter of Brienne, and with many others, last but not least Geoffrey of Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, the historian of the crusade. Some months later the badge was assumed by Baldwin, count of Flanders, by Hugh of St. Pol, by the count of Perche, and many more.

The followers of these chiefs amounted already to a formidable army. But the leaders had no adequate navy at their command, and the history of all the preceding expeditions had convinced men at last of the desperate risks to be encountered in the land journey across Europe and the Lesser Asia. One state alone there was which was fully equal to all demands that might be made upon it for ships; and of the crusades this state at least had no just reason to complain. These armed pilgrimages had vastly increased its commerce and its profits, and had produced in Europe a general desire for eastern products which insured the continuance of this wide-spread trade. To Venice accordingly the eyes of the crusading chiefs were turned, and the envoys of the counts of Blois, Flanders, and Champagne appeared there in the first week of Lent before the doge, or duke, Henry Dandolo, venerable in his age of more than ninety years, and the victim of that Byzantine cruelty which had almost, if not wholly, deprived him of his sight. ‘Sire,’ said Villehardouin, the ambassador from the count of Champagne, ‘we are come in the name of the great barons of France, who are pledged to avenge by the conquest of Jerusalem the insults offered to our Lord Jesus Christ. From no other state can they obtain the help which they desire, and they implore you for the sake of the Holy Cross and the Holy Sepulchre to furnish them with ships and all other things necessary for conveying their men across the sea.’ ‘On what terms?’ asked the doge. ‘On any that you may name,’ was the reply, ‘so long as we may be able to bear them.’ The doge promised an answer at the end of eight days; and when these were passed, the envoys were told that for four marks of silver for each horse and two for each man the republic would furnish ships, provisioned for nine months, for the conveyance of 4,500 knights with their horses, 9,000 squires, and 20,000 infantry. The total cost would be 85,000 marks of silver; but the republic would further join the expedition with 50 galleys of its own. The terms were not unreasonable, and the envoys departed, some homewards, some to seek further aid from Genoa and Pisa. Here they fared but ill; and Villehardouin reached Troyes only to find Theobald the count of Champagne prostrate with hopeless sickness. In his joy at seeing him, the young man mounted his horse: but it was for the last time. In a few days he died, and the count of Perche soon followed him to the grave.

The count of Champagne was to have been the chief of the enterprise. The offer of the command was now refused by the duke of Burgundy as by many others: it was accepted at last by Boniface, marquis of Montferrat. But it was not until the following year that the crusading forces were fairly in motion; and their lack of cohesion was at once seen in all its mischievous effects. Venice may have driven—there is no just ground for thinking that she had driven—a hard bargain; but as it was certain that from her terms she would make no abatement, it was clear that the interests of the crusaders should lead them to adhere to or give up the compact in a body. To divide their forces was merely to lay a heavier burden on those who should still seek the aid of Venice. But of two courses the crusaders were well nigh sure to choose the worse, and while some sailed across the bay of Biscay and through the straits of Gibraltar, others embarked at Marseilles. Others again found their way to ports in Southern Italy, leaving Villehardouin to deplore at Venice the wretched mischief wrought by these desertions. It seemed at first that they had dealt a death-blow to the enterprise. The Venetian fleet was ready, in perfect order and magnificently equipped: but the price, the 85,000 silver marks, must be paid in advance, and the counts of Flanders and St. Pol and the marquis of Montferrat could only make up 51,000 after selling all their plate and putting the utmost strain upon their credit.

Of this dilemma the doge proposed a solution which at first excited the astonishment, the dismay, and even the disgust of the crusaders. The war which pope Innocent had striven to kindle was strictly a holy war, directed only against the infidel for the rescue of lands, which formed the inalienable heritage of Christendom. But the Venetian doge now announced that the 34,000 marks might be discharged by conquering for the republic the town of Zara, which had been, so he averred, unjustly seized by the king of Hungary. The summer wore on. The feast of the Nativity of the Virgin had come round, when Dandolo, ascending the pulpit in the church of St. Mark, declared his readiness to live or die with the pilgrims of the cross, and then, going to the high altar, fixed the blood-red badge on his high cotton cap. The sight called forth the tears and wakened the enthusiasm of all who were present. The less pleasant features of the compact lost their repulsive aspect; and the interests of Venice were further consulted by the agreement that she should have one half of all conquests that might be made.

A new actor now appeared upon the scene. For some years past the palace of the Byzantine Cæsars had been defiled by a series of bloody murders or of mutilations still more cruel. Emperor after emperor had been put to death or blinded and thrust into a dungeon. The latter penalty was the doom of Isaac Angelus when his throne was usurped by his brother Alexios, a tyrant not wise in his generation. Isaac, laxly guarded, was able to communicate with his partisans; his son Alexios, having contrived to make his escape in a Pisan vessel to Ancona, appeared to plead his cause before Innocent at Rome. He received no genial welcome. The pope had perhaps a better hope of bringing about the submission of the Eastern to the Western church through the possessor of a throne than through claimants or pretenders. He was better received at the court of his brother-in-law, the Swabian chief Philip; and his messengers now appeared in Venice to implore the help of the commercial republic and the high chivalry of Western Christendom.

Not impossibly the vision which this crusade was destined for time to realize may have floated before the mind of Dandolo, as he listened to their earnest pleadings; but for the present he confined himself to words of encouragement and sympathy. The task immediately before them was the conquest of Zara; and Venice stuck to her bond with inflexible pertinacity. In vain the abbot Martin, who with his followers had crossed the Tyrolese Alps, protested against the invasion of territories belonging to the Hungarian king who had himself assumed the cross. They were told that the scheme might be given up on the payment of the 34,000 silver marks. In vain Innocent sent his cardinal legate Peter of Capua with orders to interdict the Venetians from assailing Zara even with their own forces, and to lead the army of the pilgrims himself to Palestine. The legate was told that he might embark in their fleet if he pleased, but that he must not dare to exercise his legatine authority when he had done so. The indignant cardinal hastened to Rome. Some few drew back from the enterprise: and the marquis of Montferrat pleaded pressing engagements which withheld him at present from taking the command.

But with the main body of the crusaders the Venetian fleet set sail, in a magnificent order and with a display of power which seemed capable of sweeping everything before it. The people of Zara, dismayed at the sight of the armament, offered at once to surrender on the best terms which they could get. The doge promised to consider the matter with the barons: but while they were thus in council, Simon of Montfort, the destined hero of a bloody crusade against heretical Christians, upbraided the Zarans with their cowardice, and assured them that the conquest of Zara was no part of the crusading plan. When the summons for the envoys came from the doge’s tent, they were nowhere to be found. They had hastened back into the city, and the walls had been manned for a siege. In the camp Guido, the abbot of Vaux Cernay, warned the army that they were pilgrims of the cross, under oath not to make war against Christians in communion with the Holy See. In high wrath Dandolo insisted that the barons should keep to their engagements. Few dared, perhaps few wished, to gainsay him. For five days Zara was besieged; on the sixth it fell. The doge took possession, but he divided the spoil with his allies.

The reduction of Zara raised hopes which were to be speedily disappointed. The crusaders wished to sail at once for the Holy Land. The doge was determined to guard his conquest against attacks from the Hungarian king. Winter was coming on; the countries of Western Asia were suffering grievously from famine, and a voyage then undertaken would bring with it the miseries of starvation. The only course was to make Zara their winter quarters. The proposal called forth vehement opposition, which was not suppressed without bloodshed. The arrival of the marquis of Montferrat to take the chief command gave promise of more harmonious action; but the crusade was to be a second time diverted from its original purpose. Envoys came from the Byzantine Alexios and the Swabian Philip urging that the purposes of the expedition would be better achieved by placing Alexios on the throne of Constantinople than by attempts, which would certainly be in vain, to wrest Palestine from the Saracens. They insisted that the crusader’s vow was really a vow to promote in every way the cause of God, of right, and of justice; and in no way would this cause be more surely furthered than by restoring the disinherited prince to the throne of which he had been robbed by an usurper. They pleaded that in this instance interest and duty went hand in hand. It would be the first business of Alexios after his restoration to bring the Eastern church into submission to the Roman church and see; his next task would be to aid the crusaders to the best of his power in the work which they had most at heart. He would not only feed the whole army and give them 400,000 silver marks: but he would also join them in person, or send 10,000 men at his own charge.

The announcement of this proposal drew from the abbot of Vaux Cernay the passionate rejoinder that they were in arms only against Saracens, and that to Syria only would they go. But though he was firmly seconded by his partisans, there was practically no reply to the retort that in Syria they could do nothing, and that Jerusalem could be won only through Constantinople or Egypt. Words and tempers ran high: but the treaty with Alexios was accepted by the marquis of Montferrat and the count of Flanders, and the destination of the army was fixed. The numbers of that army were slowly diminished through the weeks of winter. The terrors of the papal interdict hung like a cloud over the host, and the barons resolved to send envoys who should assure Innocent that the diversion to Zara, which they and he alike lamented, was to be laid wholly to the charge of those faithless knights who by departing from other ports left their comrades without the means of paying the money due to the Venetians. Of the new compact made with Alexios they prudently said nothing: and Innocent, while he agreed to suspend the interdict till the arrival of his legate Peter of Capua, insisted that the barons must still make atonement for their offence. Against the Venetians he took a higher tone. The envoys must carry with them a letter excommunicating these marauders. The marquis Boniface received the brief, but, instead of publishing it, he wrote to Innocent, sending the submission of the barons and saying that the Venetians were about to entreat his forgiveness for the conquest of Zara. No such entreaties came: and Innocent issued fresh orders that his brief should be placed in the hands of the doge. If this was done, it produced no result: and Innocent was startled, if not dismayed, when he learnt that the spoilers of Zara were making ready to sin on a larger scale. He denounced the whole scheme with seemingly vehement indignation. The emperor of Constantinople may have been guilty of blinding his brother and usurping his throne; but his empire, he insisted, was under the special protection of the Holy See. It was no part of their business or their vow to avenge the wrongs of the prince Alexios; it was their first and paramount duty to avenge the wrongs done to their Redeemer, the sign of whose cross they bore upon their shoulders. Nay, more, the Byzantine emperor had, at the special request of the pope, promised to furnish provisions for the crusaders: and the promise of the Eastern Cæsar might be trusted. If it should fail, then they might forcibly take what they wanted, at the same time paying or promising to pay the value in money.

Dandolo was in no mood to have his course checked by either papal pleadings or papal threats. The day of embarkation had arrived, and Simon of Montfort, impenetrable in his gloomy bigotry, hastened away to join the king of Hungary, the faithful servant of the pope. The other chiefs went on board the Venetian fleet, with perhaps a shrewd suspicion that their success would be followed by a marked change in the tone and language of the pope. But whatever might be his desire to keep on good terms with the reigning monarch, his longing to see the Byzantine church brought back to Roman subjection was altogether more intense. This submission would be the immediate result of the enthronement of Alexios, and the crusaders would depart for the Holy Land, (the vision of a Latin empire at Byzantium had not yet dawned upon their minds,) rich not only in the blessing of the pope, but in a wealth of sacred relics which, now stored up in the churches of the capital, ought to pass into the hands of the faithful children of the Roman obedience.

About the time of the summer solstice, the Venetian fleet anchored in the Propontis nine miles to the west of the Imperial city. A few days later the army was at Scutari, where they received a message from the reigning emperor Alexios promising them aid in their passage through Asia Minor, on the condition that during their stay on the shores of the Bosporos they should do his subjects no harm. The reply was a summons to the usurper to descend from his throne, with a promise that on this condition they would obtain for him the pardon of his nephew, the rightful sovereign.

