CHAP. VI. CHARACTER OF THE CRUSADES. 237 religious and its unmitigated ferocity, its wild love of adventure, its licentiousness, its contempt for human life, at Alliance of times its generosity, and here and there touches military spirit. of that chivalrous respect for females which had belonged to the Teutonic races, and was now mingled up with the religion. Christianity was content to bring its devotional without any of its humanising influences, its fervent faith, which was assured of its everlasting reward, its strict obedience to all the outward ceremonial of religion, its earnest prayers, its profound humility. But it left out all restraining discipline of the violent and revengeful passions; it checked not the fury of conquest; allayed in no way the miseries of the strife. The knight, before the battle, was as devout as the bishop; the bishop, in the battle, no less ferocious than the knight. No one denied himself the full privilege of massacre or of plunder; it was rather a duty against unbelievers: the females of a conquered town had no better fate with a crusading than with a Mahommedan soldiery. The Crusades have been called, and justly, the heroic age of Christianity-the heroic age in the ordi- Heroic age of nary, not the Christian sense, that of the Gospel- Christianity. which would seek her own heroes rather among the martyrs and among the benefactors of mankind. It had all the violence, the rudeness, but also the grandeur, the valour, daring, endurance, self-sacrifice, wonderful achievements, the development of strength, even of craft, which belongs to such a period: the wisdom of Godfrey of Boulogne, the gallantry of Tancred of Hauteville, the subtlety of Raimond of Toulouse; in later times the rivalry of the more barbarous Richard of England with the more courteous and polished Saladin. But in no point are the Crusades more analogous to the heroic ages of other times. than in the elevation of the heroes of the war above the common herd of the soldiery. In all wars the glory of • The Crusades ought to have been the heroic age of Christianity in poetry; but their Homer arose too late. At the time of the Crusades there was wanting a common language, or indeed any language already formed, and approaching to the life and energy of the Homeric Greek; at the same time sufficiently vernacular and popular not to become antiquated in the course of time. Before the polite and gentle Tasso, even the Italian had lost the rudeness and picturesque simplicity of its Dantesque form; the religious enthusiasm had been subdued to a timorous orthodoxy, which trembled before the Inquisition; the few is bought by the misery of the many. The superior armour and weapons, the fighting on horseback, as well as the greater skill in managing the weapons and the horse, no doubt the calmer courage, maintained the nobles as a martial and feudal aristocracy, who obtained all the glory and the advantages of their transient successes. Never, perhaps, were expeditions so utterly, hopelessly disastrous, so wildly prodigal of human life, as the popular Crusade, which set off first under Peter the Hermit. Of all this the blind enthusiasm of that day took as little notice as in later times did Godfrey's Frank knights in their poetic admiration of his exploits. In the fame of Godfrey's conquest of Jerusalem, in the establishment of that kingdom, no one under the rank of knight acquired honour, power, emolument. But since, in the account of the Crusades, even more than in other parts of the Christian annals, the life, the reality, the character, even the terror and beauty, the poetry of the whole period, consists in the details, it is only in the acts and words of individuals that clearly transpire the workings of the religion of the times. The History of Christianity must leave those annals, as a separate province, and content itself with following out some of the more general results of those extraordinary and characteristic events. I will only relate two incidents: one illustrative of the frightfulness of this Holy War; one of the profound religion which, nevertheless, lay in the hearts of its leaders. Incidents of No barbarian, no infidel, no Saracen, ever perpetrated such wanton and cold-blooded atrocities of cruelty the Crusades. as the wearers of the Cross of Christ (who, it is said, had fallen on their knees and burst into a pious hymn at the first view of the Holy City), on the capture of that city. Murder was mercy, rape tenderness, simple plunder the mere assertion of the conqueror's right. Children were seized by their legs, some of them plucked from their mothers' breasts and dashed against the walls, or whirled from the battlements. Others were obliged to leap from the the martial spirit was that of the earlier romantic poems rather than the Crusader's fanatic love of battle and hatred of the Unbeliever. With all its exquisite and pathetic passages the Jerusalem Delivered' is no Crusader's epic. Beautiful as a work of art, it is still a work of art. It is suited to the court of Ferrara rather than to the castlehall of a chieftain returned after years of war from the Holy Land. CHAP. VI. EFFECTS OF CRUSADES. 239 walls; some tortured, roasted by slow fires. They ripped up prisoners to see if they had swallowed gold. Of 70,000 Saracens there were not left enough to bury the dead: poor Christians were hired to perform the office. Every one surprised in the Temple was slaughtered, till the reek from the dead bodies drove away the slayers. The Jews were burned alive in their synagogue. Even the day after, all who had taken refuge on the roofs, notwithstanding Tancred's resistance, were hewn to pieces; still later the few Saracens who had escaped, not excepting babes of a year old, were put to death, to avoid the danger from the Egyptian army, and to avenge the insults to the dead. Bishop Adhemar de Puy, the Legate, was seen in his sacerdotal habits partaking in the triumph, and it appears, not arresting the carnage." Yet when Godfrey was unanimously saluted as sovereign of the conquered realm, to the universal admiration, he