CHAPTER III
THE FIRST CRUSADE

Until the mechanical arts have advanced far enough to cause the attack in war to predominate over the defence, centralization cannot begin; for when a mud wall can stop an army, a police is impossible. The superiority of the attack was the secret of the power of the monied class who controlled Rome, because with money a machine could be maintained which made individual resistance out of the question, and revolt difficult. Titus had hardly more trouble in reducing Jerusalem, and dispersing the Jews, than a modern officer would have under similar circumstances.

As the barbarians overran the Roman provinces, and the arts declined, the conditions of life changed. The defence gained steadily on the attack, and, after some centuries, a town with a good garrison, solid ramparts, and abundant provisions had nothing to fear from the greatest king. Even the small, square Norman tower was practically impregnable. As Viollet-le-Duc has explained, these towers were mere passive defences, formidable to a besieger only because no machinery existed for making a breach in a wall. The beleaguered nobles had only to watch their own men, see to their doors, throw projectiles at the enemy if he approached too near, counter-mine if mined, and they might defy a great army until their food failed. Famine was the enemy most feared.[100]

By the eleventh century these towers had sprung up all over the West. Even the convents and churches could be defended, and every such stronghold was the seat of a count or baron, an abbot or bishop, who was a sovereign because no one could coerce him, and who therefore exercised all the rights of sovereignty, made war, dispensed justice, and coined money. In France alone there were nearly two hundred mints in the twelfth century.

Down to the close of the Merovingian dynasty the gold standard had been maintained, and contraction had steadily gone on; but, for reasons which are not understood, under the second race, the purchasing power of bullion temporarily declined, and this expansion was probably one chief cause of the prosperity of the reign of Charlemagne. Perhaps the relief was due to the gradual restoration of silver to circulation, for the coinage was then reformed, and the establishment of the silver pound as the measure of value may be considered as the basis of all the monetary systems of modern Europe.

The interval of prosperity was, however, brief; no permanent addition was made to the stock of precious metals, and prices continued to fall, as is demonstrated by the rapid deterioration of the currency. In this second period of relapse disintegration reached its limit.

During the tenth and eleventh centuries the Northmen infested the coasts of France, and sailed up the rivers burning and ravaging, as far as Rouen and Orléans. Even the convents of Saint Martin of Tours and Saint Germain des Près were sacked. The Mediterranean swarmed with Saracenic corsairs, who took Fraxinetum, near Toulon, seized the passes of the Alps, and levied toll on travel into Italy. The cannibalistic Huns overran the Lower Danube, and closed the road to Constantinople. Western Europe was cut off from the rest of the world. Commerce nearly ceased—the roads were so bad and dangerous, and the sea so full of pirates.

The ancient stock of scientific knowledge was gradually forgotten, and the imagination had full play. Upon philosophy the effect was decisive; Christianity sank to a plane where it appealed more vividly to the minds of the surrounding pagans than their own faiths, and conversion then went on rapidly. In 912 Rollo of Normandy was baptized; the Danes, Norwegians, Poles, and Russians followed; and in 997 Saint Stephen ascended the throne of Hungary and reopened to Latin Christians the way to the Sepulchre.

Perhaps the destiny of modern Europe has hinged upon the fact that the Christian sacred places lay in Asia, and therefore the pilgrimage brought the West into contact with the East. But the pilgrimage was the effect of relic-worship, and relic-worship the vital principle of monasticism. In these centuries of extreme credulity monasticism had its strongest growth. A faculty for scientific study was abnormal, and experimental knowledge was ascribed to sorcery. The monk Gerbert, who became pope as Sylvester II., was probably the most remarkable man of his generation. Though poor and of humble birth, he attracted so much attention that he was sent to Spain, where he studied in the Moorish schools at Barcelona and Cordova, and where he learned the rudiments of mathematics and geography. His contemporaries were so bewildered by his knowledge that they thought it due to magic, and told how he had been seen flying home from Spain, borne on the back of the demon he served, and loaded with the books he had stolen from the wizard, his master. Sylvester died in 1003, but long afterwards anatomy was still condemned by the Church, and four separate councils anathematized experimental medicine, because it threatened to destroy the value of the shrines. The ascendency of Cluny began with Saint Hugh, who was chosen abbot in 1049, the Year Leo’s election. The corporation then obtained control of Rome, and in another twenty-five years was engaged in its desperate struggle with the remains of the old secular police power. But though Hildebrand crushed Henry, the ancient materialism was too deeply imbedded to be eradicated in a single generation, and meanwhile the imagination had been brought to an uncontrollable intensity. A new and fiercer excitement seethed among the people—a vision of the conquest of talismans so powerful as to make their owners sure of heaven and absolute on earth.

The attraction of Palestine had been very early felt, for in 333 a guide-book had been written, called the Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem, which gave the route through the valley of the Danube, together with an excellent account of the Holy Land. In those days, before the barbaric inroads, the journey was safe enough; but afterwards communication nearly ceased, and when Stephen was baptized in 997, the relics of Jerusalem had all the excitement of novelty. Europe glowed with enthusiasm. Sylvester proposed a crusade, and Hildebrand declared he would rather risk his life for the holy places “than rule the universe.”

Each year the throngs upon the road increased, convents sprang up along the way to shelter the pilgrims, the whole population succoured and venerated them, and by the time Cluny had seized the triple crown, they left in veritable armies. Ingulf, secretary to William the Conqueror, set out in 1064 with a band seven thousand strong.

In that age of faith no such mighty stimulant could inflame the human brain as a march to Jerusalem. A crusade was no vulgar war for a vulgar prize, but an alliance with the supernatural for the conquest of talismans whose possession was tantamount to omnipotence. Urban’s words at Clermont, when he first preached the holy war, have lost their meaning now; but they burned like fire into the hearts of his hearers then, for he promised them glory on earth and felicity in heaven, and he spoke in substance thus: No longer do you attack a castle or a town, but you undertake the conquest of the holy places. If you triumph, the blessings of heaven and the kingdoms of the East will be your share; if you fall, you will have the glory of dying where Christ died, and God will not forget having seen you in His holy army.[101]

Urban told them “that under their general Jesus Christ ... they, the Christian, the invincible army,” would march to certain victory. In the eleventh century this language was no metaphor, for the Cluniac monk spoke as the mouthpiece of a god who was there actually among them, offering the cross he brought from the grave, and promising them triumphs: not the common triumphs which may be won by man’s unaided strength, but the transcendent glory which belongs to beings of another world.