This young prince was paraded by the Venetian fleet in front of the walls; but the proclamation which called upon the people to acknowledge him as their sovereign was received with contemptuous silence or with showers of arrows, and no alternative remained but that of open war. The struggle presents few features of real interest: as a series of military operations it has little value or none. The imperial fleet consisted, it is said, of only twenty ships, and these useless, the anchors, cables, and sails having been sold by the admiral, a brother of the empress. The army exhibited all the pageantry of war, and lacked almost every soldierly quality. The port of Constantinople and the town of Galata were soon in the possession of the invaders, and the siege of the city was begun, so far as the efforts of a force which could assail but an insignificant extent of wall deserves the name. The first flag planted on one of the towers was placed there by the men of Dandolo’s ship; and Dandolo himself, setting fire to the surrounding houses, kept off the imperial troops while his crew fortified themselves in their position. The Latins and the Greeks were now face to face. The splendid ranks of the Byzantine army stood, as it might seem, ready for battle, when Alexios gave the signal for retreat and sealed his own downfall. That night he fled from the city. The blind Isaac Angelus, drawn from his dungeon, was again clad in the imperial robes, and his son Alexios was admitted to share his imperial dignity.

The task of the crusaders in Europe seemed to be now done. Their heralds announced to the Egyptian sultan that they would soon take summary vengeance unless he surrendered the Holy Land. The Pisans who had aided the usurping Alexios made up their quarrel with Venice. The French barons asked the forgiveness of the pope for the attack made upon Constantinople, and Innocent replied that it must depend on the fulfilment of the promises made by Alexios. This prince, having paid part of the money which he had sworn to give them, bade them remember how dear must be to himself the cost of alliance with them, and how greatly he must need their help to stem the tide of unpopularity. In short, he let them know that in or near Constantinople they must find their winter quarters. It was absurd to think of encountering the risk of a voyage during the winter: and even if they went, they could do nothing against the Turks until spring. He would then see that nothing should be left undone towards furthering the success of the crusade.

The northern pilgrims received these proposals with murmurs of anger. But the decision lay really with Dandolo, and Dandolo declared that at this season of the year the ships of the republic should not be exposed to useless dangers. The army remained where it was: but new troubles came thick and fast. Religious antagonism ran out into brawls and fights. An accidental conflagration preyed for eight days on the streets and houses of the city. The rage excited by these losses was increased by the exactions to which the young Alexios was driven in order to meet his engagements with the crusaders, and was lashed into madness when his officers stripped the churches of their gold and silver ornaments. The indignation of the people found utterance in the vehement eloquence of Alexios Ducas, called Mourzoufle from his dark and shaggy eyebrows; and his protests so far swayed the youthful emperor as to make him remiss in carrying out his compact with his allies. These told him plainly that to that compact he must strictly adhere, or, failing in this, must prepare himself for war.

During the night following the day in which he received this warning Alexios sent a squadron of fire-ships against the Venetian fleet. The danger was great; but the Venetian sailors were as prompt as they were brave. The deadly ships were turned aside into open water, and a Pisan merchant ship was the only vessel set on fire and destroyed. It was the last exploit of Alexios. Another revolution hurled him from the throne, which after one or two more emperors had been set up and put down passed to Mourzoufle. The new Cæsar showed some aptitude for war, but he preferred to try the effect of negotiations with Dandolo. The old doge retorted that with an usurper he could have no dealings, and that, if he sought peace, he should replace his master Alexios on the throne. Mourzoufle resolved that this demand should not be made a second time: and that night Alexios was slain in prison.

For the fate of their former ally the crusaders professed to feel a profound sympathy; and their grief prompted the resolution of cutting the evil at its root by placing a Latin emperor on the seat of the Eastern Cæsars. The compact was accordingly drawn up. The booty to be obtained within the city was to be shared equally between the French and the Venetians; and a committee of twelve, half French, half Venetian, should elect the new sovereign, who was to have one-fourth part of the city with the palaces of Blachernai and Boukoleon, the rest of the city being shared by the two allied powers. Venice, freed from all feudal obligations to the Greek empire, should be equally free from all feudal dependence on the Latin sovereign, while the Latin patriarch should be chosen from the nation to which the emperor might not belong.

The second siege of Constantinople is as devoid of interest as the first. The success of the Greeks on the first day was followed by a series of disasters which on the fourth day enabled the Latins to force their way through the gates. Mourzoufle shut himself up in his palace. A third conflagration desolated the city. In the morning the conquerors learnt that the usurper had fled with many of the inhabitants. The Latin conquest was accomplished. The Byzantine clergy alone urged continued resistance; but when they presented Theodore Lascaris to the people as their emperor, their silence showed that the appeal was made in vain. Then, seeing that nothing more could be done, the patriarch John Kamateros fled from the sight of the awful scenes which disgraced the triumph of the Latins. The three Western bishops had strictly charged the crusaders to respect the churches and the persons of the clergy, the monks, and the nuns. They were talking to the winds. In the frantic excitement of victory all restraint was flung aside, and the warriors of the cross abandoned themselves with ferocious greed to their insatiable and filthy lewdness. With disgusting gestures and in shameless attire an abandoned woman screamed out a drunken song from the patriarchal chair in the church of Sancta Sophia, the magnificent work of Justinian. Wretches blind with fury drained off draughts of wine from the vessels of the altar: the table of oblation, famed for its exquisite and costly workmanship, was shattered: the splendid pulpit with its silver ornaments utterly defaced. Mules and horses were driven into the churches to bear away the sacred treasures; if they fell, they were lashed and goaded till their blood streamed upon the pavement. While the savages were employed on these appropriate tasks, the more devout were busy in ransacking the receptacles of holy relics, and laying up a goodly store of wonder-working bones or teeth to be carried away to the churches of the great cities on the Rhine, the Loire, or the Seine. ‘How,’ asks the pope, ‘shall the Greek Church return to ecclesiastical unity and to respect for the Apostolic See, when they have seen in the Latins only examples of wickedness and works of darkness, for which they might justly loathe them worse than dogs?’ The question might well be asked: and we may be well assured that Innocent would not be likely to over-colour the picture in favour of the Greeks, and that his informers would not care to put before him in their naked hideousness iniquities which it would be a sin to describe.

The first task of the conquerors was to elect a chief and share the spoil. The committee of twelve met in the chapel of the palace and invoked the aid of the Holy Spirit. The six French electors were all ecclesiastics,—the abbot of Loces, the bishops of Troyes, Soissons, Halberstadt, and Bethlehem, and the archbishop-elect of Acre. Their first choice fell on Dandolo. His wisdom, his energy, his undaunted courage, seemed to point him out as the best man fitted to rule the empire in the winning of which he had played the chief part. But the old man cared little for the office, and to the Venetians the combination of the powers of emperor and doge in the same person probably boded ill for the best interests of the commercial republic. There remained only two who could well be placed in competition for the prize. The marquis of Montferrat, the lord of a petty principality at the foot of the Alps, could be no object of Venetian jealousy, while his age and character well qualified him for the office. But Baldwin of Flanders, at the age of thirty-two, was in the first flush of vigorous manhood; he was come of the race of Charles the Great, and the French king was his cousin. He was also the feudal sovereign of a wealthy territory and the leader of a powerful army raised among his own people. The electors came to an unanimous decision, and this decision announced to the barons, who were waiting outside, that the count of Flanders was the Eastern Cæsar. Boniface of Montferrat at once did homage to him as his lord; and the old doge was the only man not called upon to make this act of submission. Borne on the shields of his comrades Baldwin was carried to the church of Sancta Sophia and there was invested with the purple buskins. Three weeks later he was crowned by the papal legate, the new patriarch not having been yet elected.

This election was to the Venetians a subject of greater anxiety than the choice of a temporal sovereign. There was no room here for the fear that Venice might become an insignificant dependency of a vast empire; and they set to work with their usual promptitude and coolness. The canonical regularity of the election was, as they supposed, ensured by the appointment of Venetian priests to be canons of Sancta Sophia; and these canons were placed under oath to elect none but a Venetian. Their choice fell on Thomas Morosini, a member of one of their noblest houses and a man highly esteemed by Innocent III.

The Roman pontiff played his part with consummate skill. While the usurping Alexios was on the throne, he had striven to secure through his help the submission of the Eastern church. No sooner had he fled, than Innocent reminded his nephew Alexios of the promises of obedience which he had personally made, and urged the crusaders to insist on the immediate fulfilment of this promise. In no other way could they justify themselves for diverting to other purposes the forces which had been enrolled solely for the redemption of the Holy Land. He had now to deal with a new order of things. The emperor Baldwin had prayed him to ratify the compact made with the Venetians, to stir up afresh the zeal of Western Europe for the maintenance of the Latin empire in the East, to send forth new armies who in the countries now brought under Latin sway would assuredly reap an abundant harvest, and to reinforce the Latin clergy by a multitude of new recruits. The Venetians had besought his forgiveness for attacking Zara, his sanction of the conquest of Constantinople. They could not bring themselves to believe that the people of Zara were really under his protection, and hence they had determined to bear with the excommunication in patient silence until the pontiff should learn the truth. For what they had done at Byzantium the young Alexios was chargeable, not they. He had tried to send fire-ships among their fleet, and it was indispensable for their own safety and that of their allies to deprive him of the power of doing further mischief.

The satisfaction which Innocent felt, and avowed that he felt, was expressed in carefully guarded terms. He was rejoiced to be able to revoke the excommunication of the Venetians, and so high was his admiration of the valour and wisdom of Dandolo that he could not comply with the prayer of the venerable doge to be relieved from further obligation under his vow. The hero who could bear so lightly the burden of ninety winters must not deprive the crusade of services which would ensure success to the enterprise and a glorious reward for himself. To the delicate praise which thus took the form of a command he added the assurance that he had taken the Latin empire under his special protection, and had prayed the sovereigns and prelates of the West to exert themselves to the utmost in its behalf. He had felt himself bound to pass a stern condemnation on the deeds of horrible violence and lewdness committed by the crusaders in the sacking of a Christian city; but he could not withhold the admission that the history of the conquest was a memorable commentary on the parables of the talents and the vineyard. The Greeks had done nothing with the good things committed to their trust: far from aiding, they had seriously hindered, the warriors of the cross and even done their best to destroy them. They had kept up a causeless schism; they had turned a deaf ear to all entreaties which called upon them to come back to the unity of the Church; and they had now paid the penalty by seeing their inheritance in the hands of better husbandmen who would bring forth fruit in due season. But if Innocent was thus complaisant with the secular empire, he laid a heavy hand on the spiritual power which the Venetians hoped to secure as their special portion. The pope had a stern censure for the conduct both of the Venetians and the French in daring to seize on the temporalities of the Eastern church and to portion out along with other lands and property all that might remain over and above the amount deemed sufficient for the maintenance of the Latin clergy. Nor could he allow the validity of Morosini’s election, whether by a self-constituted chapter or by priests chosen by a purely secular authority. The election, in short, was null and void; but so great was his regard for the Venetians, so high his esteem for Morosini, that he would himself appoint to the Byzantine patriarchate the man whom they had chosen, and invest him with singular privileges. These privileges involved a reservation of certain appeals to the pope; and the very plenitude of the powers thus bestowed served only to show with the greater clearness the paramount sovereignty of the Roman pontiff to whom he owed his dignity and his jurisdiction.

