The Historians' History of the World 08

[78] See Matthew of Parisc and also Fuller.d “About this time (1250) many thousands of the English were resolved for the holy war, and would needs have been gone, had not the king strictly guarded his ports, and kept his kingdom from running away out of doors. The king promised he would go with them; and hereupon got a mass of money from them for this journey. Some say that he never intended it, and that this only was a trick to stroke the skittish cow to get down her milk. His stubborn subjects said that they would tarry for his company till midsummer, and no longer. Thus they weighed out their obedience with their own scales; and the king stood to their allowance. But hearing of the ill success of the French, both prince and people altered their resolution, who had come too late to help the French in their distress, and too soon to bring themselves into the same misery.”

[79] “It is storied,” says Fuller,d “how Eleanor, his lady, sucked all the poison out of his wounds without doing any harm to herself. So sovereign a remedy is a woman’s tongue, anointed with the virtue of loving affection. Pity it is that so pretty a story should not be true (with all the miracles in love’s legends), and sure he shall get himself no credit, who undertaketh to confute a passage so sounding to the honour of the sex. Yet can it not stand with what others have written.”

[80] Henry when young had endeavoured to implant Christianity in Lithuania vi et armis. When king he gained the friendship of the clergy by aiding them to put down the followers of Wycliffe.

[81] [See also the History of the Papacy for a full account of this tragedy.]

CHAPTER VII. CONSEQUENCES OF THE CRUSADES

[1096-1291 A.D.]

No religious wars have ever been so long, so sanguinary, and so destructive as the Crusades. Countless hosts of holy warriors fell the victims of their own vindictive enthusiasm and military ardour. Fierceness and intolerance were the strongest features in the character of the dark ages, and it is, perhaps, not so much in the conduct, as in the object, of the Crusades, that anything distinct and peculiar can be marked. It was not for the conversion of people, nor the propagation of opinions, but for the redemption of the sepulchre of Christ, and the destruction of the enemies of God, that the crimson standard was unfurled. The western world did not cast itself into Asia from any view of expediency, or in consequence of any abstract theoretical principle of a right of hostility; men did not arm themselves from any conviction that the co-existence of Christendom and Islamism was compatible with the doctrines of the Koran, or that the countries of the West would be precipitated into the gulf of destruction, if Asia Minor were not torn from the Seljuk Turks, and restored to the emperor of Constantinople. But the flame of war spread from one end of Europe to the other, for the deliverance of the Holy Land from a state which was called pollution; and the floodgates of fanaticism were unlocked for the savage and iniquitous purpose of extermination. But popular madness would not listen to the calls of generous policy and lofty ambition. The wish for the redemption of the Holy Land was the feeling which influenced both Godfrey de Bouillon and St. Louis, the first and last great champions of the cross; it was that wild desire which moved Europe for two centuries, and without it the Crusades would never have been undertaken.

The question of the justice of the holy wars is one of easy solution. The crusaders were not called upon by heaven to carry on hostilities against the Mussulmans. Palestine did not, of right, belong to the Christians in consequence of any gift of God; and it was evident, from the fact of the destruction of the second temple, that there was no longer any peculiar sanctity in the ground of Jerusalem. There is no command in the Scriptures for Christians to build the walls of the Holy City, and no promise of an earthly Canaan as the reward of virtue. If the Christians had been animated by the conviction that war with all the world was the vital principle of the Mohammedan religion, then also a right of hostility would have been raised.