So the crusaders rode out to fight, the originals of the fairy knights, clad in impenetrable armour, mounted on miraculous horses, armed with resistless swords, and bearing charmed lives.

Whole villages, even whole districts, were left deserted; land lost its value; what could not be sold was abandoned; and the peasant, loaded with his poor possessions, started on foot with his wife and children in quest of the Sepulchre, so ignorant of the way that he mistook each town upon the road for Zion. Whether he would or no, the noble had to lead his vassals or be forsaken, and riding at their head with his hawks and hounds, he journeyed towards that marvellous land of wealth and splendour, where kingdoms waited the coming of the devoted knight of God. Thus men, women, and children, princes and serfs, priests and laymen, in a countless, motley throng, surged toward that mighty cross and tomb whose possessor was raised above the limitations of the flesh.

The crusaders had no commissariat and no supply train, no engines of attack, or other weapons than those in their hands, and the holy relics they bore with them. There was no general, no common language, no organization; and so over unknown roads, and through hostile peoples, they wandered from the Rhine to the Bosphorus, and from the Bosphorus to Syria.

These earlier crusades were armed migrations, not military invasions, and had they met with a determined enemy, they must have been annihilated; but it chanced that the Syrians and Egyptians were at war, and the quarrel was so bitter that the caliph actually sought the Christian alliance. Even under such circumstances the waste of life was fabulous, and, had not Antioch been betrayed, the starving rabble must have perished under its walls. At Jerusalem, also, the Franks were reduced to the last extremity before they carried the town; and had it not been for the arrival of a corps of Genoese engineers, who built movable towers, they would have died miserably of hunger and thirst. Nor was the coming of this reinforcement preconcerted. On the contrary, the Italians accidentally lost their ships at Joppa, and, being left without shelter, sought protection in the camp of the besiegers just in time.

So incapable were the crusaders of regular operations, that even when the towers were finished and armed, the leaders did not know how to fill the moat, and Raymond of Saint Gilles had nothing better to propose than to offer a penny for every three stones thrown into the ditch.

On July 15, 1099, Jerusalem was stormed; almost exactly three years after the march began. Eight days later Godfrey de Bouillon was elected king, and then the invaders spread out over the strip of mountainous country which borders the coast of Palestine and Syria, and the chiefs built castles in the defiles of the hills, and bound themselves together by a loose alliance against the common enemy.

The decentralization of the colony was almost incredible. The core of the kingdom was the barony of Jerusalem, which extended only from the Egyptian desert to a stream just north of Beyrout, and inland to the Jordan and the spurs of the hills beyond the Dead Sea, and yet it was divided into more than eighteen independent fiefs, whose lords had all the rights of sovereignty, made war, administered justice, and coined money.[102]

Beside these petty states, the ports were ceded to the Italian cities whose fleets helped in the conquest. Venice, Genoa, and Pisa held quarters in Ascalon, Joppa, Tyre, Acre, and Beyrout, which were governed by consuls or viscounts, who wrangled with each other and with the central government.

Such was the kingdom over which Godfrey reigned, but there were three others like it which together made up the Frankish monarchy. To the north of the barony of Jerusalem lay the county of Tripoli, and beyond Tripoli, extending to Armenia, the principality of Antioch. To the east of Antioch the county of Edessa stretched along the base of the Taurus Mountains and spread out somewhat indefinitely beyond the Euphrates.

Thus on the north Edessa was the outwork of Christendom, while to the south the castle of Karak, which commanded the caravan road between Suez and Damascus, held a corresponding position among the hills to the east of the Dead Sea.

Beyond the mountains the great plain sweeps away into Central Asia, and in this plain the Franks never could maintain their footing. Their failure to do so proved their ruin, for their position lay exposed to attack from Damascus; and it was by operating from Damascus as a base that Saladin succeeded in forcing the pass of Banias, and in cutting the Latin possessions in two at the battle of Tiberias.

A considerable body of Europeans were thus driven in like a wedge between Egypt and the Greek Empire, the two highest civilizations of the Middle Ages, while in front lay the Syrian cities of the plain, with whom the Christians were at permanent war. The contact was the closest, the struggle for existence the sharpest, and the barbaric mind received a stimulus not unlike the impulse Gaul received from Rome; for the interval which separated the East from the West, at the beginning of the twelfth century, was probably not less than that which divided Italy from Gaul at the time of Cæsar.

When Godfrey de Bouillon took the cross, the Byzantine Empire was already sinking. The Eastern trade which, for so many centuries, had nourished its population, was beginning to flow directly from Asia into Italy, and, as the economic aristocracy of the capital lost its nutriment, it lost its energy. Apparently it fell in 1081, in the revolution which raised Alexius Comuenus to the throne. Because Alexius sacked Constantinople with a following of mongrel Greeks, Slavs, and Bulgarians, he has been called the first Greek emperor, but in reality the pure Greek blood had long since perished. The Byzantine population at the end of the eleventh century was the lees of a multitude of races,—a mixture of Slavs, Armenians, Jews, Thracians, and Greeks; a residuum of the most tenacious organisms, after all that was higher had disappeared. The army was a mixed horde of Huns, Arabs, Italians, Britons, Franks; of all in short who could fight and were for sale, while the Church was servile, the fancy dead, and art and literature were redolent of decaying wealth.