The great crusade promoted by Innocent had thus produced results very different from those which he had looked for. It had not touched the power of the Syrian sultans; it had not struck a blow on the soil of Palestine. But on the whole he had no cause to complain. It had widely extended the limits of his supremacy, and had subdued a spiritual rebellion which had rent asunder the seamless robe of Christ. But if the pope was a gainer, Venice had secured to herself advantages, more solid perhaps, certainly more enduring. By the conquest of Zara she had laid the foundations of her vast commercial empire; and her factories at Pera needed only the defence of her fleets, while the Latins in Byzantium had to guard themselves against attacks by land. She had her settlements in the richest islands of the Egean, and in every harbour was seen the flag of the maritime republic. This growth of her commerce was, moreover, fostering in her a spirit of antagonism to ecclesiastical authority, of which Innocent seems to have foreseen the issue, and which he sought with all his power to crush. The abbot of St. Felix in Venice was consecrated, by the command of Ziani, the successor of Henry Dandolo, to the archbishopric of Zara, the sanction of the pope not being first asked. The wrath of Innocent blazed forth at once. He reviewed in the harshest terms the general policy of the Venetians in the conduct of the crusade. It was true that they had taken Zara, and even that they had overthrown the Byzantine empire: but what would not an army, which had won such victories, have achieved in the Holy Land? Had the crusaders fulfilled their vows, not only must Egypt have been subdued, and the cross replaced on the dome of Omar, but Syria itself must have been swept clear of all Saracen dominion. That this glorious result had not been brought about already, was the fault of the Venetians and of them alone. He could not therefore recognize their archbishop, and he insisted on their submission under pain of the censures which were ready to fall upon them. There is no evidence to show that the Venetians took the reproof to heart, or that they vouchsafed any reply.

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We have already (p. 55) marked the broad contrast between the character of the Greeks and that of the Latin and Teutonic nations of Western Europe; between the centralized and legal government of the one and the feudalism of the other; between the restlessness and ambition which in the West ran out into constant private war, and the habit of almost unreflecting obedience which had left the subjects of the Eastern Cæsars unable to cope with rougher and ruder spirits except with the weapons supplied by cunning, fraud, and treachery. The crusaders had come to a people which to a large extent might be described as in a state of decrepitude, but to a land nevertheless which was not less Christian than Italy or France, nay, which boasted churches of an antiquity more venerable than those of Milan, Ravenna, and Rome itself,—to a land ruled by a system of law which has affected the legislation of every nation in Europe,—to a land where Antony and Basil had reared the fabric of monachism long before the days of the Nursian Benedict or the Scottish Columba,—to a land where the ritual of the Church had taken root while Christianity was in its cradle, and had moulded the life, the thoughts, the very being of all its members.

This time-honoured civilization the Western champions of the cross now fancied that they could crush or sweep away. Not one of them cared to think that he was dealing with Christians or with the subjects of the ancient empire of Octavius or of Constantine. For them the land, not less than Syria and Egypt, was a part of heathendom; the people savages to be brought under a yoke as heavy as that of the Western serfs; their patriarchs, their bishops, their priests, and their monks were ministers of a false faith beyond the pale of charity or mercy. Wiser conquerors might have mingled with the people, and through intermarriage might have infused new vigour into the feeble mass. By Baldwin and his allies a rigid line was drawn separating the present from the past. All dignities, offices, and lands were forfeited; all were shared exclusively among the conquerors. If they were still under an emperor, this emperor was not the autocrat who represented the majesty of Rome, but a mere feudal chief whose barons, although owing him homage, regarded themselves as practically his peers. In short, Baldwin and his comrades held that they might do at Constantinople what Godfrey and his allies had done in Palestine. The code of Justinian gave place to the Assize of Jerusalem (p. 78), and not a single Greek was permitted to take part in the administration of this law.

As it was with the secular order of things, so was it with the spiritual. The pope annulled without scruple the election of Morosini by self-chosen or state-appointed canons: but he did so only because his own authority was imperilled, not at all because they were invading the jurisdiction of a patriarch whose throne was as ancient as that of Innocent himself. Just as though they had been mere priests of Baal or Mahomedan Imams, the Greek clergy were all driven from their churches (p. 163), and the people compelled to abandon their venerable liturgy for that of the Church of Rome. The emperor besought the pope to send out bands of priests as though for the conversion of a heathen country, and to furnish Dominican and Cistercian monks for the purposes of reforming the stereotyped monachism of the East. Innocent was indeed full of exultation. His letters everywhere called on the faithful to succour the devoted missionaries who were preaching the Gospel in the churches of Constantinople and bringing home to the people the enormity of the heresy which denied the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son as well as from the Father. ‘Samaria,’ he said, ‘had now returned to Jerusalem; God had transferred the empire of the Greeks from the proud to the lowly, from the superstitious to the religious, from the schismatics to the Catholics, from the disobedient to the devoted servants of God.’ He was impressed with the needfulness of sending young men from the schools of Paris to strengthen themselves by the learning of the East: Philip Augustus summoned young Greeks to Paris to receive instruction in the creed and ritual of the West. Both were playing with edged tools. The pope and the king were both encouraging that intercourse of thought which was in the end to scatter to the winds the theory of the divine right of temporal despots and the infallibility of spiritual rulers.

The order of things so set up lasted a little longer than the Latin principality of Edessa (p. 59). It was essentially the piece of new cloth patched into the old garment, the new wine poured into old leathern bottles only to burst them. In its relation to the conquered race it had no more stability than the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem (p. 111); and in itself gave play to all the jealousies and quarrels which disgraced the feudal states of Western Europe. The strife began before the landing of Morosini. While yet at Rome, he had been warned by the pope to have nothing to do with the schemes of Venetian statesmen, and to show no preference in his new home for men of Venetian birth. In Venice he was compelled to abjure this promise, to swear that Venetians alone should be canons of Sancta Sophia, and that, so far as his power might extend, he would strive to secure to a Venetian the succession to his patriarchate. Nothing more would be needed beyond the rumours of these intrigues to rouse the suspicions of the French clergy; and accordingly, when Morosini approached the shore, not one obeyed his summons. To the Greeks the sleek and beardless prelate and his coarse-looking and beardless priests were alike repulsive. Morosini was left almost alone. He threatened with excommunication the clergy who would not admit his authority; his menaces were treated with indifference or contempt.

The conquerors had indeed won for themselves a domain almost appalling in its extent; and the sharing of the prize was soon followed by the quarrelling of robbers over their booty. Not three months after the fall of Constantinople the emperor led his forces against his vassal Boniface of Montferrat, now the lord of Thessalonica: and the quarrel which was for the time made up was a significant token of the future history of his empire. The time was come for carrying out the compact made before the conquest. The aged Dandolo became despot of Romania, and in his new sovereignty he died, leaving to his countrymen the task of strengthening and extending their commercial empire by means of a chain of factories along the mainland and in the islands of the Adriatic and the Archipelago. The task was too costly even for the resources of Venice: and the commercial republic was constrained to govern her possessions by that feudal system to which her constitution was utterly opposed. For Boniface, the chivalrous rival of Baldwin, the lordship of Crete had less attractions than the kingdom of the Macedonian Thessalonica: but his wanderings did not end here. Thebes, Athens, Argos, received his followers within their gates; and the resistance of Corinth and Napoli was speedily overpowered. The count of Blois received the dukedom of Nicæa (Nikaia, Nice), the count of St. Pol the lordship of Demetria, a city about twenty miles to the south of Adrianople, while Geoffrey of Villehardouin, now marshal of Romania as well as of Champagne, found a splendid home on the banks of the Hebros.

But the power of the old Byzantine Cæsars was rather divided than crushed by the Latin crusaders. The wretched Mourzoufle, caught by the Latins, was hurled from the Theodosian column; but Theodore Lascaris, the son-in-law of the Alexios who dethroned Isaac Angelus, established himself at Nicæa first as despot then as emperor, and in no long time had extended his power from the Bosporos to the banks of the Meander. Other parts of the empire were likewise in revolt against the new Cæsars. The governors of Trebizond, without changing their titles at first, became sovereigns of their province, and laid the foundations of their later empire. A power not less formidable sprung up in Epirus (Epeiros) and had its centre within the walls of that city of Durazzo which is especially associated with the history of Bohemond. The conquerors were now to feel the effects of feudal subordination, which was only another name for real anarchy. The terror which they had inspired when their combined forces assailed the walls of Constantinople was rapidly lessened when their dispersal betrayed their scanty powers of cohesion, and when encounters in the field proved to be not always irresistible.

The storm burst on the Latins from a quarter in which they had not looked for it. The chief of the Bulgarians, John or Calo-John, had at first greeted Baldwin with the freedom of an equal as well as the heartiness of a friend; but the retort that in the count of Flanders he must recognize his emperor roused a resentment which led him to make common cause with the insurgent Greeks. Waiting until Baldwin’s brother Henry had with a large force crossed the Hellespont, he gave the signal for slaughter, and the Latins were forthwith cut down in the towns and villages of Thrace. Baldwin at once sent a messenger to recall his brother; but before he could return, he set out with 140 knights and their retinues, followed by the aged Dandolo. The force was perilously small; but good order and discipline might have more than compensated this disadvantage. All desultory action was forbidden; the order was disregarded by the count of Blois who was himself surprised and slain, while the emperor Baldwin became a prisoner. The army was saved by the wisdom, fortitude, and heroism of Villehardouin, whose masterly retreat is perhaps the only piece of true generalship in the whole military history of the crusades. But the empire was already little more than the shadow of its former self. A few fortresses on the shore of the Propontis now formed with the capital the imperial domain of the Latins. Calo-John was in the full tide of success. The pope, for whom he had but a little while ago professed a deep devotion, entreated him to have mercy on his enemies and to release the emperor. This last request was, he said, beyond mortal power to grant. Baldwin had already died in prison. How, no one ever knew. Stories grew up which told of horrible barbarities practised on the defenceless captive; and the common belief that great men cannot die brought forward twenty years later in Flanders a man who gave himself out as the true sovereign of the country, and won from thousands a faith not to be shaken by the discovery of his imposture and the ignominious death which followed it.

The career of Alexander the Great and of Baldwin was cut short at the same early age. The reign of Baldwin’s younger brother Henry was extended over ten years, and closed when he was forty-four years old. It began in darkness and gloom, it was followed by a time of overwhelming disasters: but in itself it is the only period in the history of the Latin empire on which our thoughts may rest with anything approaching to satisfaction. Twelve months had passed while he acted as regent for his brother before he could be brought to believe that Baldwin no longer lived, and to assume the imperial title. Dandolo had already ended his long life at Constantinople. Boniface of Montferrat was soon to follow him, after his disputes with the emperor on points of homage had been settled by the marriage of Henry to his daughter Agnes. Boniface died in a war with Calo-John; and with him his friend Geoffrey of Villehardouin disappears from history.

But the tide was now to turn against the Bulgarian chief. The Greeks, who had looked to Calo-John as to one who would restore to them their freedom and their laws, found that they were dealing with a savage whose mind ran on massacre and on those wholesale deportations of conquered tribes which have in all ages delighted the hearts of Eastern despots. The cruelties of the tyrant taught them that in the Latin emperor they might perhaps find a friend. At their prayer for help Henry took the field with a dangerously scanty force; and the retreat of Calo-John was probably caused less through fear of the Latin army than by the desertion of his Comans. Not long afterwards the Bulgarian chief was killed in his tent, while besieging Thessalonica. With his successor Vorylas Henry made an honourable peace; a treaty with the Greek sovereigns of Nice and Epirus (Epeiros) left to him undisturbed possession of an ample territory; and the rest of his life was spent in conscientious efforts for its just and orderly government. Clearly seeing the fatal folly of that exclusive system which was so dear to the hearts of crusaders generally, Henry resolved to govern Greeks through Greeks. The great offices of the state were thrown open to them, in great part filled by them. To the tyranny which repressed the use of the Eastern liturgy and thrust on the people a theological dogma he opposed a passive resistance: to the theory of papal supremacy he gave a significant answer by having his throne placed on the right hand of the patriarch’s chair in the church of Sancta Sophia. His presumption was rebuked by Innocent III.; but Henry was none the more deterred from prohibiting the alienation of fiefs which was adding only to the wealth and power of the clergy.

