CHAPTER XV

THE CRUSADES

We have seen that the kings of the date to which this greatest story now has come, do not seem to have realised that if they partitioned up their possessions among several sons the result was likely to be that there would be disunion and righting. Charlemagne had three sons, and would, it appears, have divided his Empire by his will among them, but two of those sons died, so that the whole Empire came into the hands of the survivor.

This survivor, however, had, in his turn, three sons, and at his death the Empire was divided amongst the three. In this division we see the beginnings of the present arrangement of the greater part of Europe, for one son took a territory of which the boundaries were nearly the same as those of modern France, another had what corresponds more or less to Germany of to-day, and the third to something very like modern Italy. The Italian brother, the eldest, had the title of Emperor.

And now--to state shortly what was the rather natural outcome of that division--the kings, or those who claimed the kingship, of those territories fought over their possessions for at least a century and a half, 150 years.

Of course that meant that the people of the country were in constant misery and fear of their lives and uncertainty about any property they might have. {127} Bands of soldiers, followers of their feudal lords, went about the country, and were very rough and brutal, taking all they could find and paying nothing. The authority of the king could not deal with these disturbers of the peace. The big landowners grew more and more independent of the king. He might be their feudal lord, in name, but for all this century and a half the King of France had no more power than several of the great lords themselves. More and more then it became necessary for the poorer class, if they would live safely, to live under the protection of one or other of the big men. This led to the clustering of the houses of the poor people round about the castle, the strong place, of their lord. He organised them as a fighting force, when fighting had to be done, and stood for them in place of the king. They were his faithful subjects, getting his protection as their return for working and fighting for him. Some of these lords grew so powerful and so dangerous to the king that he was glad to grant them their independence and full possession of their lands in return for their assurance that they would not take arms against him and attack his territory.

[Sidenote: Normandy]

Now all the while that the Danes and Northmen were harrying the shores of England they paid their attentions no less to the coasts of France, going up the Seine to Rouen, especially, and establishing winter quarters there very much as the Danes did in England. The emperor and the kings of France strove against them, but if they were defeated they only came back again in numbers larger than before. The end of it was that in the beginning of the tenth century the king deemed it his best policy to give up to the Northmen or Normans all that Normandy which they held despite all he could do against them. He made it condition that they should become Christians. And thus it was that they were firmly established as a {128} Duchy under a Duke (dux, or leader) at the date of their conquest of England in 1066.

Descendants of Charlemagne continued to sit on the throne of France until near the end of the tenth century, when one Hugh Capet, a great noble, was elected by his fellow-nobles as king. Note that; that it was by an election of the feudal lords, not because he had a hereditary right--that is, a right by birth--to the throne, that he became king. And how long that dynasty of the Capetian kings, as they are called, lasted in France you may realise from the fact, which you most likely will remember, that the king who was guillotined during the French revolution was called "Louis Capet" by those revolutionists who proclaimed that all men were equal and that titles of all kinds were to be done away.

This first elected Capet king, however, had no more power over those who had elected him than the kings who had descended from Charlemagne. But the Capetians kept the kingdom in their family, as we have seen, all down the ages. Still, it was not until nearly two hundred years later than the election of Hugh Capet that any of his descendants began to have really great power. About that date, that is to say towards the end of the twelfth century, or a little before 1200, the king succeeded in making his power over the nobles very much more effective, and therewith the last days of the feudal system came to an end. It passed away to give place to what is known as the "absolute monarchy"--government by a king who was able to do anything that he chose, without check of any kind.

In the meantime the Carolingian kings (descendants of Carolus Magnus, Charles the Great, or Charlemagne) went out of the story, and the Capetians came into it, in the midst of perpetual disorder and fights among the feudal lords. Each duke, in his duchy, each count in {129} his county, was a little independent king. It seems a wonder that the whole government of Europe did not fall apart and dissolve into these independent governments of the big lords in the different places, each governing according to his own ideas. It seems a wonder, and it really is a thing to wonder at. It seems to suggest that there was some power at work through it all, some one power, powerful everywhere, which kept things together and in some sort of unity and order--kept the same ideas of government and justice and so on underlying all the differences.

