The imperial standards of Constantinople were designed with a two-headed eagle typifying Constantine’s rule over the kingdoms of East and West. Towards the end of the eleventh century this emblem had become more symbolic of the Emperor’s anxious outlook upon hostile neighbours. With Asia Minor practically lost by the establishment of a Mahometan dynasty at Nicea within one hundred miles of the Christian capital, with the Bulgarians at the gates of Adrianople, and the Normans and the Popes in possession of his Greek patrimony in Italy, Alexius Commenus, when he ascended the throne of the Caesars, found himself master of an attenuated Empire, consisting mainly of strips of Grecian seaboard.

Yet in spite of her shorn territories Constantinople remained the greatest city in Europe, not merely in her magnificent site and architecture, nor even in her commerce, but in the hold she preserved over the imagination of men.

Athanaric the Goth had exclaimed that the ruler of Constantinople must be a god: eleventh-century Europe accepted him as mortal, but still crowned the lord of so great a city with a halo of awe. It was Constantinople that had won the Russians, the Bulgars, and the Slavs from heathenism to Christianity, not to the Catholicism of Western Europe but the Greek interpretation of the Christian faith called by its believers the ‘orthodox’. It was Constantinople whose gold coin, ‘the byzant’, was recognized as the medium of exchange between merchants of all nations. It was Constantinople again, her wealth, her palaces, her glory of pomp and government, that drew Russian, Norse, and Slav adventurers to serve as mercenaries in the Emperor’s army, just as auxiliaries had clamoured of old to join the Roman eagles. Amongst the ‘Varangar’ bodyguard, responsible for the safety of the Emperor’s person, were to be found at one time many followers of Harold the Saxon, who, escaping from a conquered England, gladly entered the service of a new master to whom the name ‘Norman’ was also anathema.

Alexius Commenus was in character like his Empire—a shrinkage from the dimensions of former days. There was nothing of the practical genius of a Constantine in his unscrupulous ability to mould small things to his advantage; nothing of the heroic Charlemagne in his eminently calculating courage. Yet his daughter, Anna Commena, who wrote a history of his reign, regarded him as a model of imperial virtues; and his court, that had ceased to distinguish pomp from greatness and elaborate ceremonial from glory, echoed this fiction. It was this mixture of pretension and weakness, of skill and cunning, of nerve and treachery, so typical of the later Eastern Emperors, that made the nations of Western Europe, while they admired Byzantium, yet use the word ‘Byzantine’ as a term of mingled contempt and dislike.

The Emperor, on his part, had no reason to love his Western neighbours. The Popes had robbed him of the Exarchate of Ravenna: they had set up a Headship of the Church in Rome deaf to the claims of Constantinople. When in the eighth century the Emperor Leo, the Isaurian,12 earned the nickname of ‘Iconoclast’, or ‘Image-breaker’, by a campaign of destruction amongst devotional pictures and images that he denounced as idolatrous, Rome definitely refused to accept this ruling on behalf of Western Christendom.

This was the beginning of the actual schism between the Eastern and Western Churches that had been always alien in their outlook. In the ninth century the breach widened, for Pope Nicholas I supported a Patriarch, or Bishop of the Eastern Church, deposed by the Emperor and excommunicated his rival and successor, while subsequent disputes were rendered irreconcilable in the middle of the eleventh century when the Patriarch of Constantinople closed the Latin churches and convents in his diocese and publicly declared the views of Rome heretical.

Besides the Pope at Rome the Eastern Empire possessed other foes in Italy. Chief of these were the Normans, who, not content with acquiring Naples, had, under the leadership of Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemund, captured the famous port of Durazzo on the Adriatic and invaded Macedonia. From this province they were only evicted by Alexius Commenus after wearying campaigns of guerrilla warfare to which his military ability was better suited than to pitched battles or shock tactics.