Henry died at Thessalonica; and with him the male line of the counts of Flanders came to an end. But the daughter of Henry’s sister Yolande was married to Andrew, king of Hungary; and to the Latins it seemed that the choice of a powerful sovereign as their emperor might be the salvation of their dynasty. The prize had no attractions for Andrew: and the offer of the crown was in a fatal hour accepted by Peter of Courtenay, count of Auxerre, the husband of Yolande herself, who had won his spurs in a crusade, not against Turks and Saracens, but against the Albigensian heretics of Provence. To raise a decent force which might guard him on the march to his capital Peter was compelled to sell or mortgage the best part of his territories; and when he reached Rome, the pope, Honorius III., careful to avoid anything which might seem to recognize his authority over the old imperial city, crowned him in a church without the walls. The means of transport across the sea he had been obliged to seek from the Venetians. They were granted, but under conditions similar to those which had been imposed on Baldwin and his allies. He must recover Durazzo for the republic, as for her they had conquered Zara. His success was not greater than that of Bohemond, and his miserable march from Durazzo led him into trackless mountains, amongst which he fell into the hands of his enemies. With him the papal legate became a captive.

At once the pope threatened to place the Epirot sovereign under his ban; but it soon became evident that his anxiety was for the legate, not for the emperor. The former was released; the latter was probably murdered in prison; and the successor of Henry died without seeing the city of which he was the Cæsar.

While Peter of Courtenay pined in his dungeon, his wife Yolande, in the midst of her grief, anxiety, and apprehension, gave birth to Baldwin, the luckless child with whom the Latin dynasty was to reach its close. Death soon brought relief from her sorrows; and the barons had again before them the task of choosing an emperor. Namur, the inheritance of Yolande, had passed to her eldest son Philip, who was too prudent to change the substance of his principality for the shadow of an empire. The crown was offered to her second son Robert, who set out on his journey, by way of Germany and the Danube, through the territories of his brother-in-law, the king of Hungary. He was crowned by the patriarch in Justinian’s church; but the pageant preceded an endless line of disasters. Demetrius, the son and successor of the marquis Boniface, was expelled from his kingdom of Thessalonica: and the remains of Asiatic territory still in the hands of the Latins were seized by the Nicæan emperor, John Vataces, the son-in-law of Theodore Lascaris. Still more ominous was the fact that these conquests were achieved by the aid of French mercenaries. The house was indeed divided against itself; and the champions of the cross had learnt the art of turning their arms to profit in the service of the highest bidder or the most successful general. To disaster in the field was added vice, with its issue crime, in the palace: and Robert, in an agony of grief and rage at the mutilation of a woman for whom he had wished to thrust aside his wife, the daughter of Vataces, sought comfort and redress at the feet of the Roman pontiff. He was told to go back to his capital and there do his duty. The weight of his humiliation was a burden beyond his strength. Death relieved him from the duty of obedience to the papal order.

Baldwin, the youngest son of Yolande, was a child only seven years old when Robert died; and the barons of the Latin empire felt that the imperial power, shadowy though it had become, could not yet be entrusted to his hands. They resolved to offer it in the mean season to John of Brienne, titular king of Jerusalem, by right of his wife Mary, daughter of Isabella (p. 144) and Conrad of Montferrat, and grand-daughter of king Almeric. This veteran warrior, now more than eighty years of age, whom in his earlier years we shall meet in the crusade of Frederick II., was induced to accept the title of emperor on condition that Baldwin should marry his second daughter and succeed him on the throne. But his energy was impaired, whether by age or by desire for rest. He did not reach Constantinople till 1231, two years after his election: and the Greek traditions are silent about the exploits which he is said by the Latins to have performed during a siege of the city by the forces of Vataces and the Bulgarian chief Azan. On his death began the ignominious reign of the second Baldwin, a reign of twenty-five years, most of which were spent in foreign lands for the purpose of exciting pity for his sorrows and raising alms to relieve his needs. His success was not equal to his importunities. If at the council of Lyons which excommunicated Frederick II. he was placed on the right hand of the pope, at Dover he was asked how he could presume without leave to enter an independent territory. In England he received 700 marks: at Rome the pontiff loaded him with indulgences and proclaimed a crusade in his favour. The sainted Louis of France was moved to tears of sympathy by the story of his wrongs: but his arms were directed to Egypt, not to Constantinople. Still, by alienating his marquisate of Namur and his lordship of Courtenay, he contrived to return to the East with an army of 30,000 men. But the next scene of his history exhibits him as the ally of the sultan of Iconium, on whom he bestowed his niece, and of the Comans, in whose pagan rites he did not hesitate to take part. His needs became more pressing, and he bethought him of the sacred relics which still remained in the churches of Constantinople. Of these the most precious was the crown of thorns which had circled the brow of the Redeemer, and for which he received from Louis IX. 10,000 marks of silver. At smaller prices he disposed of the baby linen used by the Virgin Mary in the cave of Bethlehem, the lance and sponge used in the Passion on Calvary, and the rod of Moses, all of which, with some others, were transferred to the exquisite chapel in Paris which still attests the munificence and perfect taste of the sainted king of France.

Meanwhile the power of Vataces was being extended on every side: and only his submission to the Roman doctrine respecting the procession of the Holy Spirit was needed to secure a papal declaration in his favour. That submission was not made; and his death brought a respite to the Latin emperor. But when Baldwin sent his envoys to see what territorial concessions could be obtained from Michael Paleologos, the colleague and guardian of John, the grandson of Vataces, they were curtly told that he would yield them not a foot of land. By the payment of an annual tribute amounting to the whole sum received from the customs and excise of Constantinople the Latin Cæsar might secure peace: if he refused these terms, he must prepare for war. The great quarrel was soon decided. Michael had bestowed the title of Cæsar on his general Alexios Strategopoulos; and by his orders this general went to keep close watch on the capital, under the pledge that he would run no dangerous risks. He failed to keep his promise, and when with a scanty band of followers he clambered over the unguarded walls, he began to tremble at his own rashness. But his volunteers (for so they were termed) would listen to no arguments for retreat. The die was cast, and the result was victory. The Greeks rose on all hands at the cry which called them to the rescue of their ancient empire; the Genoese were not unwilling to take revenge upon their Venetian enemies; and the Latin emperor with his chief vassals, embarking on board the Venetian fleet, sailed first to Euboia and thence to Italy. The capital of the Eastern empire was freed from the presence and the yoke of its Western conquerors; but for thirteen years longer Baldwin bore about with him an empty title which won for him the commiseration or the contempt of thousands who could not be brought to stir hand or foot in his service. His pretensions were maintained by his son Philip, and through his grand-daughter Catharine passed to her husband Charles of Valois, brother of Philip the Fair of France.

Next after, perhaps even before, the deliverance of the Holy Land and the restoration of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, the wish dearest to the heart of Innocent III. was the recovery of the Greek communion to the unity of the Church. He was also statesman enough to see that his wishes would best be realized by a closer union between the subjects of the Eastern and the Western empires. The death-blow to these hopes and yearnings was dealt by his own crusade. In itself, and in the events which followed it, not a single thing was lacking which could exaggerate suspicion into vehement jealousy, and intensify dislike into burning hatred. There was the merciless intolerance which regarded Christian patriarchs with their clergy and their laity as heathens because they questioned the supremacy of the pope and refused to add one word to one proposition in the Nicene creed. There was the cruelty which intruded strangers into the places of those who had taught and ministered to the people, and which suppressed a ritual hallowed by the associations of ages. There was the gross injustice which thrust Greeks out of every high, or responsible, or lucrative office, and which imposed on them a system of law utterly alien to their wishes, thoughts, and habits. There was the savage fury which had made the streets of the capital run with blood, and defiled its sanctuaries with blasphemy and massacre. Last, but perhaps not least, was the brutality which had shattered or committed to the flames all that was beautiful in art, costly in materials, exquisite in workmanship, precious from its rarity or the absolute impossibility of restoring it. The tombs of the emperors were burst open and rifled: the masterpieces of ancient sculptors were thrown down and shattered. In the Venetians alone the impulse to destroy was weaker than the temptation to theft, and the horses of Lysippos, borne across the sea to Venice, still stand above the gorgeous portals of the basilica of St. Mark. The Greeks were left with a bitter hatred of the laws, the customs, the government of Latin Christendom; and an impassable gulf remained yawning between the churches of the East and the West, which no efforts have thus far been able to close or to bridge over.

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The infatuation by which in every instance the champions of the cross had nullified or thrown away the advantages gained by their victories was to be shown not less persistently in the sixth crusade. But the short-sighted obstinacy of the mass was to be brought out in more prominent relief by its contrast with the moderation and sagacity of the great sovereign whose name is especially associated with this enterprise. In the career of this remarkable man we have a picture in which we see running together or side by side the lines which belong to the old order of things with others which seem to belong exclusively to the modern civilization of Europe. The struggle between Frederick II. and Gregory II. anticipated in more than one of its features the struggle between Leo X. and Luther.

The famine which Dandolo urged on the leaders of the fifth crusade (p. 153) as a reason for delaying their voyage to Palestine till the spring which followed the conquest of Zara, pressed less heavily on the Latin Christians in the Holy Land than the destruction wrought by an earthquake which laid many cities in ruins and which was regarded as a presage of the last judgment. In spite of this belief much money and labour was spent in repairing the shattered walls of Acre; and amongst the captives impressed for the work was, it is said, the Persian poet Saadi.

Both sides in fact were greatly weakened and depressed: and the tidings that Constantinople was in the hands of Boniface, Dandolo, and Baldwin carried with them for Saphadin a conclusive reason for concluding a peace of six years with the Christians. But before the six years had come to an end the death of Almeric and his wife had left to Mary, the daughter of Isabella and Conrad of Tyre, the titular sovereignty of Jerusalem. Unable to find on the spot a man of sufficient energy and ability to share with her the shadowy dignity, the barons invoked the aid of the French king, Philip Augustus, to find her a husband. His choice fell on John of Brienne, who promised to lead a powerful army to Palestine within two years. The prospect of this formidable increase to the strength of his enemies led Saphadin to propose a renewal of the peace, and to give as guarantees of his good faith any ten castles which they might choose to name. As we might expect, the approval of the Teutonic knights and the Hospitallers called forth the angry protests of the Templars and the clergy: and the decision was given for war.

Three hundred knights only accompanied John of Brienne when he set out for Palestine. In England the wretched John was defying the pope while the kingdom for his sake lay under the papal interdict; the French king was more anxious to turn that interdict to his own advantage than to face once more the perils of a distant enterprise; and for the time even Innocent III. felt that the chastisement of Christian heretics was a more pressing duty than the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. Hence the marriage of John of Brienne to Mary, and their coronation as king and queen of Jerusalem, were soon followed by the sterner business of war. In his encounters with Saphadin his exploits may have equalled those of Tancred; but he was compelled to write and tell the pope that the Latin kingdom was attenuated to the shadow of a shade.

