The crusades had come to an end. The embers smouldered on: but it was to the last degree unlikely that they would be rekindled. The great military orders withdrew to seek a field for their energies elsewhere; the Teutonic knights to the dreary regions of Lithuania and Poland,—the knights of the Hospital first to Cyprus, then to Rhodes where, after many a hard fight with Greeks and Saracens, they achieved the conquest of the whole island and settled down to repose in their earthly paradise. The dream of returning to Palestine still haunted the mind of Edward I., who by his will left 30,000l. for the equipment and maintenance of the knights who were to bear his heart to the Holy Land; but probably the last reflection of the old fire is seen in the words by which Henry V. in his dying moments asserted the bounden duty of princes to build the walls of Jerusalem, and declared that, had he been spared for a longer life, or had he lived in quieter times, he would have undertaken this task of restoration. Even now, perhaps, the task was one of no insuperable difficulty. Its practicability had been shown more than once by its accomplishment; but it was one which must be taken in hand in the spirit of that wise and tolerant statesmanship which seeks to further the interests of the subject population, and to make one people of the conquerors and the conquered. This idea was, as we have seen, deliberately rejected by the first crusaders, and, with the single exception of the emperor Henry at Constantinople (p. 170), by all who followed them. There is no reason to suppose that the English Henry V. would have been animated by a wiser spirit and a larger charity than the companions of Godfrey and Tancred.

The soil of Palestine had been watered abundantly with the blood both of Christians and of infidels. The soil of Europe, chiefly that of France, was to drink the blood of that haughty but valiant order which had done as much to destroy as to maintain the hold of Latin Christendom on Palestine. Among all the monstrous iniquities which perjured kings and godless statesmen have ever perpetrated, the lies and cruelties, the persistent and diabolical injustice which attended the suppression of the Knights Templars must hold very nearly the first place. These men may have, nay undoubtedly they had, committed enormous crimes themselves; but these were crimes done in the sight of the sun and shared by all crusaders of every generation, the saintly Louis of France forming, it would seem, the solitary exception. Now, when their services were no longer needed or could no more be of use in Palestine, the benefits to be derived from a confiscation of their properties became patent to Philip the Fair, the brutal tyrant, the profligate murderer, the unscrupulous thief, who bullied the pope, Clement V., into a recognition of charges which at first he had rightly cast aside as absurd, extravagant, and impossible. False witness, tortures, hunger, thirst, darkness, filth, and disease in sunless dungeons, were all used with consummate skill and pertinacity to subdue the warriors who in the field had never quailed. Taken one by one, some made confessions which were drawn from them by excruciating agonies, and which, when these agonies ceased, were indignantly withdrawn. With his remaining comrades the last grand-master died, solemnly asserting the innocence of his order—an innocence unquestionably real, if we confine ourselves to the charges brought against them by Philip and his myrmidons; and the kings of France, made wealthier by their iniquities, laid up another count for the great indictment to be brought against their luckless representative in the French revolution. In England the proceedings against the Templars, shameful though they were, fell infinitely short of the disgrace which covered the king and the judges of France: but in both countries it was seen what might be done by malignant lies uttered boldly under the plea of maintaining the truth and the righteousness of God.