More subtly dangerous than either Pope or Normans was the commercial rivalry of the merchant cities of the Mediterranean, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. It was Venice who from behind her barrier of islands had watched Attila the Hun lead away his armies in impotent rage.13 It was Venice again who of the North Italian states successfully resisted the feudal domination of Western Emperors and kept her own form of republican government inviolate of external control. It was the young Venice, the ‘Queen of the Adriatic’ as her sons and daughters proudly called her, that could alone in her commercial splendour and arrogance compare with the dying glory of Constantinople.

Alexius Commenus in his struggles against Robert Guiscard had been compelled to call twice upon Venice for the assistance of her fleet; but he paid dearly for this alliance in the trading privileges he was forced to grant in Eastern waters. Wherever in the Orient Venetian merchants landed to exchange goods they were quick to establish a political footing; and the world mart on the Adriatic, into which poured the silks and dyes, the sugar and spices of Asia, built up under the rule of its ‘Doges’, or Dukes, a national as well as a commercial reputation.

In 1095 necessity spurred Alexius Commenus to appeal not merely to Venice for succour but to Pope Urban II and all the leading princes of Western Europe.

‘From Jerusalem to the Aegean,’ he wrote, ‘the Turkish hordes have mastered all: their galleys, sweeping the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, threaten the imperial city itself, which, if fall it must, had better fall into the hands of Latins than of Pagans.’

These Turks, or ‘Tartars’, to whom he referred, were the cause of the Eastern Empire’s sudden danger. Descendants of a Mongol race in central Asia, of which the Huns were also an offshoot, they turned their faces westward some centuries later than the ancestors of Attila, fired by the same love of battle and bloodshed and the same contempt for civilization. To them the wonderful Arabian kingdom, moulded by successive Caliphs of Bagdad out of Eastern art, luxury, and mysticism, held no charm save loot. Conquered Greece had endowed Rome with its culture, but the inheritance of Haroun al-Raschid bequeathed to its conquerors only the fighting creed of Islam.

Mahometans in faith, the Turkish armies, more dangerous than ever because more fanatical, swept over Persia, Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor, subjugating Arabs and Christians until they came almost to the straits of the Bosporus. Here it was that they forced Alexius Commenus to realize his imminent danger and to turn to his enemies in Europe for the protection of his tottering Empire.

The Latins, or Christians of the West, to whom he appealed, had reasons enough of their own for answering him with ready promises of men and money. From the early days of the Church it had been the custom of pious folk, or of sinners anxious to expiate some crime, to set out in small companies to visit the Holy Places in Jerusalem where tradition held that Christ had preached, prayed, and suffered, that there they might give praise to God and seek His pardon. These ‘pilgrimages’, with their mixture of good comradeship, danger, and discomfort, had become very dear to the popular mind, and, if not encouraged by the Mahometan Arabs, had been at least tolerated. ‘Hospitals’, or sanctuaries, were built for the refreshment of weary or sick travellers, and pilgrims on the payment of a toll could wander practically where they chose.

On the advent of the Turks all was changed: the Holy Places became more and more difficult to visit, Christians were stoned and beaten, mulcted of their last pennies in extortionate tolls, and left to die of hunger or flung into dungeons for ransom.

Tradition says that a certain French hermit called Peter, who visited Jerusalem during the worst days of Turkish rule, went one night to the Holy Sepulchre weeping at the horrors he had seen, and as he knelt in prayer, it seemed to him that Christ himself stood before him and bade him ‘rouse the Faithful to the cleansing of the Holy Places’. With this mission in mind he at once left the Holy Land and sought Pope Urban II, who had already received the letter of Alexius Commenus and now, fired by the hermit’s enthusiasm, willingly promised his support.

Whether Urban was persuaded by Peter or no is a matter of doubt, but he at any rate summoned a council to Clermont in 1095, and there in moving words besought the chivalry of Europe to set aside its private feuds and either recover the Holy Places or die before the city where Christ had given his life for the world. It is likely that he spoke from mixed motives. A true inheritor of the theories of Gregory VII, he could not but recognize in the prospect of a religious war, where the armies of Europe would fight under the papal banner and at the papal will, the exaltation of the Roman See. Was there not also the hope of bringing the Greek Church into submission to the Roman as the outcome of an alliance with the Greek Empire? Might not many turbulent feudal princes be persuaded to journey to the East, who by happy chance would return no more to trouble Europe?