His entreaties roused in the pope the old crusading spirit. Innocent revoked the indulgences which had made the crusade against the Albigenses as attractive as the crusade against the Saracens; and in his encyclical letter he declared that the Moslem power was tottering and ready to vanish away. It had lasted 666 years, the mystic number which showed it to be the Beast of the Apocalypse. A little while ago he had written to the sultan of Aleppo to thank him for his moderation to the Christians and his respect for their religion. He now demanded of Saphadin the peaceable and immediate surrender of all Palestine, as a country from which he was deriving far more of annoyance than of profit.

The crusade which Innocent now wished to set in motion was preached in France by Robert of Courcon, an Englishman whom he had made his legate. This pupil of Fulk of Neuilly had inherited all his earnestness with some portion of his eloquence; nor, if the numbers whom he enrolled as pilgrims be taken as a test, was his success much less splendid. But in truth the barons and knights who engaged in these expeditions were getting tired of the zeal which invited the maimed, the halt, the blind, and the leper to take the kingdom of heaven by violence; and the same charge which had been heard in the days of Fulk was now urged with greater force against his disciple. Robert was convicted of diverting to other purposes money given solely for the recovery of the Holy Land; but he had a firm friend in Innocent who, in 1218, appointed him the colleague of Pelagius, bishop of Albano, in his legatine commission.

A few months sufficed after the council of Clermont to get together and send forth the armies of the first crusade: for these latter enterprises the time of preparation was extending to years. In his sermons preached before the fourth council of Lateran Innocent declared his intention of accompanying the champions of the cross to the scene of their exploits; and the troubadours in their songs extolled him as their firm and courageous guide. But another year had passed before the king of a people who had done what they could to bar the way of the first crusaders was prepared to set forth on his eastward journey. The ships of Venice conveyed Andrew, king of Hungary, first to Cyprus, and thence to Palestine, where an unsuccessful attack on a tower or castle on Mount Thabor seems to have disgusted him with the undertaking. He determined to return to Hungary, and he reached home with scant glory, but rich in relics gathered in Armenia and Greece.

In the following year another force, which had been brought together at Cologne and on its way had done some work in Portugal by taking Alcazar from the Moors, joined the Templars and Teutonic knights who had fortified a post on mount Carmel. These warriors now inclined to the policy of Almeric I. which had aimed at attacking and recovering Palestine through Egypt. The siege of Damietta was begun; the castle was soon taken; and the Christians were still further aided by the disorders which in Egypt followed the death of Saphadin, and which drove his son, the Egyptian sultan Kameel, to take refuge in Arabia. In the crusaders’ camp success, as usual, produced arrogance and sloth. Their strength was increased by the arrival of new bands from France under the counts of Nevers and la Marche, from England under William Longsword, earl of Salisbury, and from Italy under the bishop of Albano and Robert of Courcon. The latter landed only to be cut off by sickness; and while the other chiefs lay idle, Kameel was brought back to his throne by his brother the Syrian sultan Coradin. At length the siege was resumed with some vigour and good fortune: and Coradin, knowing the consequences which the fall of Damietta would bring with it, dismantled the walls of Jerusalem and then offered peace to the besiegers, pledging himself to rebuild the walls which he had just thrown down, and to surrender not only the piece of the true cross but the whole of Palestine, with the exceptions of the castles of Karac and Montreal for the purpose of protecting the pilgrims for Mecca.

All that the crusaders could even hope to accomplish was thus within their grasp. But the eagerness of king John of Brienne, with the Teutonic knights and the French, to seize the prize was for the Templars and Hospitallers, with the Italians and the papal legate, a sufficient reason for rejecting the proffers of the sultan with indignant contempt. Folly carried the day. Damietta was taken, and the Christians hurried in to plunder and to slay. The pillage was abundant enough; but in the work of slaughter pestilence had been beforehand with them. Three thousand only remained, it is said, of the 70,000 who were shut up in the city at the beginning of the siege, and to these plague-stricken wretches life was promised on condition that they should clear the streets and houses of the dead bodies of their kinsfolk.

The crusades had everything once more in their hands; but the winter was allowed to pass by without further action. When spring came round the legate, in opposition to the remonstrance of John of Brienne, insisted on attempting the conquest of Egypt. On their march to Cairo they received from the Sultan Kameel the same offers which they had rejected during the siege of Damietta; and they rejected them again. But the Nile was fast rising. The Egyptians opened the sluices; the camp of the crusaders was inundated; their tents and baggage swept away. It was now the turn of the legate to sue for peace, and he offered to surrender Damietta. In the Saracen camp it was no easy task for the Sultan Kameel to repress the stern indignation with which many of the chiefs demanded the utter destruction of the enemy. He urged the vast importance of doing nothing which should excite fresh crusades in Europe, while Syria was menaced and ravaged by Tartar invasions, and of recovering Damietta without a blow from a garrison strong enough to sustain a siege as long as that which had come to an end a few months ago.

The triumph of the Egyptian sultan seemed to be complete; but he had now to encounter an enemy of a very different temper. At the age of eighteen Frederick, the son of the infamous Henry VI. and grandson of Frederick Barbarossa, had been summoned by the pope to assume the imperial crown which Otho of Brunswick, the son of Henry the Lion, was pronounced to have forfeited by his misdeeds. It was the old story. The strife between pope and anti-pope was but a reflection of the almost fiercer strife of rival emperors; and in this struggle the pope naturally inclined to that side from which the church was likely to reap the most advantage. Otho, the nephew of Richard Cœur de Lion, came of a house which had been generally loyal and faithful to the Roman pontiffs; his rival belonged to the Swabian house of Hohenstaufen, at whose hands the popes had experienced more of enmity than of friendship. The remembrance of the days of Frederick Barbarossa was vivid in the mind of Innocent III., to whom the two emperors appealed after their coronation. The deliberation was grave and long; but the issue was not doubtful. Otho’s rival Philip was ‘an obstinate persecutor of the Church’, and he was even then scheming to deprive the pontiff of his kingdom of Sicily. He must be put down before he could reach his full strength; and therefore the pope declared himself for Otho, himself devoted to the Church, by his mother’s side from the royal house of England, by his father from the duke of Saxony, all loyal sons of the Church. ‘Him, therefore, we proclaim king; him we summon to take on himself the imperial crown.’ Innocent, like the frogs in the fable, was only exchanging king Log for king Stork. The reign of Otho was a period of desperate strife and anarchy in Germany, of desperate struggles on his part to throw off the papal yoke. The pope turned his eye on the youthful Frederick, then basking in the sunshine of his Sicilian paradise and giving promise of the brilliant qualities of his nature which were afterwards to be sullied by darker lines of angry passion. In 1212 Frederick was chosen emperor at Frankfort. In 1214 his victory at Bouvines shattered the power of Otho. The gratitude of Frederick for the favour of the pope had been shown by taking the crusader’s vow and pledging himself to lead an army for the recovery of the Holy Land. While his rival Otho lived, it was impossible for him to fulfil his promise. Two years before his death Innocent III. had passed away from the scene of proud dominion and unceasing toil, and the more moderate and kindly Honorius III. sat in his seat. In courteous language which might pass for that of friendship, the pope besought him to march to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre; but the dark shadows were already stealing across the clear sky. Without asking the sanction of the pope Frederick by a compact made with his vassals and prelates at the Diet of Frankfort procured the election of his son Henry to the crown of Germany. Honorius expressed his displeasure at a step which seemed designed to unite permanently the Sicilian kingdom with the empire. Frederick hastened to say that he had no such wish, and that Sicily should revert to the pope if he should die without lawful heirs. When, a little while later, he was crowned with his queen by the pope in the church of St. Peter’s, Frederick promised that part of his army should be ready for the crusade in March of the following year, while he himself would follow in August with the rest.

But Frederick had enough, and more than enough, to do in dealing with the turbulent barons of Apulia and in guarding against Saracen insurrection in Sicily. A fleet of forty ships was sent to no purpose: and the tidings of the loss of Damietta were construed as an expression of divine displeasure for his slackness. It was clear that only a vast army under a skilful general could turn the scale in favour of the Latin Christians of Palestine: but nothing was said of the besotted folly which had more than once flung aside all the advantages which could possibly be gained by the most successful crusade. Such an army could not, however, be got together in a month or in a year. The decision was postponed from a meeting at Veroli to a meeting at Verona which never took place. When next the pope and emperor met at Ferentino (March 1223), it was agreed that two years more should be spent in preparations, and that Frederick, now a widower, should marry Iolante, the daughter of the titular king of Jerusalem, and thus as his heir go forth to the maintenance of his own rights. King John of Brienne, who was present at the debate, started at once on a mission in which he hoped to achieve a success not unlike that of the hermit Peter, of Bernard, or Fulk of Neuilly. But the times were changed, and king John could only report to the pope the impossibility of moving at the time named in the treaty of Ferentino. A new agreement was made at San Germano, postponing the departure of the army for two years longer. Four months later Frederick married Iolante, and proceeded at once to deprive his father-in-law of his shadowy royalty. John of Brienne, he insisted, was king only by right of his wife: by her death the title had passed to his daughter, and to him as her husband, and he, Frederick, was thus king of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem. John was furious, but he could revenge himself only by accusations, whether true or false, of gross and habitual profligacy on the part of the young emperor.

‘Never did pope love emperor as he loved his son Frederick.’ Such were the words of Honorius when he parted from him after his coronation at Rome. Before the close of his pontificate in 1227 the gentle pontiff had to address not a few stern remonstrances to his loving son. The real struggle was reserved for the papacy of the cardinal Ugolino, a kinsman of Innocent III., who assumed the triple crown at the age of eighty years. To an eloquence unrivalled in his own day, to a profound knowledge of the canon law and the decretals, Gregory IX. united the monastic severity of Gregory the Great and the inexorable will of Gregory VII. The sovereign with whom he had to deal was still a young man of only thirty-three, a young man with whose wishes and dreams, with whose tastes and accomplishments, Gregory had nothing whatever in common. Frederick had been born and bred in Sicily; and in the voluptuous splendours of that beautiful island, in the luxury of its sunshine, in the gorgeous profusion and glory of its vegetation, his youth passed in a passion of delight, fed by the charms of music, poetry, painting, and a rich literature which laid at his feet the treasures of ancient knowledge. From the lays of the troubadour and the company of noble knights and fair women, Frederick could turn to men learned in the lore of the East and in the philosophy of Alexandria and Athens. His life was far from faultless. With more truth it may be described as one of license which cast to the winds, at least for himself, the moral code of priests and monks, but a license to which all grossness and coarse rioting, all unrefined and boorish vices, were altogether abhorrent. Here in his southern paradise Frederick could say, with a freedom horrifying to the sacerdotal spirit of the age, that if God had seen his beautiful home he would never have chosen the barren land of Judæa for the abode of his own people. Here too he was subjected to influences which were likely to cultivate a temper far more disliked and dreaded by popes and their followers than irreverence or even blasphemous profanity. Around him were gathered populations brought from many lands, all softened by the genial and delicious climate. The Norman had here laid aside some of his northern roughness, and become an apt disciple of the gay science in which Frederick had won a foremost place. Even the Germans were toned down to something like decency of demeanour and language: and in contrast to these were numbers of Jews, who surpassed the Christians as much in refinement and learning as in their wealth, and of Saracens not less polished, not less cultivated, who delighted to call themselves subjects of Frederick and to submit themselves peaceably to his rule. Frederick was, in short, learning the dangerous lessons of toleration, and his eyes were being gradually opened to the perilous views which have become the orthodox creed of modern statesmen. As a ruler, he could survey without dislike the mingling of different religions, and see that an empire surpassing the wildest dreams of feudal grandeur could be achieved by the extension and freedom of a commerce spread over all portions of the earth. As a man of learning he could promote the cultivation of a philosophy which, whatever might be its merit, could not fail to set the mind working and accustom it to regard all questions as matters to be settled by reason and evidence, not by authority. A picture more repulsive to the mind of a man like Gregory IX. cannot well be imagined. The light-hearted enjoyment and the liberal government of the one were hopelessly opposed to the monastic gloom and ingrained despotism of the other.

