M. Michaud has told the story of the crusades with such fulness and accuracy that, so far as these religious pilgrimages in arms are concerned, nothing need be added. The movement of the West upon the East is traced and described in minute detail, with every accessory of personal incident and achievement, and the work has been done so thoroughly that probably no later historian will feel drawn to the same field. It may be profitable, however, to supplement this trustworthy and spirited narrative by a rapid survey of the wide and fruitful changes which the crusades directly and indirectly introduced into the social and political life of Europe. It is one of the gains of time that its lapse discloses those larger relations of great events which are hidden from the observation of an earlier age; and while the earlier historian has the advantage of being near the historical movement which he describes, and of collecting at first hand the fullest information of its origin, direction, and personality, the later writer is far more fully equipped for the work of setting the movement in right relation to its social and political environment. Thucydides must remain preËminently the historian of the Peloponnesian War; but Grote and Curtius, largely deriving their facts from him, are able to discuss the decisive struggle between Athens and Sparta with wider grasp of the elements of Greek character and politics which brought about the conflict, and to trace its influence in later Greek history. This chapter will add no newly discovered facts concerning the crusades; but, taking advantage of later studies in this important field, it will indicate some of the results of these expeditions as they have disclosed themselves in the subsequent political development of Europe.

The Council of Clermont in 1095 found the feudal system fully developed in Western Europe. The Holy Roman Empire which, in the person of Charlemagne, had given brief promise of a restoration of authority to government, and of cohesion to society, had become a mere shadow among the warring, aggressive factions of feudalism. The tremendous energy of Charles was potent enough to drive back the boundaries of barbarism, and make for a little time a comparatively clear field for efforts toward an organized and stable society; but the task of subduing the social and political anarchy about him was too great even for a ruler of his genius. The time was not ripe, and when the laboriously gathered lines of power fell from the strong hand, there was no successor to grasp them. Anarchy became well-nigh universal. The royal authority was everywhere, with here and there a passing exception, a vague and indefinite thing, hemmed in and jealously watched by barons, more powerful than the king in everything but name. Society was broken up into small communities, with apparently no common direction of movement or impulse of progress. Every castle was a centre of power, which might be hostile to every other authority about it. There were no common ties binding races into the larger fellowship of kindred aims and aspirations. Men of the same blood were arrayed in more deadly hostility to each other than were men of alien races.

No large enterprises were possible, because the community of sentiment and the harmony of action which made them possible, were alike absent. The principle of individualism—the greatest contribution of the northern races to the political development of Europe—had reached its fullest growth, and everywhere asserted itself in the most aggressive forms. Western Europe had gone so far in this direction that no further progress in the arts, industries, and institutions of civilization was possible without the introduction of a new element into the problem. What was needed was the cohesive influence of some common purpose, which should give a new unity by disclosing to men the larger possibilities of organized social and political life. Organization is the necessary condition of progress, and so long as Europe remained without the conception of government with well-defined powers, regularity of administration, and ability to suppress opposition and impress its authority, in all sections of its territory, with a firm and steady hand, no forward movement was possible.

This spell of political and social impotence was broken by the crusades. Peter the Hermit was a voice crying in the wilderness, the forerunner of a historical movement which was to be the salvation of Europe. Returning from Syria with a heart hot with indignation at the insults and persecutions which beset the pilgrim to the Holy Sepulchre, his call to arms had all the authority which a genuine religious conviction could give it, and all the persuasive eloquence of a call for which men had been longing and waiting in silence and despair. No one will deny the strength of the religious sentiment which, in answer to that message, speedily marshalled the hosts of the first crusade; but the restless life of oppressed and burdened races found in the new enterprise an outlet through which it poured itself like a rising tide. For the first time in its history Western Europe had a common purpose and united in a common undertaking. In the farthest hamlet the overshadowing power of the feudal lord became for the time being tributary to the authority of the Church, summoning Europe to fight its battles and protect its sacred places. Europe awoke to the fact, unsuspected before, that it was larger than its warring feudatories, that the possibilities of its life were far more varied and rich than men had dreamed under the iron pressure of the feudal system, and thus the needed element of association and coÖperation asserted itself.

Like all great social and political changes, the transition from feudal communities to national organization was unconscious and undiscovered. In the minds of the crusaders and of the communities whose faith they represented and whose impulse they carried into action, no clearly defined ideal of national life answered the call of Peter. That ideal grew slowly, but its roots were planted in this movement. Spaniards, Germans, Italians, Englishmen, and Frenchmen found themselves acting in harmony for a common purpose. They bore different banners, they marched under different leaders, they took different roads; but a common impulse sent them forth and a common goal drew them on. Their community of sentiment was often marred by mutual jealousies, and their unity of action impaired by mutual antagonisms; but the substantial harmony which underlay these disorders and which secured the positive results of the earlier crusades, gave Europe a conception of life which it had thoroughly learned before the last crusaders returned from their fruitless quest.