Such calculations could Urban’s ambitions weave, but with them were entwined unworldly visions that lent him a force and eloquence that no calculations could have supplied. Wherever he spoke the surging crowd would rush forward with the shout Deus vult, ‘It is the will of God,’ and this became the battle-cry of the crusaders.

‘The whole world,’ says a contemporary, ‘desired to go to the tomb of our Lord at Jerusalem.... First of all went the meaner people, then the men of middle rank, and lastly very many kings, counts, marquesses, and bishops, and, a thing that never happened before, many women turned their steps in the same direction.’

The order is significant and shows that the appeal of Urban and of Peter the Hermit had touched first the heart of the masses to whom the rich man’s temptation to hesitate and think of the morrow were of no account. Corn had been dear in France before the Council of Clermont owing to bad harvests; but the speculators who had bought up the grain to sell at a high price to those who later must eat or die found it left on their hands after the council was over. The men and women of France were selling not buying, regardless of possible famine, that they might find money to fulfil their burning desire to go to the Holy Land and there win the Holy Sepulchre and gain pardon for their sins as Pope and hermit had promised them.

The ordinary crusading route passed through the Catholic kingdom of Hungary to Bulgaria and thence to Constantinople, where the various companies of armed pilgrims had agreed to meet. It was with the entry into Bulgaria, whose ‘orthodox’14 king was secretly hostile to the pilgrims, that trouble began. Food and drink were grudged by the suspicious natives even to those willing to pay their way; whereupon the utterly undisciplined forces could not be prevented from retaliating on this inhospitality by fire and pillage. A species of warfare ensued in which Latin stragglers were cut off and murdered by mountain robbers, while the many ‘undesirables’, who had joined the crusaders more in hope of loot and adventure than of pardon, brought an evil reputation on their comrades by their greed and the brutality they exhibited towards the peasants.

Reason enough was here to account for the pathetic failure of the advance-guard of crusaders, the poor, the fanatic, the disreputable, drawn together in no settled organization and with no leaders of military repute.

Alexius Commenus, who had demanded an army, not a rabble, dealt characteristically with the problem by shipping these first crusaders in haste and unsupported to Asia Minor. There he left them to fall a prey to the Turks, disease, and their own inadequacy, so that few ever saw the coasts of their native lands again.

If the First Crusade began in tragedy it ended in triumph, through the arrival in Constantinople of a second force from the West, this time of disciplined troops under the chief military leaders of Europe. Alexius Commenus had good cause to remember the prowess of his old enemy, Bohemund, son of Robert Guiscard, who rode at the head of his Sicilian Normans, while other names of repute were Godfrey de Bouillon, Duke of Lorraine, and Robert, the eldest son of William the Conqueror, with Archbishop Odo of Bayeux, his uncle.

‘Some of the crusaders’, wrote Anna Commena, ‘were guileless men and women, marching in all simplicity to worship at the tomb of Christ; but there were others of a more wicked kind, to wit Bohemund and the like: such men had but one object—to obtain possession of the imperial city.’

These suspicions, perhaps well founded, were natural to the daughter of the untrustworthy Alexius Commenus, who trusted nobody. Hating to entertain at his court so many well-armed and often insolent strangers, yet fearing in his heart to aid their advance lest they should set up a rival kingdom to his own, the Emperor, having cajoled the leaders into promises of homage for any conquests they might make, at length transported them and their followers across the Hellespont.

The Christian campaign began with the capture of Nicea in 1097, followed by a victorious progress through Asia Minor. For nearly a year the crusaders besieged and then were in their turn besieged in Antioch, enduring tortures of hunger, thirst, and disease. When courage flagged and hope seemed nearly dead, it was the supposed discovery, by one of the chaplains, of the lance that had pierced Christ’s side as he hung upon the Cross that kept the Christians from surrender. With this famous relic borne in their midst by the papal legate, the crusaders flung the gates of Antioch wide and issued forth in a charge so irresistible in its certainty of victory that the Turks broke and fled. The defeat became a rout, and Antioch remained as a Christian principality under Bohemund, when the crusaders marched southwards along the coast route towards Jerusalem.