refused to be king: he would only be administrator, where the Saviour had been called a servant; he would wear no golden crown where the Redeemer had worn a crown of thorns. Return we to the effects of the expeditions to the Holy Land. I. The first and more immediate result of the Crusades was directly the opposite to that which had been Estrangement promised, and no doubt expected, by the advisers of the East. of these expeditions. Though not the primary, the security of the Eastern Christian Empire, and its consequent closer alliance with Latin Christendom, was at least a secondary object. Latin and Greek Christendom would become, if not one Empire, one indissoluble league: the Greek Church would become part of the kingdom of St. Peter. But instead of the reconciliation of the Byzantine Empire with the West, the Crusade led to a more total estrangement; instead of blending the Churches into one, P Mulieres mucrone perfoderunt, infantes adhuc sugentes per plantam pedis e sinu matris aut cunabulis arreptos muris vel ostiorum liminibus allidentes fractis cervicibus, alios armis trucidarunt. Albert. Aquens, p. 281. Alii illorum quos levius erat capitibus obtruncabantur; alii autem sagittati de turribus saltare cogebantur alii, vero diutissime torti et ignibus adusti. Hist. B. Sacri, p. 179. Compare the later historians of the Crusades, Wilken, Michaud, i. 411; Von Raumer (Hohenstaufen), i. 216. All the later authorities. the hostility became more strong and obstinate. The Emperors of the East found their friends not less dangerous and destructive than their enemies could have been. Vast hordes of disorderly and undisciplined fanatics came swarming across the frontiers, trampling down everything in their way, and spreading desolation through the more peaceful and flourishing provinces. Already the Hungarians had taken up arms against these unwelcome strangers; and a Christian power had been the first to encounter the champions of the Cross. The leaders of the Crusade, the Hermit himself, and a soldier of fortune, Walter, who went by the name of the Pennyless, were altogether without authority, and had taken no steps to organise or to provide food for this immense population which they had set in motion. This army mainly consisted of the mainly consisted of the poorer classes, whose arms, such as they were, were their only possession. The more enthusiastic, no doubt, vaguely trusted to the protection of Providence; God would not allow the soldiers of his blessed Son to perish with want. The more thoughtful calculated on the hospitality of their Christian brethren. The pilgrims of old had found hospitals and caravanseries established for their reception; they had been fed by the inexhaustible bounty of the devout. But it had occurred to none that, however friendly, the inhabitants of Hungary and the Provinces of the Byzantine Empire, through which they passed, could not, without miracles, feed the swelling, and, it seemed, never-ending swarm of strangers. Hunger led to plunder, plunder to hostility, hostility hardened and inflamed to the most bitter mutual antipathy. Europe rung with denunciations of the inhospitality, the barbarity of these more than unbelievers, who were accused of secret intelligence and confederacy with the Mahommedans against the cause of Christ. The subtle policy of Alexius Comnenus, whose craft was in some degree successful in the endeavour to rid his subjects of this intolerable burthen, was branded as the most malignant treachery. Hence mistrust, hatred, contempt, sprang up between the Greek and Latin Christians, which centuries could hardly have eradicated, even if they had been centuries of friendly intercourse, rather than of aggravated wrong and unmingling hostility. The Greeks despised CHAP. VI. EFFECTS OF THE CRUSADES. 241 the Franks, as rude and savage robbers; the Franks disdained the Greeks, as wily and supple slaves. The conduct of the more regular army, which took another and less destructive course, was restrained by some discipline, and maintained at first some courtesy, yet widened rather than closed this irreparable breach. The Emperor of the East found that his Western allies conquered not for him, but for themselves. Instead of considering Syria and Palestine as parts of the Eastern Empire, they created their own independent principalities, and owned no sovereignty in him who claimed to be the legitimate lord of those territories. There was a singular sort of feudal title made out to Palestine: God was the Sovereign owner; through the Virgin, of royal descent from the house of David, it descended to our Lord. a later period the contempt of the Franks reached its height in their conquest of Constantinople, and the establishment of a Latin dynasty on the throne of the Eastern Emperors; contempt which was amply repaid by the hatred of the Greeks, who when they recovered the Empire, were only driven by hard necessity to cultivate any friendly alliance with the West. At This implacable temporal hostility did not tend to soften or reconcile the religious difference. The supremacy of the Pope became a sign, a bitter remembrancer of their subjugation. Even at the last hour, after the Council of Florence, the Eastern Church refused to surrender its freedom or to accept the creed of the West. II. The Pope, the clergy, the monastic institutions, derived a vast accession of power, influence, and Power of the wealth from the Crusades. Already Urban, by Pope. placing himself at the head of the great movement, had enshrined himself in the general reverence, and to the Pope reverence was power and riches." He had crushed his adversaries in the popular mind of great part of Christendom. He bequeathed this great legacy of pre-eminence to his successors. The Pope was general-in-chief of the armies of the faith. He assumed from the commencedemy. To these writers I would refer for the general effects on commerce, arts, and literature. Compare Heeren's Essay on the influence of the Crusades, Werke, vol. ii., and Choiseul d'Aillecourt, who obtained the second prize from the French Aca VOL. III. R |