Nevertheless, ever since the fall of Rome, Constantinople had been the reservoir whence the West had drawn all its materialistic knowledge, and therefore, it was during the centuries when the valley of the Danube was closed, that the arts fell to their lowest ebb beyond the Alps and Rhine. After pilgrimages began again in the reign of Stephen, the Bosphorus lay once more in the path of travel, and as the returning palmers spread over the West, a revival followed in their track; a revival in which the spirit of Byzantium may yet be clearly read in the architecture of Italy and France. Saint Mark is a feeble imitation of Saint Sophia, while Viollet-le-Duc has described how long he hesitated before he could decide whether the carving of Vézelay, Autun, and Moissac was Greek or French; and has dwelt upon the laborious care with which he pored over all the material, before he became convinced that the stones were cut by artists trained at Cluny, who copied Byzantine models.[103]

But the great gulf between the economic and the imaginative development, separated the moribund Greek society from the semi-childhood of the Franks; a chasm in its nature impassable because caused by a difference of mind, and which is, perhaps, seen most strikingly in religious architecture; for religious architecture, though always embodying the highest poetical aspirations of every civilization, yet had in the East and West diametrically opposite points of departure.

Saint Sophia is pregnant with the spirit of the age of Justinian. There was no attempt at mystery, or even solemnity, about the church, for the mind of the architect was evidently fixed upon solving the problem of providing the largest and lightest space possible, in which to display the functions of a plutocratic court. His solution was brilliantly successful. He enlarged the dome and diminished the supports, until, nothing remaining to interrupt the view, it seemed as though the roof had been suspended in the air. For his purpose the exterior had little value, and he sacrificed it.

The conception of the architects of France was the converse of this, for it was highly emotional. The gloom of the lofty vaults, dimly lighted by the subdued splendour of the coloured windows, made the interior of the Gothic cathedral the most mysterious and exciting sanctuary for the celebration of the miracle which has ever been conceived by man; while without, the doors and windows, the pinnacles and buttresses, were covered with the terrific shapes of demons and the majestic figures of saints, admonishing the laity of the danger lurking abroad, and warning them to take refuge within.

But if the Greeks and the Franks had little affinity for each other, the case was different with the Saracens, who were then in the full vigour of their intellectual prime, and in the meridian of their material splendour.

In the eleventh century, when Paris was still a cluster of huts cowering for shelter on the islands of the Seine, and the palace of the Duke of Normandy and King of England was the paltry White Tower of London, Cairo was being adorned with those masterpieces which are still the admiration of the world.

Prisse d’Avennes considered that, among the city gates the Bab-el-Nasr stands first in “taste and style,” and the famous Bab-el-Zouilyeh is of the same period. He also thought the mosque of Teyloun a “model of elegance and grandeur,” and observed, when criticising the mosque of the Sultan Hassan, built in 1356, that though imposing and beautiful, it lacks the unity which is only found in the earlier Arabic monuments, such as Teyloun.[104] Indeed, the signs are but too apparent that, from the twelfth century, the instinct for form began to fail in Egypt, the surest precursor of artistic decay.

The magnificence of the decoration and furnishing of the Arabic palaces and houses has seldom been surpassed, and a few extracts from an inventory of a sale of the collections of the Caliph Mostanser-Billah, held in 1050, may give some idea of its gorgeousness.

About the time the monk Gerbert was accused of sorcery because he understood the elements of geometry, the Caliph Aziz-Billah founded the university of Cairo, the greatest Mohammedan institution of learning. This was two hundred years before the organization of the university of Paris, and the lectures at the mosque of El-Azhar are said to have been attended by twelve thousand students. Munk was of opinion that Arabic philosophy reached its apogee with Averrhoës, who was born about 1120.[106] Certainly he was the last of a famous line which began at Bagdad three centuries earlier; and Hauréau, in describing the great period of Saint Thomas at Paris, dwelt upon the debt Western learning owed to the Saracens.

The splendour of Haroun-al-Raschid is still proverbial. The tales of his gold and silver, his silks and gems, almost surpass belief, and even in his reign the mechanical arts were so advanced that he sent a clock to Charlemagne.

Humboldt considered the Arabs as the founders of modern experimental science, and they were relatively skilful chemists, for they understood the composition of sulphuric and nitric acid, and of aqua regia, beside the preparation of mercury and of various oxides of metals. As physicians they were far in advance of Europe. While the Church healed by miracles, and put experimental methods under her ban, the famous Rhazes conducted the hospitals of Bagdad, and in the tenth century wrote a work in ten books, which was printed at Venice as late as 15 10. Practitioners of all nations have used his treatise on small-pox and measles; he introduced mild purgatives, invented the seton, and was a remarkable anatomist. He died in 932.

William of Tyre stated that the Frankish nobles of Syria preferred the native or Jewish doctors; and though Saladin sent his physician to Richard, Richard never thought of sending an Englishman to Saladin when afterwards attacked by illness.

Even as late as the middle of the thirteenth century little advance seems to have been made in Europe, for one of the most curious phenomena of the crusades was the improvement in the health of the army of Saint Louis after it surrendered. During the campaign various epidemics had been very fatal; but when the soldiers were subjected to the sanitary regulations of the Egyptian medical staff, disease disappeared.

The Arabs had a strong taste for mathematics, and were familiar with most of the discoveries which have been attributed to astronomers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

As early as 1000 spherical trigonometry was in use, and Aboul-Hassan wrote an excellent treatise on conic sections. In 833 the Caliph El-Mamoun, having founded observatories at Bagdad and Damascus, caused a degree to be measured on the plain of Palmyra. By the thirteenth century the Arabic instruments were comparatively perfect. They had the astrolabe, the gnomon, the sextant, and the mariner’s compass, and Aboul-Wafa determined the third lunar variation six hundred years before Tycho Brahe.

To enumerate all the improvements in agriculture and manufactures which came from the mediæval pilgrimage would take a separate treatise. A French savant thought of writing a book upon the flora of the crusades alone. The mulberry and the silkworm were brought from Greece, the maize from Turkey, the plum from Damascus, the eschalot from Ascalon, and the windmills with which, down to the present century, corn was ground, were one of the importations from the Levant.

It might almost be said that all the West knew of the arts was learned on the road to the sepulchre. The Tyrians taught the Sicilians to refine sugar, and the Venetians to make glass; Damascus steel was a proverb, Damascus potters were the masters of the potters of France; the silk, brocades, and carpets of Syria and Persia were in the twelfth century what they have been down to the present day, at once the admiration and despair of Western weavers, while there can be little doubt that gunpowder was the invention of the chemists of the East.