In this process we see, in fact, the legitimate result of the crusades. The unbelief of the Saracen was a sufficient reason for wresting from him a country which was regarded as the inalienable heritage of Christendom: the alleged unbelief or profanity of Templars was a sufficient reason for hounding on judges to their destruction; and the heresies truly or falsely alleged against any persons whatsoever would be a thorough warrant for carrying fire and sword through their land, if gentler means failed to extort submission. The lesson had been soon learnt; and while Dandolo and Baldwin were laying the foundations of the short-lived Latin empire at Constantinople, Innocent was preaching a crusade against the peaceable, although perhaps not strictly orthodox, subjects of count Raymond of Toulouse. The attempt to put down error by force was producing its natural fruits; and men like Bernard and Innocent were brought to consider every means lawful, every weapon hallowed, against the wretched enemies of Christ and of his Church. Horrible miscreants, like the inquisitors Fulk of Marseilles and Arnold of Amaury, could without a pang of remorse involve in one common slaughter the aged and the young, the mother and the infant; and Simon of Montfort, cased in the triple armour of a heart harder than the nether millstone, could exult with savage joy over the massacres of his sword and the torments of the Inquisition. In this awful chaos Frederick II., the enemy of the pope, the friends of Saracenic philosophers, of Moslem women, joined furiously in the fray. Near in its ideal, and similar in some points of its development, as was the careless society of the troubadour to his own luxurious civilization in Sicily, yet not a sign is there to show that he regarded with the least emotion its rapid and terrible catastrophe. His appreciation of their Gay Science, of their art, their refinement, and their luxury, was chilled and quenched by the thought of the vile crowd of Petrobrussians and other vulgar heretics, by whom these careless voluptuaries were surrounded. Well may it be said that never in any history were the principles of justice, the faith of treaties, common humanity so trampled under foot as in the Albigensian crusade, ‘Slay on; God will know his own,’ was the cry of the papal legate before the walls of Beziers; and this easy method of settling a long controversy was the moral logically drawn from the preaching of the hermit Peter and of Bernard of Clairvaux.

It is possible that the historian who seeks to account for all the characteristics which mark the era of the crusades may connect these expeditions with some events which should be traced to other causes. The impulses which bring vast crowds together for any purpose are always more or less contagious: and the middle ages exhibit, throughout, a series of enthusiastic risings. The outbreak of the Pastoureaux, or Shepherds (so called from their supposed simplicity), which for a time led astray even Blanche of Castile (p. 196), took place, perhaps only by an accidental coincidence, while Louis IX. was a captive in Egypt: but it was only one of a thousand instances of what has well been termed superstition set in motion. To this class belong probably the expeditions known as the Children’s crusades, although these were started with the idea of recovering the Holy Cross from the infidel. A few words may suffice to tell the miserable story how in France under the boy Stephen 30,000 children encamped around Vendome; how 10,000 were lost or had strayed away before they reached Marseilles a month later; how there they waited under a conviction that the waters of the Mediterranean would be cloven asunder to give them a passage on dry land; how at length two merchants offered ‘for the cause of God and without charge’ to convey them in ships to Palestine; and how the 5,000 children, who sailed from the harbour chanting the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, found themselves at the end of their voyage in the slave markets of Alexandria and Algiers. A pendant to this woful tale is found in the sufferings of the 20,000 German boys and girls who set out in the same year from Cologne under the peasant lad Nicholas 20,000 strong, and of whom 5,000 only reached Genoa. Of the rest some had returned home: some marched to Brindisi, and, setting sail for Palestine, were never heard of more. The fortune of those who found their way to Genoa was more happy. Invited to settle there by the senate, many became wealthy, and not a few, rising to distinction, founded some of the noblest families in the state.

But as the motives which led to the crusades were complex, so their results were complex also. The picture must not be presented only in its darker aspects. We have seen the effect which they produced on the growth of the temporal power of the popes. We must not forget that by rolling back the tide of Mahomedan conquest from Constantinople for upwards of four centuries they probably saved Europe from horrors the recital of which might even now make our ears tingle; that by weakening the resources and the power of the barons they strengthened the authority of the kings acting in alliance with the citizens of the great towns; that this alliance broke up the feudal system, gradually abolished serfdom, and substituted the authority of a common law for the arbitrary will of chiefs who for real or supposed affronts rushed to the arbitrament of private war. Worthless in themselves, and wholly useless as means for founding any permanent dominion in Palestine or elsewhere, these enterprises have affected the commonwealths of Europe in ways of which the promoters never dreamed. They left a wider gulf between the Greek and the Latin churches, between the subjects of the Eastern empire and the nations of Western Europe; but by the mere fact of throwing East and West together they led gradually to that interchange of thought and that awakening of the human intellect to which we owe all that distinguishes our modern civilization from the religious and political systems of the middle ages.