They came in sight of this, the goal of their ambitions, on 7th June, 1099, not garbed as knights and soldiers but barefooted as humble pilgrims, kneeling in an ecstasy of awe upon the Mount of Olives. This mood of prayer passed rapidly into one of fierce determination, and on 15th June Godfrey de Bouillon and his Lorrainers forced a breach in the massive walls, and, hacking their way with sword and spear through the streets, met their fellow crusaders triumphantly entering from another side. The scene that followed, while in keeping with mediaeval savagery, has left a shameful stain upon the Christianity it professed to represent. Turks, Arabs, and Jews, old men and women, children and babies, thousands of a defenceless population, were deliberately butchered as a sacrifice to the Christ who, dying, preached forgiveness. The crusaders rode their horses up to the knees in the blood of that human shambles. ‘There might no prayers nor crying of mercy prevail,’ says an eyewitness. ‘Such a slaughter of pagan folk had never been seen nor heard of. None knew their number, save God alone.’

Their mission accomplished, the majority of crusaders turned their faces homewards, but before they went they elected Godfrey de Bouillon to be the first ruler of the new Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, with Antioch and Edessa in the north as dependent principalities.

Godfrey reigned for almost a year, bearing the title ‘Guardian of the Holy Grave’, since he refused to be crowned master of a city where Christ had worn a wreath of thorns. His protest is typical of the genuine humility and love of God that mingled so strangely in his veins with pride and cruelty. When he died he left a reputation for courage and justice that wove around his memory romance and legends like the tales of Charlemagne.

His immediate successors were a brother and nephew, and it is in the reign of the latter that we first hear mention of the Military Orders, so famous in the crusading annals of the Middle Ages. These were the ‘Hospitallers’ or ‘Knights of St. John’, inheritors of the rents and property belonging to the old ‘Hospital’ founded for pilgrims in Jerusalem, and the ‘Templars’, so called from their residence near the sight of Solomon’s Temple.

Both Orders were bound like the monks by the vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity; but the work demanded of them, instead of labour in the fields, was perpetual war against the infidel. ‘When the Templars are summoned to arms,’ said a thirteenth-century writer, ‘they inquire not of the number but of the position of their foe. They are lions in war, lambs in the house: to the enemies of Christ fierce and implacable, but to Christians kind and gracious.’

Yet a third Order, that of the Teutonic Knights, was founded in the twelfth century, arising like that of the Knights of St. John out of a hospital, but one that had been built by German merchants for crusaders of their own race. At the end of the thirteenth century the Order removed to the southern Baltic, and on these cold inhospitable shores embarked on a crusade against the heathen Lithuanians. It is of interest to students of modern history to note that in the sixteenth century the last Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights became converted to the doctrines of Luther, suppressed his Order, and absorbed the estates into an hereditary fief, the Duchy of Brandenburg. On the ‘Mark’15 and Duchy of Brandenburg, both founded with entirely military objects, was the future kingdom of Prussia built.

The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1187) survived for more than three-quarters of a century. That it had been established with such comparative ease was due not only to the fighting quality of the crusaders, but also to the feuds that divided Turkish rulers of the House of Seljuk. The Turks far outnumbered the Christians, and whenever the Caliphs of Bagdad and Cairo should sink their rivalries, or one Moslem ruler in the East gain supremacy over all others, the days of the small Latin kingdom in Palestine would be numbered. In the meantime the Latins maintained their position with varying fortune, now with the aid of fresh recruits from Europe and Genoese and Venetian sailors, capturing coast towns, now losing land-outposts there were insufficient garrisons to protect.

