chapter 9._

The brutality and destructiveness of the Crusades.

"The Church of the Albigenses had been drowned in blood. These supposed heretics had been swept away from the soil of France. The rest of the Languedocian people had been overwhelmed with calamity, slaughter, and devastation. The estimates transmitted to us of the numbers of the invaders and of the slain are such as almost surpass belief. We can neither verify nor correct them; but we certainly know that, during a long succession of years, Languedoc had been invaded by armies more numerous than had ever before been brought together in European warfare since the fall of the Roman empire. We know that these hosts were composed of men inflamed by bigotry and unrestrained by discipline; that they had neither military pay nor magazines; that they provided for all their wants by the sword, living at the expense of the country, and seizing at their pleasure both the harvests of the peasants and the merchandise of the citizens. More than three-fourths of the landed proprietors had been despoiled of their fiefs and castles. In hundreds of villages, every inhabitant had been massacred. … Since the sack of Rome by the Vandals, the European world had never mourned over a national disaster so wide in its extent or so fearful in its character."

_Sir J. Stephen, Lectures on the History of France, lecture 7._

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ALBION.

"The most ancient name known to have been given to this island [Britain] is that of Albion. … There is, however, another allusion to Britain which seems to carry us much further back, though it has usually been ill understood. It occurs in the story of the labours of Hercules, who, after securing the cows of Geryon, comes from Spain to Liguria, where he is attacked by two giants, whom he kills before making his way to Italy. Now, according to Pomponius Mela, the names of the giants were Albiona and Bergyon, which one may, without much hesitation, restore to the forms of Albion and Iberion, representing, undoubtedly, Britain and Ireland, the position of which in the sea is most appropriately symbolized by the story making them sons of Neptune or the sea-god. … Even in the time of Pliny, Albion, as the name of the island, had fallen out of use with Latin authors; but not so with the Greeks, or with the Celts themselves, at any rate those of the Goidelic branch; for they are probably right who suppose that we have but the same word in the Irish and Scotch Gælic Alba, genitive Alban, the kingdom of Alban or Scotland beyond the Forth. Albion would be a form of the name according to the Brythonic pronunciation of it. … It would thus appear that the name Albion is one that has retreated to a corner of the island, to the whole of which it once applied."

_J. Rhys, Celtic Britain,

ALSO IN _E. Guest, Origines Celticae,