Frederick may have been slow in fulfilling his promise: there is no evidence that he ever deliberately intended to break it. But he had no intention of wading through a sea of blood if he could obtain his ends without striking a blow. He had already had some friendly intercourse with the Egyptian sultan: and from these relations he was hereafter to reap good fruit. For the present they served only to excite the anger of Gregory, whose patience was exhausted when at length Frederick gathered his forces at Brundusium (Brindisi) only to see them decimated by fever, and when he himself, having set out with his fleet, was compelled to return after three days to the harbour of Otranto. On St. Michael’s day the pope excommunicated Frederick with bell, book, and candle. In his discourse to the Apulian bishops, the subjects of Frederick, he spoke of the tender care with which the Church had nursed him in his infancy and childhood in order that he might fight the serpents and basilisks whom she had unwittingly fostered in her bosom. She had borne him on her shoulders; she had rescued him from those who would have slain him; she had hoped to find in him a protecting staff and support. These hopes had been cheated. Frederick had purposely exposed his army at Brundusium to pestilence, and after pretending to set off on his voyage for Palestine had returned under a false plea of illness to the luxuries of the baths of Puteoli. On St. Martin’s day and again on Christmas day the excommunication was repeated with all its appalling ceremonies. The sentence was by the pope’s orders to lie published in all churches of his obedience. By one of the clergy of Paris, who professed to know merely the fact of the quarrel and nothing of the merits of the case, it was published as a sentence of condemnation against the one who might be in the wrong. ‘I excommunicate the aggressor, and I absolve the sufferer.’ Frederick appealed not to the pope, but to the sovereigns of Christendom. His illness had been real, the accusations of the pope wanton and cruel. ‘The Christian charity which should hold all things together is dried up at its source, in its stem, not in its branches. What had the pope done in England but stir up the barons against John, and then abandon them to death or ruin? The whole world paid tribute to his avarice. His legates were everywhere, gathering where they had not sown, and reaping where they had not strawed.’ But although he thus dealt in language as furious as that of the pope, the thought of breaking definitely with him and of casting aside his crusading vow as a worthless mockery never seems to have entered his mind. He undertook to bring his armies together again with all speed, and to set off on his expedition. His promise only brought him into fresh trouble with the pope, who in the Holy Week next following laid under interdict every place in which Frederick might happen to be. If this censure should be treated with contempt, his subjects were at once absolved from their allegiance. The emperor went on steadily with his preparations, and then went to Brundusium. He was met by papal messengers who strictly forbade him to leave Italy until he had offered satisfaction for his offences against the Church. In his turn Frederick, having sailed to Otranto, sent his own envoys to the pope to demand the removal of the interdict; and these, of course, were dismissed with contempt.

In September the emperor landed at Ptolemais; but the emissaries of the pope had preceded him, and he found himself under the ban of the clergy and shunned by their partisans. The patriarch and the masters of the military orders were to see that none served under his polluted banners. The charge was given to willing servants: but Frederick found friends in the Teutonic knights under their grand-master Herman of Salza, as well as with the body of pilgrims generally. He determined to possess himself of Joppa, and summoned all the crusaders to his aid. The Templars refused to stir, if any orders were to be issued in his name; and Frederick agreed that they should run in the name of God and Christendom. But while the enemy was aided greatly by the divisions among the Christians, the death of the Damascene sultan Moadhin was of little use to Frederick. The Egyptian sultan Kameel was now in a position of greater independence, and his eagerness for an alliance with the emperor had rapidly cooled down. Frederick on his side still resolved to try the effect of negotiation. His demands extended at first, it is said, to the complete restoration of the Latin kingdom, and ended, if we are to believe Arabian chroniclers, in almost abject supplications. At length the treaty was signed. It surrendered to the emperor the whole of Jerusalem except the Temple or mosque of Omar, the keys of which were to be retained by the Saracens; but Christians under certain conditions might be allowed to enter it for the purpose of prayer. It further restored to the Christians the towns of Jaffa, Bethlehem, and Nazareth.

To Frederick the conclusion of this treaty was a reason for legitimate satisfaction. It enabled him to hasten back to his own dominions, where a papal army was ravaging Apulia and threatening Sicily. One task only remained for him in the East. He must pay his vows at the Holy Sepulchre. But here also the hand of the pope lay heavy upon him. Not merely Jerusalem but the Sepulchre itself passed under the interdict as he entered the gates of the city, and the infidel Moslem saw the churches closed and all worship suspended at the approach of the Christian emperor. On Sunday, in his imperial robes, and attended by a magnificent retinue, Frederick went to his coronation as king of Jerusalem in the church of the Sepulchre. Not a single ecclesiastic was there to take part in the ceremony. The archbishops of Capua and Palermo stood aloof, while Frederick, taking the crown from the high altar, placed it on his head. By his orders his friend Herman of Salza read an address in which the emperor acquitted the pope for his hard judgment of him and for his excommunication, and added that a real knowledge of the facts would have led him to speak not against him, but in his favour. He confessed his desire to put to shame the false friends of Christ, his accusers and slanderers, by the restoration of peace and unity, and to humble himself before God and before his Vicar upon earth.

From the Saracens he won golden opinions. The kadi silenced a muezzin who had to proclaim the hour of prayer from a minaret near the house in which the emperor lodged, because he added to his call the question, ‘How is it possible that God had for his son Jesus the son of Mary?’ Frederick marked the silence of the crier when the hour of prayer came round. On learning the cause he rebuked the kadi for neglecting on his account his duty and his religion, and warned him that if he should visit him in his kingdom he would find no such ill-judged deference. He showed no dissatisfaction, it is said, with the inscription which declared that Saladin had purified the city from those who worshipped many gods, or any displeasure when the Mahomedans in his train fell on their knees at the times for prayer. His thoughts about the Christians were shown, it was supposed, when, seeing the windows of the Holy Chapel barred to keep out the birds which might defile it, he asked, ‘You may keep out the birds; but how will you keep out the swine?’

In glowing terms Frederick wrote to the sovereigns of Europe, announcing the splendid success which he had achieved rather by the pen than by the sword. He scarcely knew what a rock of offence he had raised up amongst Christian and Moslem alike. By a few words on a sheet of parchment the Christian emperor had deprived his people of the hope of getting their sins forgiven by murdering unbelievers: by the same words the Moslem sultan had prevented his subjects from ensuring an entrance to the delights of paradise by the slaughter of the Nazarenes. From Gerold, patriarch of Jerusalem, a letter went to the pope, full of virulent abuse of the emperor as a traitor, an apostate, and a robber; but even before he received this letter Gregory had condemned what he chose to consider as a monstrous attempt to reconcile Christ and Belial, and to set up Mahomed as an object of worship in the temple of God. ‘The antagonist of the cross,’ he wrote, ‘the enemy of the faith and of all chastity, the wretch doomed to hell, is lifted up for adoration, by a perverse judgment, and by an intolerable insult to the Saviour, to the lasting disgrace of the Christian name and the contempt of all the martyrs who have laid down their lives to purify the Holy Land from the defilements of the Saracens.’

But Frederick in his turn could be firm and unyielding. He returned from Jerusalem to Joppa, from Joppa to Ptolemais; and there learning that a proposal had been made to establish a new order of knights, he declared that no one should without his consent levy soldiers within his dominion. Summoning all the Christians within the city to the broad plain without the gates, he spoke his mind freely about the conduct of the patriarch and the Templars, with all who aided and abetted them, and insisted that all the pilgrims, having now paid their vows, should return at once to Europe. On this point he was inexorable. His archers took possession of the churches; two friars who denounced him from the pulpit were scourged through the streets; the patriarch was shut up in his palace; and the commands of the emperor were carried out. Frederick returned to Europe, to find that the pope had been stirring up Albert of Austria to rebel against him, and that the papal forces were in command of John of Brienne, who may have been the author of the false news of Frederick’s death, and who certainly proclaimed himself as the only emperor. To the pope Frederick sent his envoys, Herman of Salza at their head. They were dismissed with contempt; and their master was again placed under the greater excommunication with the Albigensians, the Poor Men of Lyons, the Arnoldists, and other heretics who in the eyes of the faithful were the worst enemies of the Christian church. Such was the reward of the man who had done more towards the re-establishment of the Latin kingdom in Palestine than had been done by the lion-hearted Richard, and who, it may fairly be said, had done it without shedding a drop of blood.

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The number of the crusades might be largely extended if we gave the name to all the minor expeditions to the Holy Land in the intervals between the greater enterprises to which the term has been commonly applied. Yet the expedition led by Richard, earl of Cornwall, king of the Romans and brother of Henry III. of England, as being scarcely less remarkable than that of Frederick II., and for the same reason, may fairly be reckoned as the seventh of these extravagant and ill-starred enterprises.

Time had softened in some degree the spirit which had animated the first crusaders; but in the events which follow the return of Frederick we see something like an honest reaction against the diversion to other purposes of money contributed for the deliverance of Palestine. These diversions had become so frequent that the papal collectors regarded it as an annoyance or an insult if any refused to commute by money payments their engagements as crusaders.

The peace which the Egyptian sultan Kameel had made with Frederick was little more than a truce. It was to last for ten years; but even during that term the compact was kept with no rigid strictness perhaps on either side. Thousands of Christians were slain, it is said, on their passage from Acre to Jerusalem, and envoys were sent to Gregory IX. and to Frederick, with whom he had been reconciled at Anagni, to entreat the equipment of another crusade. The crusade was enjoined, accordingly, but, as it seemed, with little sincerity; and when the French barons, headed by Theobald, count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Hugh, duke of Burgundy, met in council at Lyons, they were commanded by the papal legate to adjourn their discussions and to return home. The request was peremptorily refused; but when their plans seemed to be in all respects matured, the ambassadors of Frederick himself besought them to wait until he could give them effectual help. Even to this appeal they turned a deaf ear: and although Frederick charged his officers to withhold all aid from the crusaders, these barons still insisted on carrying out their design and found their way to Acre. Before they reached it, Kameel had seized Jerusalem and dismantled the tower of David; and the crusaders had before them a task not less arduous than that which Godfrey of Bouillon and his followers had to encounter. Their failure was complete; it can scarcely be said that they even attempted to grapple with it.

The English crusade which under Richard of Cornwall and William Longsword (son of the earl of Salisbury, but not earl of Salisbury himself) embarked at Dover for France, and having journeyed across France set sail from Marseilles in spite of a papal prohibition, was followed by results far more solid. On reaching Acre, they found the affairs both of Christians and Moslems in a state of strange confusion through treaties which neither side was able strictly to carry out. But the quarrel which had broken out afresh between the sultans of Egypt and Damascus told greatly in their favor. The march of Richard to Jaffa led to negotiations, and by the treaty which followed them the Egyptian sultan granted him terms even more favourable than those which had been conceded to Frederick II.