That which drew together various nationalities and races, disclosing to them the religious and social aims and tastes which they possessed in common, brought about a similar result through the widely separated ranks of society. European society had no homogeneity when the first crusade was preached. It was divided into ranks sharply discriminated from each other, bound together by the pressure of external force, rather than by the cohesive power of organic structure. There was no mutuality of interest or feeling. King, baron, burgher, and peasant were so widely apart by virtue of the education of their circumstances that they could not understand each other. That common language of experience and aspiration, which to-day finds a response among men of all social ranks, would have been incomprehensible in the age of the first crusade. Baron and peasant had indeed acted together in feudal warfare; but only as the lower was forced to serve the higher, the weaker to do the work of the stronger. No common impulse had ever before stirred the common humanity of all classes; no call had ever before summoned them as individuals to a service in which each stood in a spiritual equality with every other. Men had moved in classes before, but they moved as classes and not as men.

The Church had seen its early dream of an imperial power with which it could keep itself in friendly and influential alliance fade like a mist before the iron individualism of feudalism, and had been compelled to begin almost anew its conquest over the governing powers of Europe. The work which a few skilful ecclesiastics could have done at the courts of kings in a few capital cities was relegated for centuries to an army of priests attached to baronial households, and conducting the sacred offices of their religion in the chapels of castles over the vast territory of Western Europe. The Church and feudalism were in radical antagonism; they represented ideas which could not, in the extremes in which each held them, be harmonized in practical life. The Church had yielded to feudalism, as in an earlier age she had yielded to the barbarian conquest of Southern Europe, because surrender, in form at least, was inevitable. But, in the latter case, as in the former, the struggle was renewed at once upon a new plan of action. The orderly campaign by massing of forces at a few strategic points was abandoned for incessant watchfulness and a perpetual skirmish along an immensely extended frontier. Every barony became a scene of action, every castle a stronghold to be won by the most skilful devices of the spiritual warfare. The Church was the only representative of the idea of universal authority and order, but as yet no occasion had arisen by which it might profit to make that conception an active principle in society. It was in deadly antagonism to the system which broke society up into small, hostile communities; but the time had not come when it could bring to bear a force powerful enough to destroy its antagonist, or to set at work an influence which would inevitably result in the disintegration of the feudal order.

The preaching of the first crusade was an opportunity which the Church was quick to recognise and to follow up with that persistent and consummate ability which characterized all its earlier and much of its later history. It was possible now to call not only separate feudatories but all Europe to arms. Feudalism would keep men divided into fixed classes, and society broken up into permanent groups; the Church, on the other hand, would prevent the oppression of one class by another by binding all in a universal allegiance to herself, and would impress upon society the unity of a common service and a common faith.

The crusades sprang out of a feeling which was as strong in the heart of the peasant as in that of the noble. A great cause and a universal sentiment gave the Church the opportunity for which it sought. A solemn council made the preaching of Peter the Hermit the voice of the Church herself. Feudal distinctions were forgotten in the enthusiasm of a service which transcended in its sanctions and its aims all earthly duties, and in which earthly differences were for the moment laid aside. The power of the feudal nobility, hitherto the dominant authority in Western Europe, became, for the time being, secondary to that of the Church. Men were summoned no longer to the service of their lords, but to the service of their Church. The change was radical. It was the introduction of a principle which is still struggling to assert itself in practical legislation and political action. Its development has been slow, but it has revolutionized society, and what its ultimate outcome is to be no man can predict. King, baron, burgher, and peasant found themselves side by side in the same cause, one class serving another, not by virtue of a feudal but of a spiritual authority; comrades in arms in an enterprise which addressed what was common and eternal in them all rather than what was distinctive and conventional. Not suddenly, but by the slow processes of growth which belong to great moral changes, men forgot their abasement and slavery under feudalism in the dawning light of a liberty conferred by a superior and a spiritual power. A conception of a higher authority than that lodged in the hands of the feudal lord took root in the mind of Europe and became fruitful of vast change. In Syria the leaders of the crusades were not able to keep their followers in subjection when they attempted to follow their personal ambitions. The commanding purpose which drew them thither overmastered all private designs and made insubordination a virtue. An influence more powerful than feudalism entered into European life with the crusades, and was perhaps the most far-reaching and potential effect which they produced upon the world.

The crusades found Europe stationary and without the power of progress. Society had crystallized into forms so rigid and fixed that strong pressure from without was essential to any movement toward liberation. Not only were communities circumscribed and reduced in numbers, and individuals held in their places by a power against which it was hopeless to strive; but the whole population was bound to the soil by a system of servitude the most exacting and the most pervasive known in history. Contiguous communities spoke dialects differing so widely as to make communication between men of the same race almost as difficult as between men of widely separated nationalities.