All the evidence tends to prove that the ogive came from the Levant, and without the ogive Gothic architecture could never have developed.[107] Prior to the council of Clermont the pointed arch was practically unknown west of the Adriatic; but the Arabs had long used it, and it may still be seen in the ninth century mosque of Teyloun.

In Palestine the Franks were surrounded by Saracenic buildings, and employed Saracenic masons, and the attention of Western architects seems no sooner to have been drawn to the possibilities of the ogive, than they saw in it the solution of those problems which had before defied them. An arch formed by two intersecting segments of a circle could be raised to any height from any base, and was perfectly adapted to vaulting the parallelograms formed by the columns of the nave. Therefore, contemporaneously with the building of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the period of transition between the Romanesque and the Gothic opened in France. The two most important transition buildings were the abbey of Saint Denis and the cathedral of Noyon, and, while the Holy Sepulchre was dedicated in 1149, the abbey was completed in 1144, and the cathedral was begun almost immediately after.[108]

Thenceforward the movement was rapid, and before the year 1200, Christian sacred architecture was culminating in those marvels of beauty, the cathedrals of Paris, of Bourges, of Chartres, and of Le Alans. Yet, though sacred architecture tells the story of the rise of the imagination as nothing else can, if it be true that centralization hinges on the preponderance of the attack in war, the surest way of measuring the advance toward civilization of rude peoples must be by military engineering.

In the eleventh century, north of the Alps, this science was rudimentary, and nothing can be more impressive than to compare the mighty ramparts of Constantinople with the small square tower which William the Conqueror found ample for his needs in London.

When the crusaders were first confronted with the Greek and Arabic works, they were helpless; nor were their difficulties altogether those of ignorance. Such fortifications were excessively costly, and a feudal State was poor because the central power had not the force to constrain individuals to pay taxes. The kingdom of Jerusalem was in chronic insolvency.

The life of the Latin colony in Syria, therefore, hung on the development of some financial system which should make the fortification of Palestine possible, and such a system grew up through the operation of the imagination, though in an unusual manner.

Fetish worship drew a very large annual contribution from the population in the shape of presents to propitiate the saints, and one of the effects of the enthusiasm for the crusades was to build up conventual societies in the Holy Land, which acted as standing armies. The most famous of the military orders were the Knights of the Temple and the Knights of Saint John. William of Tyre has left an interesting description of the way in which the Temple came to be organized:—

The council of Troyes was held in 1128, and in the next fifty years, in proportion as the feudal organization of the Latin kingdom decayed, the military orders increased in wealth and power. The Hospital held nineteen thousand manors in Europe, the Temple nine thousand, and each manor could maintain a knight in the field.

At Paris the house of the Temple filled a whole quarter; its donjon was one of the most superb buildings of the Middle Ages; at a later period, when the corporation took to banking, it served as a place of deposit for both public and private treasure, and in times of danger the king himself was glad to take shelter within its walls.

The creation of this monastic standing army was evidently due to the inferiority of the attack to the defence, which made the civil power incapable of coercing the individual who refused to pay taxes. The petty barons who built the castles throughout Palestine were too poor to erect fortifications capable of resisting the superior engines used in the East. Therefore the whole burden of the war was thrown upon the Church, and in all modern history nothing is more wonderful than the way in which this work was done.

Within fifty years after the conquest the feudal machinery was in ruin, and the strategic points, one after another, passed into the hands of the strongest force of the age, the force which was incarnate imagination.

The fortresses built by the monks were the ramparts of Christendom, and among the remains which have survived the past, perhaps none are more impressive than the huge castles of the crusaders in the gorges of the Syrian mountains; nor do any show so clearly whence came the rationalistic stimulus which revolutionized Europe, shattered the Church, and brought in the economic society which has ruled Europe since the Templars passed away.

Twenty-five miles due west of Homs, at the point where the Lebanon melts into the Ansarieh range, the mountains open, and two passes lead by easy descents to the sea. Through the southern runs the road to Tripoli, through the northern that to Tortosa. Between them, on a crag a thousand feet above the valleys, still stands the castle of the Krak des Chevaliers, ceded by Count Raymond of Tripoli to the Hospital in 1145. Towering above the plain it can be seen for miles, and no description can give an idea of its gigantic size and power. Coucy and Pierrefonds are among the largest fortresses of Europe, and yet Coucy and Pierrefonds combined are no larger than the Krak.

Compared with it, the works then built in the West were toys, and the engineering talent shown in its conception was equalled by the magnificence of its masonry. The Byzantine system was adopted. A double wall, the inner commanding the outer, with a moat between; and three enormous towers rising from the moat, formed the donjon. There were stone machicoulis and all the refinements of defence which appeared in France under Saint Louis and his son, and a study of this stupendous monument shows plainly whence Europeans drew their military instruction for a century to come.

The Krak was the outwork dominating the plain where the Christians never made their footing good, and stood at the apex of a triangle of fortresses as remarkable as itself. From its ramparts the great white tower of Chastel-Blanc can be seen, midway between the outpost commanding the mountain passes and the base upon the sea held by the Temple; and from that tower the troop of Templars rode to relieve the knights of Saint John, on the day when the crusaders routed the conqueror Nour-ed-Din, and cut his army to pieces as it fled toward the Lake of Homs, which lies in the distance.

But the white tower is unlike the donjons of other lands, and bears the imprint of the force which built it, for it is not a layman’s hold, but a church, whose windows are cut in walls thirteen feet thick, whence the dim light falls across the altar where the magicians wrought their miracles.

Within easy supporting distance lay Tortosa, a walled town, the outwork of a donjon at least as strong as the Krak, and built with a perfection of workmanship, and a beauty of masonry, which proves at once the knowledge and the resources of the order. No monarch of the West could, probably, at that time have undertaken so costly an enterprise, and yet Tortosa was but one of four vast structures which lie within a few miles of each other. The place was ceded to the Temple in 1183, just at the beginning of the reign of Philip Augustus, before men dreamed of the more important French fortifications.