It was the loss of Edessa that roused Europe to its Second Crusade, this time through the eloquence of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who persuaded not only Louis VII of France and his wife, Queen Eleanor, but also the at first reluctant Emperor Conrad III, to bind the Cross on their arms and go to the succour of Christendom. ‘The Christian who slays the unbeliever in the Holy War is sure of his reward, more sure if he is slain.’

The pictures of the glories of martyrdom and of earthly conquests painted by the famous monk were so vivid that on one occasion he was forced to tear up his own robes to provide sufficient crosses for the eager multitude, but the triumph to which he called so great a part of the populations of France and Germany proved the beckoning hand of death and failure.

Both the King and Emperor reached Palestine—Louis VII even visited Jerusalem—but when they sailed homewards they had accomplished nothing of any lasting value. Edessa remained under Mahometan rule and the Christians had been forced to abandon the siege of Damascus that they had intended as a prelude to a victorious campaign. What was worse was that Louis and Conrad had left the chivalry of their armies in a track of whitening bones where they had retreated, victims not merely of Turkish prowess and numbers but of Christian feuds, Greek treachery, the failure of food supplies, and disease.

The Byzantine Empire owed to the first crusaders large tracts of territory recovered from the Turks in Asia Minor; but, angered by broken promises of homage on the part of Latin rulers, the Greeks repaid this debt in the Second Crusade by acting as spies and secret allies of the Mahometans. On occasions they were even to be found fighting openly side by side with the Turks, yet more merciless than these pagans in their brutal refusal to give food and drink to the stragglers of the Latin armies whom they had so basely betrayed.

The widows and orphans of France and Germany, when their rulers returned reft both of glory and men-at-arms, reviled St. Bernard as a false prophet; but though he responded sternly that the guilt lay not with God but in the worldliness of those who had taken the Cross, he was sorely troubled at the shattering of his own hopes.

‘The Sons of God’, he wrote wearily, ‘have been overthrown in the desert, slain with the sword, or destroyed by famine. We promised good things and behold disorder. The judgements of the Lord are righteous, but this one is an abyss so deep that I must call him blessed who is not scandalized therein.’

For some years after the Second Crusade Western Europe turned a deaf ear to entreaties for help from Palestine, and the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem continued to decline steadily not only in territory but in its way of life. The ennervating climate, the temptations to an unhealthy luxury that forgot Christian ideals, the almost unavoidable intermarriage of the races of East and West: all these sapped the vitality and efficiency of the crusading settlers; while the establishment of a feudal government at Jerusalem resulted in the usual quarrels amongst tenants-in-chief and their sub-tenants. In these feuds the Hospitallers and Templars joined with an avaricious rivalry unworthy of their creed of self-denial.

By 1183 Guy de Lusignan, who had succeeded in seizing the crown of Jerusalem by craft on the failure of the royal line, could only count on the lukewarm support of the majority of Latin barons. Thus handicapped he found himself suddenly confronted by a union of the Turks of Egypt and Syria under Saladin, Caliph of Cairo, a leader so capable and popular that the downfall of divided enemies was inevitable.

At Hattin, near the Lake of Tiberias, on a rocky, waterless spot, the Christians and Mahometans met for a decisive battle in the summer of 1187. The Latins, hemmed in by superior numbers, and tortured by the heat and thirst, fought desperately beneath the relic of the True Cross that they had borne with them as an incitement to their courage; but the odds were too great, and King Guy himself was forced to surrender when the defeat of his army had turned into a rout.

In the autumn of the same year Jerusalem, after less than a month’s siege, opened her gates to the victor. Very different was the entry of Saladin to that of the first crusaders; for instead of a general massacre the Christian population was put to ransom, the Sultan and his brother as an ‘acceptable alms to Allah’ freeing hundreds of the poorer classes for whom enough money could not be provided.

Europe received the news that the Holy Sepulchre had returned to the custody of the infidel with a shame and indignation that was expressed in the Third Crusade. This time, however, no straggling bands of enthusiasts were encouraged; and though the expedition was approved by the Pope, neither he nor any famous churchman, such as Peter the Hermit or St. Bernard of Clairvaux, were responsible for the majority of volunteers.