Palestine was once more virtually in the hands of the Christians, and in their hands it virtually remained, until, two years later, the Latin kingdom was again swept away by a foe more merciless than any which the crusaders had yet encountered. The brutal hordes, which Genghis Khan had set in motion from the remote wilds of Tartary, drove out from the Korasmian territories myriads of myriads scarcely less brutal than themselves. The fugitive Korasmians burst into Palestine. Jerusalem was deserted by its garrison, and the savages hastened to glut themselves with blood. The living were cut down, the dead torn from their graves, and thousands of pilgrims, decoyed back to the city by the display of crusading banners from the walls, furnished fresh victims for the awful sacrifice. In this desperate strait the Templars made common cause with the Syrians. A battle was fought in which the grand-masters of the Templars and Hospitallers were slain, the only survivors being thirty-three Templars, sixteen Hospitallers, and three Teutonic knights. The Korasmians were for the present in league with the Egyptian sovereign; but this harmony was soon followed by enmity. The Korasmians were defeated and scattered, and the tempest of barbarian invasion came to an end.

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The havoc wrought by the Korasmian inroad was alleged by pope Innocent IV. as a reason for sending forth another crusade. In a council held at Lyons, the bishop of Berytos dwelt on the miserable state of the Christians in the Holy Land, and it was resolved that another effort should be made for its deliverance. Honorius wrote to Henry III. of England to impress upon him the duty of taking up the cross like his lion-hearted predecessor; but Henry had in Simon of Montfort, earl of Leicester, a more pressing antagonist than Egyptian sultans or Korasmian savages. The pope found fuel more easily kindled in the heart of Louis IX., king of France.

This saint, the very type of royal monks and devotees, was ten years old when on the death of his father Louis VIII. he succeeded to the throne. By his mother, Blanche of Castile, the regent of the kingdom, the child was brought up with a strictness to which he answered with unbounded docility. In his early youth the beauty of some fair maidens drew from him a glance expressive of some admiration: his mother told him that she would rather see him dead than that he should entertain even a sinful thought. His own will would have led him to assume the obligations of the cloister; but the interests of the state demanded his marriage, and his wife, Margaret of Provence, passed with her husband under the rigid discipline of the queen-mother. His severity to himself grew with his years. At night he would rise from his bed and pace his chamber in the coldest season. A shift of the coarsest haircloth worn next to his skin furnished a desirable torture. Fruit he tasted only once in the year. On Fridays he never changed his dress, and never laughed. The iron chain scourges which he carried at his waist in an ivory case drew blood from his shoulders once every week of the year and thrice in every week during Lent. He would walk for miles to distant churches wearing shoes without soles. He would scarcely content himself with two, three, and even four masses a day; and if he made a journey, his chaplain recited the offices on the road. Even monks tried to check an asceticism almost exceeding that which was demanded by the rules of Benedict, Dominic, or Francis; the king asked whether he would have incurred the same rebuke had he spent twice as much time in hawking and dicing. No reproach, no sarcasm, no insult, could disturb the serenity of his humble soul. ‘You are not a king of France,’ exclaimed a woman who was pleading her cause before him; ‘you are a king only of priests and monks. It is a pity that you are king of France. You ought to be turned out.’ ‘You speak truly,’ answered Louis. ‘It has pleased God to make me king: it had been well had He chosen some one better able to govern this kingdom rightly.’ The woman was sent away with a gift of money: and money was a thing on which the king set little store, and which he seldom needed except for the purchase of relics. Here his avarice was unbounded; and we have seen him paying the enormous sum of 10,000 silver marks for the ‘genuine crown of thorns’ preserved in the church of Sancta Sophia (p. 173). To such a man absolute obedience and implicit trust not only in God but in every article or proposition set forth as forming part of the Christian faith were the first, the most indispensable of all virtues. Not one point in all the theology of the Church was to be called into question; there was not one which was not to be received as absolutely true. ‘Do you know the name of your father?’ he asked his seneschal, the lord of Joinville, who accompanied him to Palestine, and whose inimitable memoirs bring the man and his age before us in living reality. ‘Yes,’ answered the seneschal; ‘his name was Simon.’ ‘How do you know that?’ again asked Louis. ‘Because my mother has told me so many times.’ ‘Then,’ answered the king, ‘you ought perfectly to believe the articles of the faith which the apostles of our Lord have testified to you, as you have heard the Credo chanted every Sunday.’ For questioning and argument his system had no place. Under no circumstances could there ever be need of any. He related to Joinville with hearty approval the conduct of a knight, who, during a disputation between some Jews and the monks of the abbey of Clugny, asked leave of the abbot to say a few words. With some difficulty his request was granted. Raising himself on his crutches, the old warrior beckoned the rabbi to draw near, and then put to him one question. ‘Do you believe in the Virgin Mary, who bore our Saviour Jesus Christ, and that she was a virgin when she was the mother of God?’ The Jew answered promptly that he believed not one word of it. ‘Fool that thou art,’ replied the knight, ‘for daring to enter a Christian monastery when thou disbelievest these things. For this madness thou shalt now pay.’ Lifting up his crutch, he struck the man a blow on the ear which smote him to the ground. His comrades fled away from the scene of controversy, while the abbot came forward to reprove the knight for his folly. ‘Thou art the greater fool,’ was the retort, ‘in permitting an assembly from which good Christians might by listening to their arguments have gone away unbelievers.’ The king, Joinville tells us, clinched the moral of the story in the following words: ‘No one, however learned or perfect a theologian he may be, ought to dispute with Jews. The layman, whenever he hears the Christian faith impugned, should defend it with a sharp-edged sword which he should drive up to the hilt into the bodies of the unbelievers.’

We cannot really know the history of an age, if we do not really know some at least of the men who lived in it: and this fact gives in the case of Louis IX. an importance to details which we might be tempted to pass with a sigh, perhaps, or a smile. ‘Do you wash the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday?’ he asked the lord of Joinville. ‘Oh, fie!’ was the answer; ‘no, never will I wash the feet of such fellows.’ ‘It is ill said, indeed,’ answered the king, ‘for you should never hold in disdain what God did for our instruction; for He who is Lord and Master of the universe did on that day, Holy Thursday, wash the feet of all His apostles, telling them that He who was their Master had thus done, that they in like manner might do the same to each other. I therefore beg of you, out of love to Him first, and then from regard to me, that you will accustom yourself to do so.’ Another sermon, the gentleness of which makes us forget its tedious prosing, rebuked Joinville’s impetuosity in saying that he would rather have committed thirty deadly sins than be a leper. Louis was, in short, a man who would have loved all men, had he not been taught to believe that unbelief, heresy, or even doubt (honest doubt was for him, of course, a thing inconceivable), put the unbeliever or doubter beyond the pale of Christian charity. For Jews, then, or infidels he avowed the most burning hatred, although probably this hatred would have vanished like morning mist before the sight of Jew or infidel in dire distress or agony. But in spite of his bigotry and narrowness, his stern asceticism, his incessant sermonizing, there was in him a depth of sweetness and gentleness, a genuine goodness of heart and life, which won for him the love of thousands who made little attempt to follow his example. In an age infamous for its foulness of speech and the profanity of its oaths the purity of his language was never tarnished. In his quaint phrases Joinville says of him, ‘I never heard him, at any time, utter an indecent word nor make use of the devil’s name, which is now very commonly uttered by every one—a practice which, I firmly believe, far from being agreeable to God, is highly displeasing to Him.’ Nay, more, these qualities were in him combined with a sound sense and a firmness of will which made him in all cases of right and duty hard as adamant, and effectually crushed the contempt which some might have been tempted to feel for his superstitions. He could bear rebuke patiently: but they who thought that they might take advantage of his devotion to encroach on his rights as king or even on the rights of his neighbours found themselves speedily undeceived. When Gregory IX., after his second and final rupture with Frederick II., deposed him from his imperial throne and offered the dignity to Louis’s brother Robert, the meek and gentle king replied to the pope in the following words:—Whence is this pride and daring of the pope, which thus disinherits a king who has no superior, nor even an equal, among Christians,—a king not convicted of the crimes laid to his charge? Even if these crimes were proved, no power could depose him but that of a general council. On his transgressions the judgment of his enemies is of no weight, and his deadliest enemy is the pope. To us he has not only thus far appeared guiltless, he has been a good neighbour: we see no cause for suspicion either of his worldly loyalty or of his Catholic faith. This we know, that he has fought valiantly for our Lord Jesus Christ both by sea and land. So much religion we have not found in the pope, who endeavoured to confound and wickedly supplant him in his absence, while he was engaged in the cause of God.

In this cause, as interpreted by the religion of the time, this guiltless but stout-hearted champion of justice and right was now to peril limb and life without a shade of fear and with as complete a lack of every quality needed in a general and leader of armies. A more thorough contrast to Frederick whom he thus valiantly defended it would be impossible to imagine. To him the learning, the grace, the refinement of heathen philosophers and poets, the music and the songs of all poets of all ages, were beyond expression horrible. Of an intercommunion of nations founded on commerce, learning, and art, he could have not the faintest notion. To the best of his power he would administer justice in his own land so long as he remained in it; when his duty as a champion of the cross called him elsewhere, he would leave it with fifty thousand men in his train, having formed no military plans, but under a profound conviction that God whom he sought to serve would fight his battles, and that, if it should not be so, the result would be due only to his own sins and sinfulness. To the remonstrances of his mother, who sought to dissuade him from the enterprise, his ear was utterly deaf. He was seized with illness: life seemed to be gone; an attendant, thinking that it had gone, drew a covering over his face. It was withdrawn by another, and the king was heard to say, ‘God has raised me from the dead: give me the cross.’ The die was cast. Nine months later, he assumed the badge publicly in the parliament of Paris; and at Christmas in the same year he distributed to his courtiers his usual gift of a new robe to each. By his orders a red cross had been embroidered on these garments between the shoulders, and the nobles owned themselves fairly entrapped. They must accompany the king.

Two years more were spent in preparations. On the 12th of June 1248 Louis received from the papal legate at the abbey of St. Denis his purse and pilgrim’s staff with the Oriflamme or sacred banner of the saint. At the end of August he sailed from France. Eight months were spent in Cyprus, where his people were fed in great part by the emperor Frederick. The kindness called forth a warm letter to the pope, pleading for the absolution of a man who had thus befriended the soldiers of the cross. His letter was treated with contempt. In the spring of the next year he sailed for Egypt; and as soon as his fleet was off Damietta, his envoys hastened to the sultan with alarming pictures of their master’s power, and with a summons for immediate submission. The sultan replied that his cause was just; that those who made war without just cause should perish; and that mighty armaments had often been destroyed by a handful of soldiers.

The campaign began with a signal success. The garrison of Damietta, struck with something like panic fear, fled at the sight of the fifty thousand crusaders landing in the pomp of military parade. The place was taken; but the people had hurried away to Cairo, having first set fire to that quarter of the city in which they had stored their merchandise and their most valuable property. This victory had its usual result on the crusaders. The tenor of Louis’s saintly life was unbroken; but within a stone’s throw of his tent his people were indulging in unbounded debauchery.