At Margat, a day’s journey to the north, the Hospital had their base upon the sea: a stronghold whose cost must have been fabulous, for it is perched upon a crag high above the Mediterranean, and so inaccessible that it is not easy to understand how the materials for building were collected. Viollet-le-Duc, who was lost in admiration at Coucy, declared that it was colossal enough to befit a race of giants, and yet Coucy could have stood in the courtyard of Margat.

The Arabs, who were excellent engineers, deemed it a masterpiece, and the Sultan Kalaoun could not endure the thought of injuring it. After he had mined the great tower and was sure of victory, he proved to the garrison his power to destroy it, in order to induce them to accept most liberal terms of surrender, and let him have the prize. Perhaps the best description ever given of the work is in a letter written by the Sultan of Hamah to his vizier to announce its fall:

CHAPTER IV
THE SECOND CRUSADE

As the East was richer than the West, the Saracens were capable of a higher centralization than the Franks, and although they were divided amongst themselves at the close of the eleventh century, no long time elapsed after the fall of Jerusalem before the consolidation began which annihilated the Latin kingdom.

The Sultan of Persia made Zenghi governor of Mosul in 1127. Zenghi, who was the first Atabek, was a commander and organizer of ability, and with a soldier’s instinct struck where his enemy was vulnerable. He first occupied Aleppo, Hamah, and Homs. He then achieved the triumph of his life by the capture of Edessa. The next year he was murdered, and was succeeded by his still more celebrated son, Nour-ed-Din, who made Aleppo his capital, and devoted his life to completing the work his father had begun.

After a series of brilliant campaigns, by a mixture of vigour and address, Nour-ed-Din made himself master of Damascus, and, operating thence as a base, he conquered Egypt, and occupied Cairo in 1169. During the Egyptian war, a young emir, named Saladin, rose rapidly into prominence. He was the nephew of the general in command, at whose death the caliph made him vizier, because he thought him pliable. In this the caliph was mistaken, for Saladin was a man of iron will and consummate ability. William of Tyre even accused him of having murdered the last Fatimite caliph with his own hands in order to cause the succession to pass to Nour-ed-Din, and to seize on the substance of power himself, as Nour-ed-Din’s representative.

Certainly he administered Egypt in his own interest, and not in his master’s; so much so that Nour-ed-Din, having failed to obtain obedience to his commands, had prepared to march against him in person, when, on the eve of his departure, he died. Saladin then moved on Damascus, and having defeated the army of El Melek, the heir to the crown, at Hamah, he had himself declared Sultan of Egypt and Syria.

With a power so centralized the Franks would probably, under the best circumstances, have been unable to cope. The weakness of the Christians was radical, and arose from the exuberance of their imagination, which caused them to proceed by miracles, or more correctly, by magical formulas. An exalted imagination was the basis of the characters of both Louis VII. and Saint Bernard, and the faith resulting therefrom led to the defeat of the second crusade.

The Christian collapse began with the fall of Edessa, for the County of Edessa was the extreme northeastern state of the Latin community, and the key to the cities of the plain. When the first crusaders reached Armenia, Baldwin, brother of Godfrey de Bouillon, conceived the idea of carving a kingdom for himself out of the Christian country to the south of the Taurus range. Taking with him such pilgrims as he could persuade to go, he started from Mamistra, just north of the modern Alexandretta, and marched east along the caravan road. Edessa lay sixteen hours’ ride beyond the Euphrates, and he reached it in safety.

At this time, though Edessa still nominally formed part of the Greek Empire, it was in reality independent, and was governed by an old man named Theodore, who had originally been sent from Constantinople, but who had gradually taken the position of a sovereign. The surrounding country had been overrun by Moslems, and Theodore only maintained himself by paying tribute. The people, therefore, were ready to welcome any Frankish baron capable of defending them; and Baldwin, though a needy adventurer, was an excellent officer, and well adapted to the emergency.

As he drew near, the townsmen went out to meet him, and escorted him to the city in triumph, where he soon supplanted the old Theodore, whom he probably murdered. He then became Count of Edessa, but he remained in the country only two years, for in 1100 he was elected to succeed his brother Godfrey. He was followed as Lord of Edessa by his cousin Godfrey de Bourg, who, in his turn, was crowned King of Jerusalem in 1119, and the next count was de Bourg’s cousin, Joscelin de Courtney, who had previously held as a fief the territory to the west of the Euphrates. This Joscelin was one of the most renowned warriors who ever came from France, and while he lived the frontier was well defended. So high was his prowess that he earned the title of “the great,” in an age when every man was a soldier, and in a country where arms were the only path to fortune save the Church.

The story of his death is one of the most dramatic of that dramatic time. As he stood beneath the wall of a Saracenic tower he had mined, it suddenly fell and buried him in the ruins. He was taken out a mangled mass to die, but, as he lay languishing, news came that the Sultan of Iconium had laid siege to one of his castles near Tripoli. Feeling that he could not sit his horse, he called his son and directed him to collect his vassals and ride to the relief of the fortress. The youth hesitated, fearing that the enemy were too numerous. Then the old man, grieving to think of the fate of his people when he should be gone, had himself slung in a litter between two horses, and marched against the foe.

He had not gone far before he was met by a messenger, who told him that when the Saracens heard the Lord of Courtney was upon the march, they had raised the siege and fled. Then the wounded baron ordered his litter to be set down upon the ground, and, stretching out his hands to heaven, he thanked God who had so honoured him that his enemies dared not abide his coming even when in the jaws of death, and died there where he lay.

The second generation of Franks seems to have deteriorated through the influence of the climate, but the character of the younger Joscelin was not the sole cause of the disasters which overtook him. Probably even his father could not permanently have made head against the forces which were combining against him. The weakness of the Frankish kingdom was inherent: it could not contend with enemies who were further advanced upon the road toward consolidation. Had Western society been enough centralized to have organized a force capable of collecting taxes, and of enforcing obedience to a central administration, a wage-earning army might have been maintained on the frontier. As it was, concentration was impossible, and the scattered nobles were crushed in detail.