The Third Crusade was in character a military campaign of three great nations: of the Germans under the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, or the ‘Red Beard’; of the French under Philip II; and of the English under Richard the ‘Lion-Heart’. Other princes famous enough in their lands for wealth and prowess sailed also; and had there been union in that great host Saladin might well have trembled for his Empire. He was saved by the utter lack of cohesion and petty jealousies of his enemies as well as by his statecraft and military skill.

While English and French rulers still haggled over the terms of an alliance that would allow them to leave their lands with an easy mind, Frederick Barbarossa, the last to take the Cross, set out from Germany, rapidly crossed Hungary and Bulgaria, reduced the Greek Emperor to hostile inactivity by threats and military display, and began a victorious campaign through Asia Minor. Here fate intervened to help the Mahometans, for while fording a river in Cilicia the Emperor was swept from his horse by the current and drowned. So passed away Frederick the ‘Red Beard’, and with him what his strong personality had made an army. Some of the Teutons returned home, while those who remained degenerated into a rabble, easy victims for their enemies’ spears and arrows.

In the meantime Richard of England (1189–99) and Philip of France had clasped the hand of friendship, and, having levied the Saladin Tithe, a tax of one-tenth of the possessions of all their subjects, in order to pay their expenses, set sail eastwards from Marseilles. Both were young and eager for military glory; but the French king could plot and wait to achieve the ultimate success he desired while in Richard the statesman was wholly sunk in the soldier of fortune.

To mediaeval chroniclers there was something dazzling in the Lion-Heart’s physical strength, and in the sheer daring with which he would force success out of apparently inevitable failure, or realize some dangerous enterprise.

‘Though fortune wreaks her spleen on whomsoever she pleases, yet was he not drowned for all her adverse waves.’

‘The Lord of Ages gave him such generosity of soul and endued him with such virtues that he seemed rather to belong to earlier times than these.’

‘To record his deeds would cramp the writer’s finger joints and stun the hearer’s mind.’

Such are a few of the many flattering descriptions the obvious sincerity of which paints the English king as he seemed to the men who fought beside him.

A clever strategist, a born leader in battle, fearless himself, and with a restless energy that inspired him when sick to be carried on cushions in order to direct the fire of his stone-slingers, Richard turned his golden qualities of generalship to dust by his utter lack of diplomacy and tact. Of gifts such as these, that are one-half of kingship, he was not so much ignorant as heedless. He ‘willed’ to do things like his great ancestor, the Conqueror, but his sole weapon was his right hand, not the subtlety of his brain.

‘The King of England had gallows erected outside his camp to hang thieves and robbers on ... deeming it no matter of what country the criminals were, he considered every man as his own and left no wrong unavenged.’

This typical high-handed action, no doubt splendid in theory as a method of discouraging the crimes that had helped to ruin previous campaigns, was, when put into practice, sufficient alone to account for the hatred Richard inspired amongst rulers whose subjects he thus chose to judge and execute at will. The King of France, we are told, ‘winked at the wrongs his men inflicted and received,’ but he gained friends, while Richard’s progress was a series of embittered feuds, accepted light-heartedly without any thought of his own future interests or of those of the crusade.

Open rupture with Philip II of France was brought about almost before they had left the French coasts through Richard’s repudiation of his ally’s sister, to whom he had been bethrothed, since the English king was now determined on a match with Berengaria, the daughter of the King of Navarre.

In South Italy he acquired his next enemies in both claimants then disputing the crown of Sicily, but before he sailed away he had battered one of the rivals, the Norman, Tancred, into an outwardly submissive ally after a battle in the streets of Messina. The other rival, Henry, son of Frederick Barbarossa, and afterwards the Emperor Henry VI, remained his enemy, storing up a grudge against him in the hopes of a suitable opportunity for displaying it.

From Cyprus Richard, pursuing military glory, drove its Greek ruler because he had dared to imprison some shipwrecked Englishmen; and thus, adding an island to his dominions and the Eastern Emperor to his list of foes, arrived at last in Palestine, in the summer of 1191, just in time to join Philip II in the siege of Acre.

