The Historians' History of the World 08

The penalties which the church inflicted on its members, as the temporal punishments of sin, might have been unwarranted by Scripture, and were doubtless often awarded by cruelty and caprice. But the practice of prayer, fasting, and alms-giving, was in itself salubrious to the individual, and beneficial to society. It softened pride; it subdued the sensual passions; it diffused charity. Instead of these blessings, the slaughter of human beings was made the propitiation of offence; and the Christian virtues of self-denial and benevolence were considered an absurd and antiquated fashion. As the discipline of the church had been broken in upon for one purpose, it could be violated for another. The repentant sinner who could not take the cross himself, might contribute to the charge of the holy expedition. When offences were once commuted for money, the religious application of the price of pardon soon ceased to be necessary. Absolutions from penance became a matter of traffic, and holy virtues were discountenanced. For this reason, and for many others, the Crusades conferred no benefits on morals. The evils of a life free from domestic restraints, formed a strong argument against pilgrimages in very early ages of the church, and it does not appear that when the wanderers became soldiers their morals improved. The vices of the military colonists in Palestine are the burden of many a page of the crusading annalists. Something must be detracted from those representations in consequence of their authors’ prejudice that the vices of the Christians in the Holy Land effected the ruin of the kingdom. Yet enough remains to show that the tone of morals was not at a higher pitch in Palestine than in Europe. The decrees of the council at Nablus (Shechem or Neapolis) prove that a difference of religion, although a barrier against the dearest charities of life, was no impediment to a vicious sensual intercourse between the Franks and the Moslems. The Latins lived in a constant course of plunder on their Mussulman neighbours, and therefore on their return to Europe could not spread around them any rays of virtue.[82]

POLITICAL EFFECTS

As the Crusades were carried on for holy objects, not for civil or national ends, their connection with politics could only have been collateral and indirect. The spirit of crusading, composed as it was of superstition and military ardour, was hostile to the advancement of knowledge and liberty; and consequently no improvement in the civil condition of the kingdoms of the West could have been the legitimate issue of the principles of the holy wars. The pope was the only monarch who mixed politics with his piety. The other princes seem to have been influenced by the spirit of religion or of chivalry; and it was only in the attempts again to disorder the intellect of Europe, that we find one monarch, Henry IV of England, acting the part of a crafty politician.

Great changes in the political aspect of Europe were coeval with but were not occasioned by the holy wars. The power of the French crown was much higher at the end of the thirteenth, than it had been at the same period of the eleventh century; but the influence of the imperial throne was materially depressed. These opposite effects could never have been the simple results of the same cause; namely, the loss of the flower of the western aristocracy in Palestine.

The causes of the depression of imperial authority were the aggrandisement of the nobles (a natural effect of the feudal system); the improvident grants of lands which the Swabian family made to the clergy; the contests between the popes and emperors respecting their different jurisdictions, and, above all the rest, the destructive wars which the emperors waged in the north of Italy for the reannexation of that country to the throne of the descendants of the imperial house of Charlemagne.

German Crusader of the Early Crusades