Antioch was the nearest supporting point to Edessa, and, when Zenghi made his attack, Raymond de Poitiers, one of the ablest soldiers of his generation, was the reigning prince. But he was at feud with the Courtneys; the king at Jerusalem could not force him to do his duty; the other barons were too distant, even had they been well disposed; and thus the key to the Christian position fell without a blow being struck in its defence.

To that emotional generation the loss of Edessa seemed a reversal of the laws of nature; a consequence not of bad organization but of divine wrath. The invincible relics had suddenly refused to act, and the only explanation which occurred to the men of the time was, that there must have been neglect of the magical formulas.

Saint Bernard never doubted that God would fight if duly propitiated; therefore all else must bend to the task of propitiation: “What think ye, brethren? Is the hand of the Lord weakened, or unequal to the work of defence, that he calls miserable worms to guard and restore his heritage? Is he not able to send more than twelve legions of angels, or, to speak truly, by word deliver his country?”[111]

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the soul of the second crusade, was born at the castle of Fontaines, near Dijon, in 1091, so that his earliest impressions must have been tinged by the emotional outburst which followed the council of Clermont. The third son of noble parents, he resembled his mother, who had the ecstatic temperament. While she lived she tried to imitate the nuns, and at her death she was surrounded by holy clerks, who sung with her while she could speak, and, when articulation failed, watched her lips moving in praise to God.

From the outset, Bernard craved a monastic life, and when he grew up insisted on dedicating himself to Heaven. His first success was the conversion of his brothers, whom he carried with him to the cloister, with the exception of the youngest, who was then a child. As the brothers passed through the castle courtyard, on their way to the convent, Guy, the eldest, said to the boy, who was playing there with other children, “Well, Nivard, all our land is now yours.” “So you will have heaven and I earth,” the child answered; “that is an unequal division.” And a few years after he joined his brothers.[112] The father and one daughter then were left alone, and at last they too entered convents, where they died.

At twenty-two, when Bernard took his vows at Citeaux, his influence was so strong that he carried with him thirty of his comrades, and mothers are said to have hid their sons from him, and wives their husbands, lest he should lure them away. He actually broke up so many homes that the abandoned wives formed a nunnery, which afterward grew rich.

His abilities were so marked that his superiors singled him out, when he had hardly finished his novitiate, to found a house in the wilderness. This house became Clairvaux, in the twelfth century the most famous monastery of the world.

In the Middle Ages, convents were little patronized until by some miracle they had proved themselves worthy of hire; their early years were often passed in poverty, and Clairvaux was no exception to the rule, for the brethren suffered privations which nearly caused revolt. In the midst of his difficulties, Bernard’s brother Gérard, who was cellarer, came to him to complain that the fraternity were without the barest necessities of life. The man of God asked, “How much will suffice for present wants?” Gérard replied, “Twelve pounds.” Bernard dismissed him and betook himself to prayer. Soon after Gérard returned and announced that a woman was without and wished to speak with him. “She, when he had come to her, prostrating herself at his feet, offered him a gift of twelve pounds, imploring the aid of his prayers for her husband, who was dangerously sick. Having briefly spoken with her, he dismissed her, saying: ‘Go. You will find your husband well.’ She, going home, found what she had heard had come to pass. The abbot comforting the weakness of his cellarer, made him stronger for bearing other trials from God.”[113]

Although his family were somewhat sceptical about his gifts, and even teased him to tears, the monk William tells, in his chronicle, how he soon performed an astounding miracle which made Clairvaux a “veritable valley of light,” and then wealth poured in upon him.

Meanwhile, his constitution, which had never been vigorous, had been so impaired by his penances that he was unable to follow the monastic life in its full rigour, and he therefore threw himself into politics, to which he was led both by taste and by the current of events.

Clairvaux was founded in 1115, and fifteen years later Bernard had risen high in his profession. The turning-point in his life was the part he took in the recognition of Innocent II. In 1130, Honorius II. died, and two popes were chosen by the college of cardinals, Anacletus and Innocent II. Anacletus stayed in Rome, but Innocent crossed the Alps, and a council was summoned at Étampes to decide upon his title. By a unanimous vote the question was referred to Bernard, and his biographer described how he examined the evidence with fear and trembling, and how at last the Holy Ghost spoke through his mouth, and he recognized Innocent. His decision was ratified, and soon after he managed to obtain the adhesion of the King of England to the new pontiff.

His success made him the foremost man in Europe, and when, in 1145, one of his monks was raised to the papacy as Eugenius III., he wrote with truth, “I am said to be more pope than you.”

Perhaps no one ever lived more highly gifted with the ecstatic temperament than Saint Bernard. He had the mysterious attribute of miracles, and, in the twelfth century, the miracle was, perhaps, the highest expression of force. To work them was a personal gift, and the possessor of the faculty might, at his caprice, use his power, like the sorcerer, to aid or injure other men.

One day as Saint Bernard was on his way to a field at harvest time, the monk who drove the donkey on which he rode, fell in an epileptic fit. “Seeing which the holy man had pity on him, and entreated God that for the future he would not seize him unaware.” Accordingly from that day until his death, twenty years after, “whenever he was to fall from that disease, he felt the fit coming for a certain space of time, so that he had an opportunity to lie down on a bed, and so avert the bruises of a sudden fall.”[114]

This cure was a pure act of grace, like alms, made to gratify the whim of the saint; and a man who could so control nature was more powerful than any other on earth. Bernard was such a man, and for this reason he was chosen by acclamation to preach the second crusade.