Later in the season an addition to their force was made by 200 English knights under William Longsword (p. 194) now bishop of Salisbury; and in November the army began its march towards Cairo. Their progress, never easy, owing to the assaults of the enemy, was effectually checked at the canal of Ashmoun. The causeways which they attempted to construct were destroyed, and their machines burnt with Greek fire. At length a Bedoween, for a large bribe, showed them a ford. The passage was effected, and the enemy fled before them on the other side. With good order and discipline the crusaders might now have achieved some solid success. But the count of Artois, brother of the king, could not wait to be joined by the main army. He must press on at once against the fugitives. In vain the grand-master of the Templars reminded him of the folly of trusting to a feeling of passing fear. The count deliberately imputed his advice to systematic treachery. ‘Do you suppose,’ replied the Templar with calm dignity, ‘that we have left our homes and our substance, and taken the religious habit in a strange land, only to betray the cause of God and to forfeit our salvation?’ The bishop of Salisbury offered his mediation: it was rejected with a biting insult. In thorough disorder the crusaders rushed into Mansourah; and seeing their condition at a glance the Mamelukes rushed upon their prey. A sufficient force was sent to cut off all communication between the men with the count of Artois and the main army under the king. Boiling water, stones, blazing wood, were hurled upon them from the houses. The count of Artois was killed before he could see the full effects of his folly; and his death was soon followed by that of William Longsword. The utter destruction of his force was prevented only by succour from the king who, feeble though he may have been as a general, showed in the hour of danger a dauntless and unselfish bravery. Both sides had suffered fearfully; but the king was cut off from Damietta, and sickness of a singularly malignant kind began to waste his camp. Louis offered the enemy a treaty based on the exchange of Damietta for the lordship of Jerusalem. The negotiation failed, and retreat became inevitable; but at the river and before the canal they had to fight at desperate disadvantage. The courage of the king was unbroken; but his strength was gone. He sank down in a state of exhaustion after exertions worthy of the English Richard, and awoke to find himself a prisoner. Some there were, says Joinville, to whom the idea of retreat was intolerable; and the thought of the age is vividly marked in the story which tells us how James du Chastel, bishop of Soissons, preferred to live with God to returning to the land of his birth, how he made a charge on the Turks, as if he alone meant to fight their whole army, and how they soon sent him to God and placed him in the company of martyrs by forthwith cutting him down.

The crusade seemed to be closing in hopeless disaster. The queen at Damietta was about to become a mother, when she heard the tidings of her husband’s captivity. A premature birth followed. She called her babe Tristan, the child of sorrow. Louis himself had to undergo greater misery. Of 10,000 Christian prisoners in Mansourah those only who embraced the faith of Islam were allowed to live. Some recanted, and Louis had the bitterness of witnessing their apostasy: the vast majority stood firm, and he had the agony of seeing them die. But at no time was he known to exhibit a more unclouded trust in God, a more cool bravery towards his enemy. Peace was offered to him if he would surrender all the Christian fortresses in Syria. He answered that they were not his to surrender, and that he could not dispose of that which belonged to Frederick II. as king of Jerusalem. He was threatened with torture to his limbs, with the degradation of being carried from city to city and exposed for the gratification of sight-seers. He replied quietly, ‘I am your prisoner. You may do with me as you will.’ At last it was arranged that Damietta should be given up, that the king should pay one million byzants for his own ransom, and half a million French livres for his barons. He demurred to the amount for himself, but agreed at once to the other. ‘The king of France,’ he said, ‘must not haggle about the freedom of his subjects.’ Not to be outdone by his unselfishness, the sultan Turan Shah struck off one fifth from his ransom.

It was almost the last act of the sultan’s life. His murder heightened the dangers of the Christian captives; the firmness of Louis in refusing to take an oath couched in what he pronounced to be blasphemous language increased them still more. The difficulty was at length got over; and after enduring sufferings for which the Saracens said (if we may believe Joinville) that if they had had to undergo them they would have renounced Mahomed, the king was free.

Still Louis, with the bare relics of his army, could not bring himself to return home. He had written again and again to urge on Henry of England the duty of coming himself with instant and effectual succour; he could not think that Henry would disregard his entreaties, especially when these were backed by offers of the surrender of Normandy. He still fancied that the Vicar of Christ himself, having made up his long quarrel with Frederick, would hasten to join his faithful children and lead them in a supreme effort which could not fail of success. He was abandoned by his brothers the counts of Anjou and Poitou; but with his faithful seneschal he made a pilgrimage in sackcloth to Nazareth. The sight of the Holy Sepulchre, the dearest longing of his heart, he firmly denied himself. The permission to visit it was freely offered by the sultan of Damascus: but Louis would not leave behind for future sovereigns a precedent by which they might reap the fruits of an enterprise in which they had failed. He returned to Europe like Richard of England, humbled but not dishonoured;—rather, to speak more strictly, having won that serene renown which was soon to place his name in the long catalogue of the saints.

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Throughout the history of the crusades the wisdom of the general or the statesman is conspicuous by its absence; and we may fairly compare the long series of these wild enterprises with the erratic course and fitful splendour of a comet which at the moment of its greatest brilliancy rushes off into an ocean of darkness. They carried with them, as we have seen (p. 107), not one of the elements of permanent success, while they lasted long enough to impoverish myriads and carry misery and grief to the homes of millions. But the qualities which had won for the earlier crusaders whatever renown they may have acquired, were exhibited in full measure to the end. Their absolute fearlessness, their firm persistence in the faith which alone they could allow to be true, their heroic endurance of the suffering which in hours of triumph they seldom hesitated to inflict on others, are beyond question; but all these are virtues which apart from the sagacity of the wise ruler may be brilliant but must be eminently useless.

This wisdom the Latin Christians of Palestine were destined never to learn. Disunion ran perpetually into quarrels,—quarrel sometimes into open warfare. Between the Venetians and the men of Pisa and Genoa there was but at best but a hollow truce. The side which the Templars might take in a dispute was not that which would be taken by the Hospitallers or the Teutonic knights; and the schism of the two former of these orders led in 1259 to a pitched battle from which scarcely a Templar escaped alive. From slaughtering each other the champions of the cross passed to the slaughter-houses of Saracen executioners. The savage warriors of the Mameluke sultan Bibars seized Nazareth and Acre, torturing to death those who had not been happy enough to fall on the battle-field. Ninety Hospitallers held the fortress of Azotus! the last of them died when at length their enemies stormed the walls. The castle of Saphouri was surrendered by the Templars on the condition that the garrison, numbering 600 men in all, should be safely conveyed to the next Christian town. The sultan flung the treaty to the winds, and gave them a few hours to make their choice between death and apostasy. The prior and two Franciscan monks besought their companions to stand fast in their faith; and when the sultan demanded their answer, not a man shrunk from the penalty of refusal. All were slaughtered, the prior with the two monks being flayed alive.

At length the tidings reached Europe that Bohemond VI. had been driven from Antioch and that his city had passed into the hands of the unbelievers. The saintly Louis still yearned for the rescue of the holy places; but the memory of his past disasters led him to fear that his sinfulness or his bad generalship might again bring disgrace on the Christian arms. His diffidence called forth the encouragement of pope Clement IV., who with greater importunity urged Henry III. of England to do his duty by taking the cross. Three years had passed since the fatal defeat of Simon of Montfort, earl of Leicester, at Evesham: but the country, although not in actual war, was by no means in a state of repose, and we might wonder why at such a time the prince who was afterwards to reign as Edward I. should pledge himself to the new crusade, were it not clear that the enterprise was one which might be used for the purpose of drawing away from England men who might be troublesome or dangerous to his father or to himself. Edward took good care that the earl of Gloucester whom he feared the most should share his perils, if not his glory, in the East.

With sixty thousand men, Louis IX., accompanied by the counts of Flanders, Brittany, Champagne, and other barons, left France to return to it no more. A storm drove the fleet to Sardinia; and there it was decided that the crusaders should in the first instance go to Tunis. Charles of Anjou, the sovereign of Sicily, was anxious to maintain the rights of Christendom by exacting a tribute paid formerly to his predecessors: the devout Louis remembered, it is said, the messages by which the king of Tunis had expressed his wish to embrace Christianity, and thought that the presence of a large army would give him courage to make open confession of the true faith. The army landed and had encamped, we are told, on the site of Carthage, when a plague broke out, and amongst its crowd of victims struck the king. His whole life had been a prayer: it remained to the last a prayer for others rather than for himself. With serene submission to the divine counsels he stretched himself on his couch of ashes, and as he uttered the words, ‘I will enter Thy house, O Lord, I will worship in Thy sanctuary,’ he died.

When the English Edward at last arrived in the camp, he saw that the idea of reaching Palestine before the winter was impracticable, and made up his mind to return to Sicily until the spring. When at length he reached Acre, he found that his name carried with it much of the terror associated with that of Richard Plantagenet. The Christians hastened to his standard, and with 7,000 men he attacked and took Nazareth, slaying the people with a massacre as pitiless as any which had sullied the chronicles of the crusades. It was his first and his last victory in Palestine. His campaign was cut short by sickness, and the dagger of an assassin sent by the emir of Joppa as a bearer of letters touching his conversion to Christianity well nigh cut short his life. Edward hurled the murderer to the floor and stabbed him to the heart. But the dagger was undoubtedly poisoned; and it needed more than ordinary skill on the part of the surgeons to arrest the progress of the venom. The sides of the wound were carefully pared away; and the strength of youth with the tender nursing of his wife Eleanor did the rest. The romancers of a later age framed the tale that he must have died, had she not with her lips sucked the poison from the wound.

It was clear that nothing more could be done in the Holy Land, and Edward knew not how soon his presence might become indispensable in England. A peace was made for ten years, and the English crusaders set out on their homeward voyage. For a long series of years Europe had been making vigorous efforts, and the result of these efforts had been nothing more substantial or permanent than the lines left on the sea sand by an ebbing tide. For one moment it seemed that the spirit of the dream might be changed, when Theobald, archdeacon of Liege, the friend of the English Edward, was summoned from Acre to fill the chair of St. Peter as Gregory X. Theobald had been an eye-witness of the desperate calamities which were crushing the Latins of Palestine, and he called the princes of Europe to the rescue with a zeal worthy of Innocent III. or of Urban II. A council held at Lyons decreed a new crusade. Rodolph of Hapsburg, not yet firm in his imperial dignity, pledged himself to join it; and his example was followed by Michael Paleologos who thirteen years earlier (1287) had put down the Latin dynasty in Constantinople. But Gregory died in less than two years after the assembly at Lyons, and his visions of renewed conquests in Palestine died with him.

In the Holy Land itself the miserable Christian remnant adhered to its old tradition of fighting about shadows when the substance had been already lost. Hugh III. of Cyprus had had himself crowned at Tyre as king of Jerusalem. The Templars urged the claims of Charles of Anjou; the Hospitallers insisted with more sense that the dispute might be postponed until they had recovered the kingdom the title to which they were debating. A few years later, when Henry II. of Cyprus held this shadowy dignity, the grand-master of the Templars pleaded before Nicholas IV. the wrongs of the Latins which could be avenged only by the blood of the Saracens. But the power of the ancient spell was broken. Nicholas was ready to furnish some men, but these were ruffians and criminals, the very offscourings of the people: money he obstinately refused to give. The grand-master was not more successful elsewhere; and the Italian robbers formed the whole force with which he returned to Palestine.

The last forlorn struggle was made at Acre. Here, as elsewhere, the valour of the Templars shone conspicuous. The grand-master rejected the bribes of the sultan; but the latter cared little whether he could work on the venality of his enemies or whether he could not. His Mamelukes were not less courageous than the Templars, and their numbers were overwhelming. The assault began; the titular king of Jerusalem, Henry II. of Cyprus, besought the Teutonic knights to occupy his post, promising to return the next morning. His request was granted: but before the morning came, Henry was on his way to Cyprus. The attack was renewed with greater fury; but the Christians had lost all heart. The master of the Templars had been killed by a poisoned arrow, and seven Knights Hospitallers sailed away, the last remnant of the magnificent order which had braved successfully a thousand dangers. The city was lost: but the horrors of the siege were not ended. The people had hurried to the shore; a storm prevented them from embarking; and the very sea was reddened by the blood of the last victims of a wild and fanatical superstition.

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EPOCHS OF HISTORY