There was almost no interchange of knowledge, no commerce of ideas. Where men were born they spent their lives, and were buried with no sense of any larger relationships in life than those of the locality which formed their little sphere of action. Feudalism, in disintegrating society and reducing the individual to an unimportant factor in a vast system, had paralyzed the power of development, which comes only through interchange and combination of energy. The Chinese Empire of a century ago was hardly more securely walled in from external influence and condemned to absolute stagnation than were the countries over which feudalism had spread its iron network. Into this close, dense atmosphere the crusades sent a vigorous current of new thought. The hopeless and weary routine to which great populations were condemned explains much of that enthusiasm with which multitudes rushed into a dangerous and laborious service. Men were stifled in an air which they and their fathers before them had breathed without any possibility of change. In the crusade epoch the religious impulse was strong, but the impulse toward freedom was doubtless the sentiment next in importance.

Between 1095 A.D. and 1291 A.D., there was an immense change. The first crusade found men of all nationalities eager to follow its leaders, the preachers of the last crusade appealed to deaf ears. Europe was indifferent to the cause which for two centuries had found orators as eloquent as Bernard of Clairvaux and leaders as pure as Godfrey, as daring as Richard, as devoted as St. Louis, and yet religious zeal was not dead, nor had the sanctions of religion lost their sacredness. The secret of the change in European sentiment lay in the enlargement and liberation of European life which the crusades had secured. There was a comparatively free interchange between the different sections. The incessant movements of the crusading hosts, the intermingling of so many different races had broken down many barriers and set many unifying influences at work. The German knew the Frenchman, and the Frenchman the Englishman, and this mutual knowledge was fruitful in quickened and stimulated life everywhere. Men began to better their condition by a change of location. Emigration, which in the earlier centuries of the Christian era had changed the face of Europe and then had been checked by feudalism, began once more in ways so small and insignificant as to remain long unnoticed, but of immense importance in the light of subsequent history.

The modification and disintegration of the feudal system is unquestionably the greatest contribution of the crusades to the development of humanity. This result was brought about, as has been shown, by the liberation of thought and life throughout Western Europe; but there were other and important elements which entered into the solution of the problem of European progress.

The expeditions to the East were, for that age, enormously expensive. Very many of the great feudal lords who fitted out expeditions were not able, out of their ordinary resources, to meet the necessary outlay. Money was raised by all kinds of expedients. Cities took advantage of the needs of their feudal lords to purchase their freedom, great estates that for centuries had increased by continued accumulation and conquest were encumbered or sold. There was an interchange of landed property altogether unprecedented in European history. Many great fiefs disappeared entirely during the two centuries which saw the gathering of the successive expeditions for the East. By purchase and by escheat and confiscation, which the disorder of the times made possible, the royal authority made immense inroads into the territory of feudalism, and when the last hopeless struggle in Syria was over, the principle of centralization, represented everywhere by the royal power, had gained vastly upon the extreme individualism of feudalism.

The advance of the Church in influence and authority was, however, the most immediate and marked result of the crusades. Religious ideas, Guizot declares, had experienced no change, but power had changed hands no less than property. The Church, quick to profit by every opportunity which the troubled age and the vicissitudes of war afforded, had pushed steadily forward, occupying every defenceless position and fortifying every exposed point. The authority which Urban had exercised at the Council of Clermont, in calling all men to arms as subjects of the Church, was asserted upon every occasion with that steadiness and universality of policy which is one of the secrets of papal power. A new principle of allegiance was substituted for feudal subordination. Differences between great barons were settled by the voice of the Church, and in the councils of kings the pope spoke by his personal representatives. Legates from Rome became familiar figures in every capital, and the persistence with which they made themselves heard in all public matters rapidly and continually enlarged the popular conception of the scope and weight of the authority of Rome.

In the East results of equal moment were brought about by the campaigns of the crusaders. Communication was reopened between the East and the West. The rude hand of war threw open the doors, which were never again to remain permanently closed.

The fierce struggles of the contending parties did not blind them to the fact that each had much to learn from the other. Oriental magnificence and culture had charms even for the warriors whose mailed hands were sworn to destroy the civilization under which they were developed. The positive and immediate gain to Western knowledge was doubtless less than was formerly believed, but the ulterior gain is incalculable. If the West is not indebted to the East for the art of printing and the compass, it is indebted for a substantial enrichment of thought, for a great enlargement of mental horizon. The interchange of thought which was set in motion by the crusades is still to work out its richest results; and in contemporaneous history there is no more impressive feature than the confluence of these two ancient civilizations.

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