His sermons have perished, but two of his letters have survived,[115] and they explain the essential weakness of a military force raised on the basis of supernatural intervention. He looked upon the approaching campaign as merely the vehicle for a miracle, and as devised to offer to those who entered on it a special chance for salvation. Therefore he appealed to the criminal classes. “For what is it but an exquisite and priceless chance of salvation due to God alone, that the Omnipotent should deign to summon to his service, as though they were innocent, murderers, ravishers, adulterers, perjurers, and those guilty of every crime?”[116]

Even had an army composed of such material been well disciplined and well led, it would have been untrustworthy in the face of an adversary like Nour-ed-Din; but Louis VII. of France was as emotional and as irrational as Saint Bernard. His father had been a great commander, but he himself had been educated in the Abbey of Saint Denis, and justified his wife’s scornful jest, who, when she left him for Raymond de Poitiers, said she had married a monk. The whole world held him lightly, even the priests sneered at him, and Innocent II. spoke of him as a child “who must be stopped from learning rebellion.” Indeed, the pope underrated him, for he appointed his own nephew to the See of Bourges in defiance of the king, and the insult roused him to resistance. Louis raised an army and invaded the County of Champagne, where the bishop had taken refuge. There he stormed and burnt Vitry, and some thirteen hundred men, women, and children, who had taken refuge in the church, perished in the flames of the blazing town. Horror seems to have unhinged his mind, absolution did not calm him, and at last he came to believe that his only hope of salvation lay in a pilgrimage to the Sepulchre. On Palm Sunday, 1146, when Bernard harangued a vast throng at Vézelay, the king was the first to prostrate himself, and take the cross from his hands.

With that day began the most marvellous part of the saint’s marvellous career, and were the events which followed less well authenticated, they would be incredible. In that age miracles were as common as medical cures are now, and yet Bernard’s performances so astonished his contemporaries that they drew up a solemnly attested record of what they saw, that the story of his preaching might never be questioned.

When he neared a town the bells were rung, and young and old, from far and near, thronged about him in crowds so dense that, at Constance, no one saw what passed, because no one dared to venture into the press. At Troyes he was in danger of being suffocated. Elsewhere the sick were brought to him by a ladder as he stood at a window out of reach. What he did may be judged by the work of a single day.

Thus, literally by thousands, the blind saw, the lame walked, the maimed were made whole. He cast out devils, turned water into wine, raised the dead. But no modern description can give an idea of the paroxysm of excitement; the stories must be read in the chronicles themselves. Yet, strangely enough, such was the strength of the materialistic inheritance from the Empire, that Bernard does not always seem fully to have believed in himself. He was tinged with some shade of scepticism. The meeting at Vézelay was held on March 24, 1146. Four weeks later, on April 21, at a council held at Chartres, the command of the army to invade Palestine was offered to the Abbot of Clairvaux. Had the saint thoroughly believed in himself and his twelve legions of angels, he would not have hesitated, for no enemy could have withstood God. In fact he was panic-stricken, and wrote a letter to the pope which might befit a modern clergyman.

After explaining that he had been chosen commander against his will, he exclaimed, “Who am I, that I should set camps in order, or should march before armed men? Or what is so remote from my profession, even had I the strength, and the knowledge were not lacking?... I beseech you, by that charity you especially owe me, that you do not abandon me to the wills of men.”[118]

During 1146 and 1147 two vast mixed multitudes, swarming with criminals and women, gathered at Metz and Ratisbon. As a fighting force these hosts were decidedly inferior to the bands which had left Europe fifty years before, under Tancred and Godfrey de Bouillon, and they were besides commanded by the semi-emasculated King of France.

The Germans cannot be considered as having taken any part in the war, for they perished without having struck a blow. The Greek emperor caused them to be lured into the mountains of Asia Minor, where they were abandoned by their guides, and wasted away from exposure, hunger, and thirst, until the Saracens destroyed them without allowing them to come to battle.

The French fared little better. In crossing the Cadmus Mountains, their lack of discipline occasioned a defeat, which made William of Tyre wonder at the ways of God.

Soon after this check Louis was joined by the Grand Master of the Temple, under whose guidance he reached Atalia, a Greek port in Pamphylia: and here, had the king been a rationalist, he would have stormed the town and used it as a base of operations against Syria. In the eyes of laymen, the undisguised hostility of the emperor would have fully justified such an attack. But Louis was a devotee, bound by a vow to the performance of a certain mystic formula, and one part of his vow was not to attack Christians during his pilgrimage. In his mind the danger of disaster from supernatural displeasure was greater than the strategic advantage; and so he allowed his army to rot before the walls in the dead of winter, without tents or supplies, until it wasted to a shadow of its former strength.

Finally the governor contracted to provide shipping, but he delayed for another five weeks, and when the transports came they were too few. Even then Louis would not strike, but abandoning the poor and sick to their fate, he sailed away with the flower of his troops, and by spring the corpses of those whom he had deserted bred a pestilence which depopulated the city.

When he arrived at Antioch new humiliations and disasters awaited him. Raymond de Poitiers was one of the handsomest and most gifted men of this time. Affable, courteous, brave, and sagacious, in many respects a great captain, his failing was a hot temper, which led him to his ruin. He forsook Joscelin through jealousy, and the fall of Edessa cost him throne and life.

After the successes of Zenghi, a very short experience of Nour-ed-Din sufficed to convince Prince Raymond that Antioch could not be held without re-establishing the frontier; and when Louis arrived, Raymond tried hard to persuade him to abandon his pilgrimage for that season, and make a campaign in the north.

William of Tyre thought the plan good, and believed that the Saracens were, for the moment, too demoralized to resist. Evidently, by advancing from Antioch, Nour-ed-Din could have been isolated, whereas on the south he was covered by Damascus, one of the strongest places in the East.

Such considerations had no weight with Louis, for, to his emotional temperament, military strategy lay in obtaining supernatural aid, without which no wisdom could avail, and with which victory was sure. He therefore insisted on the punctilious performance of the religious rites, and one of the most interesting passages in William of Tyre is the account of the interview between him and Raymond, when a movement against the cities of the north was discussed.

This refusal so exasperated Prince Raymond that he threw off all disguise, and became the avowed lover of the queen, who detested her husband. Louis, shortly afterward, escaped by night from Antioch, taking Eleanor with him by force, and thus the only hope for the recovery of Edessa was lost.

For the emotionalist everything yielded to the transcendent importance of propitiatory rites; therefore Louis ascended Calvary, kissed the stones, intoned the chants, received the benediction, and lost Palestine. Thus, by the middle of the twelfth century, the idealist had begun to flag in the struggle for life.