‘The two kings and peoples did less together than they would have done separately, and each set but light store by the other.’ So the tale runs in the contemporary chronicle; and when Acre at last surrendered the feuds between the English and French had grown so irreconcilable that Philip II, who had fallen sick, sulkily declared that he had fulfilled his crusading vow and departed homewards. Not long afterwards went Leopold, Archduke of Austria, nursing cold rage against Richard in his heart because of an insult to his banner, that, planted on an earthwork beside the arms of England, had been contemptuously flung into the ditch below.

The Lion-Heart was now master of the enterprise in Palestine, a terror to the Turks, who would use his name to frighten their unruly children into submission; but though he remained fourteen months, the jealousies and rivalries of his camp, with which he was not the man to contend, kept him dallying on the coast route to Jerusalem, unable to proceed by open warfare or to get the better of the wily Saladin in diplomacy.

News came that Philip II and the Emperor Henry VI were plotting with his brother John for his ruin at home, and Richard, weary at heart and sick in health, agreed to a three years and eight months’ truce that left the Christians in the possession of the seaports of Jaffa and Tyre, with the coastal territory between them, and gave pilgrims leave to visit Jerusalem untaxed. He himself refused with tears in his eyes even to gaze from a distant height on the city he could not conquer; but, vowing he would return, he set sail for the West in the autumn of 1192, and with his departure the Third Crusade ended.

There were to be many other crusades, but none that expressed in the same way as these first three expeditions the united aspirations of Western Europe for the recovery of the land of the Holy Sepulchre. National jealousies had ruined the chances of the Third Crusade, and with every year the spirit of nationality was to grow in strength and make common action less possible for Europe.

There is another reason also for the changing character of the Crusades, namely, the loss of the religious enthusiasm in which they had their origin. Men and women had believed that the cross on their arms could turn sinners into saints, break down battlements, and destroy infidels, as if by miracle. When they found that human passions flourished as easily in Palestine as at home and that the way of salvation was, as ever, the path of hard labour and constant effort, they were disillusioned, and eager multitudes no longer clamoured to go to the East. The Crusades did not stop suddenly, but degenerated with a few exceptions into mere political enterprises, patronized now by one nation, now by another: the armies recruited by mere love of adventure, lust of battle, or the desire for plunder.

If Western Christendom had gained no other blessing by them, the early Crusades at least freed the nations at a critical moment from a large proportion of the unruly baronage that had been a danger to commerce and good government. England paid heavily in gold for the Third Crusade; but the money supplied by merchants and towns was well spent in securing from the Lion-Heart privileges and charters that laid the foundations of municipal liberty.

In France the results of the Second Crusade had been for the moment devastating. Whole villages marched away, cities and castles stood empty, and in some provinces it was said ‘scarce one man remained to seven women’. In the orgy of selling that marked this exodus lands and possessions rapidly changed hands, the smaller fiefs tending to be absorbed by the larger fiefs and many of these in their turn by the crown. Aided also by other causes, the King of France with his increased demesnes and revenues came to assume a predominant position in the national life.

Perhaps the chief effect of the Crusades on Europe generally was the stimulus of new influences. Men and women, if they live in a rut and feed their brains continually on the same ideas, grow prejudiced. It is good for them to travel and come in contact with opposite views of life and different manners and customs, however much it may annoy them at the time. The Crusades provided this kind of stimulus not only to the commerce of Mediterranean ports but in the world of thought, literature, and art. The necessity of transport for large armies improved shipbuilding; the cunning of Turkish foes the ingenuity of Christian armourers and engineers; the influence of Byzantine architecture and mosaics the splendour of Venice in stone and colour.

Western Europe continued to hate the East; but she could not live without her silks, spices, and perfumes, nor forget to dream of the fabulous wonders of Cathay. Thus the age of the Crusades will be seen at last to merge its failures in the successes of an age of discovery, that were to lay bare a new West and another road to the Orient.