An attempt, indeed, was afterwards made upon Damascus, but it only served to expose the weakness of the men who relied on magic. By the time the advance began, confidence had been restored among the Saracens, the attack was repulsed, and Nour-ed-Din had only to move from the north to throw the crusaders back upon Jerusalem, covered with ridicule. Nothing conveys so vivid an idea of the shock these reverses gave believers, as the words in which Saint Bernard defended his prophecies.

According to the account of William of Tyre, both sides felt the end to be near. After the failure of Louis the Pious, Prince Raymond was the first to go down before the storm he had too late seen gathering. Nour-ed-Din fell upon his country with fire and sword, defeated him, cut off his head and right arm, and sent them to Bagdad as trophies. The wretched Joscelin died in a dungeon at Aleppo, while Nour-ed-Din entered Damascus, and thus consolidated the Syrian cities of the plain. Thenceforward the decentralized Franks lay helpless in the grasp of their compact adversary, and all that was imaginative in the Middle Ages received its death-wound at Tiberias. That action was the beginning of the decay of fetish-worship.

The crusaders believed they had found the cross on which Christ died at Jerusalem. They venerated it as a charm no less powerful than the Sepulchre itself, and having this advantage over the tomb, that it was portable. They thought it invincible, and used it not only as a weapon against living enemies, but as a means of controlling nature. A remarkable example of the magical properties of this relic was given in the retreat from Bosra.

Baldwin III. was crowned in 1144, when only thirteen. The kingdom was then at peace with Damascus, in whose territory Bosra lay; but, notwithstanding, the child’s advisers eagerly listened to the offer of the emir in command to betray the town, and hastened forward the departure of an expedition, in spite of the protests of the envoys from Damascus. On the march the troops suffered severely from heat and thirst, and on their arrival were appalled to find a loyal garrison. A siege was out of the question, and a regular retreat so hazardous that the barons besought the king to fly and save the cross; but the boy refused, and stayed with his men to fight to the last. The outlook was terrible, for the vegetation was dry, and when the march began—

Even then they were in extreme peril, for but one way was open, for which they had no guide. Suddenly, a “knight appeared before the troop whom no one in the host knew. He sat a white horse, and carried a crimson banner, he wore a hauberk, whose sleeves came only to the elbow. He offered to guide them, and he put himself in front; he brought them to cool sweet springs; ... he made them sleep in comfortable and good places. And he so guided them that on the third day they came to the city of Gadre.”[122]

The mighty relic of the cross was taken and defiled by the Saracens at Hattin, where the Christians suffered a decisive defeat, caused by the impotence of the central administration at Jerusalem.

Reginald de Chatillon was the type of the twelfth century adventurer. He came to Palestine in the train of Louis the Pious, and he stayed there because he married a princess. He was a brave soldier, but greedy, violent, and rash, and his insubordination precipitated the catastrophe which led to the fall of the capital.

At the siege of Ascalon he so fascinated Constance, Princess of Antioch, widow of Raymond, that she persisted in marrying him, although she was sought by many of the greatest nobles, and he was only a knight. Her choice was disastrous. He had hardly entered on his government in the north before he quarrelled with the Greek emperor, who forced him to do penance with a rope about his neck. Afterward he was taken prisoner by Nour-ed-Din, who only liberated him after sixteen years, when his wife was dead. He soon married again, this time also another great heiress, Etiennette de Milly, Lady of Karak and Montréal, and, as her husband, Reginald became commander of the fortress of Karak to the east of the Dead Sea, which formed the defence against Egypt. But as the commander of so important a post, this reckless and rapacious adventurer defied the authority of his feudal superior, and by plundering caravans on the Damascus road so irritated Saladin that “in 1187 he burst, with a powerful army, into the Holy Land, made King Guy prisoner, and the Prince Reginald, whose head he cut off with his own hand.”[123]

Guy de Lusignan had been crowned at Jerusalem the year before Saladin’s invasion, and when war broke out he was at feud with the Count of Tripoli. The imminence of the common danger brought about some semblance of cohesion among the nobles, who agreed to put every available man in the field. The castles were stripped of their garrisons so that they were indefensible in case of reverse, and about fifty thousand troops were concentrated at Sepphoris in Galilee.

The contingents of the Temple and Hospital were well organized and well disciplined, but the army, as a whole, was rather a loose gathering of the retainers of thirty or forty independent chiefs, than a compact mass, subject to a single will, such as the Egyptian revenues enabled Saladin to put in the field.

Suddenly news came to Sepphoris, that the Saracens had poured through the pass of Banias and lay before Tiberias. Dissensions broke out at once, which Guy de Lusignan could not control. He was not a man of strong character, and had he been, he was only one among a dozen princes, any one of whom could quit the army and retire to his castle if he felt so disposed. The Count of Tripoli, who seems to have been the ablest soldier among the Franks, saw the folly of leaving water and marching across a burning country under a July sun, instead of waiting to be attacked. As he represented, he of all men was most interested in relieving Tiberias, for it was his town, and his wife was within the walls; yet such was the jealousy of him in the Latin camp that his advice was rejected, and an advance began on July 3, 1187.

Three miles from Tiberias the action opened by a furious attack on the rearguard, formed by the Temple and the Hospital. When they gave ground Guy lost heart and ordered a halt. The night which followed was frightful. The Moslems fired the dry undergrowth, and, amidst flames and smoke, the Franks lay till dawn, tormented by hunger and thirst, and exposed to clouds of arrows which the enemy poured in on them.

At dawn fighting began again, but the demoralized infantry fled to a hill, whence they refused to move. The Count of Tripoli, seeing the battle lost, cut his way out with a band of his followers, but Guy de Lusignan, Reginald de Chatillon, and a multitude of knights and nobles were captured. The orders were practically annihilated, the whole able-bodied population cut to pieces, and the holy cross, which had been borne before the host as an invincible engine of war, was seized and defiled on the mountain where Jesus taught his disciples to love their enemies.

Emmad-Eddin, an Arabic historian, has described the veneration of the Christians for their talisman, their adoration of it in peace, and their devotion to it in battles; and his words help a modern generation to conceive the shock its worshippers received when it betrayed its helplessness.