[Sidenote: The power of the Church]

It seems as if there must have been some such power, for how else can we account for the fact that the society of the world did not fall all to pieces? And we know, as a fact, that there was such a power, penetrating everywhere: it was power emanating, as at the time of the Roman Empire, from Rome itself. But now it was not the power of a government with strong military forces, splendidly organised. It was the power of the Christian Church, of which Rome, with its bishop who was called the Pope, was the centre and headquarters for all the Western world.

It seems all the more wonderful that the Pope of Rome should have been able to make his power so widely felt, when we see what constant difficulties he had to encounter in the government of Rome itself. It is evident that Charlemagne himself, even at the height of his Empire, deemed that his authority would be increased if he had the Pope on his side. That is shown by his consecration at Rome, of which we have spoken before. And there is no doubt that the Pope too was very glad to have the Emperor on his side, to help him.

At the same time there was another aspect to the story, for the Pope was continually trying to make himself, as the governor of Rome, independent of the Emperor. Yet, if he became so independent as to be {130} without the Emperor's help, he had scarcely sufficient force at his command to oppose two other parties in Rome who were always striving for power, the nobles and the populace. A proof of this weakness of the Pope's is that on the break-up of the Empire of Charlemagne the Pope at once found himself in difficulties with these other parties in the city and its vicinity. He was able to assume to himself much of the power that had been wielded by the Emperor; but, being now without the help of the Empire, he was without defence against the nobles, who at once obtained greater power.

And, further, there were enemies without, as well as within. The Saracens at this time, that is to say in the first half of the tenth century, were in Sicily and Southern Italy and pressed up from the south, while again, as long before, tribes of the Huns threatened from the north. Both dangers were repelled, by the arms of the "barbarians" far more than by the arms of Rome, and almost at the end of this tenth century we find a "barbarian," a German, elected as Pope of Rome.

Yet, in spite of all these difficulties, and while from one moment to another the very existence of the Pope's rule in Rome, the central city of the Christian Church, seems to have been in danger, the power which went out from that centre reached far and was efficient. Europe, under the feudal system, was very disturbed, maybe, very full of fighting, but it was deeply religious. Partly it was because men were so lawless and committed so many sins that they submitted themselves so humbly to the commands and advice of the priests. They had very many sins to repent of. The Church and its priests taught that remission or absolution of sins might be gained by gifts made by the sinners to the Church. Thus a great lord or a king, to expiate his evil deeds, might build a cathedral or an abbey or give {131} extensive grants of land to the Church. Thus the Church grew rich.

[Sidenote: The Holy City]

But the Church also taught that forgiveness for sins might be gained by doing penance, that is to say by punishment and suffering; and one of the forms of this punishment which the Church advised as most efficacious was to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Holy City. That is a fact of which it is worth your while to make a special note in your minds, because it was out of this habit of pilgrims going to Jerusalem for the good of their souls that those great expeditions called the Crusades came to be made.

Among the many good things for which the Christian Church was working was peace. It was working for peace in a world that was at constant war, in spite of the Church's efforts. It may seem a strange thing to say, that the Crusades were partly due to the Church's wish for peace, but it is probably true that part of the reason why the Church gave them its blessing was they were a means by which Christian soldiers, instead of fighting against each other, might be united in fighting against non-Christians, against Mahommedans.

This is one reason which might have led the Church to favour the Crusades. Another was that it seemed a dreadful thing that a city so sacred as Jerusalem should be in the hands of the Saracens. Naturally the Church favoured the attempt to recover the Holy Places by the Christian powers.

Yet a third reason which brought about the first of the many Crusades was that the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, in Constantinople, was being hard pressed at the moment by the Mahommedans in Asia Minor, and made a request to the Christians in the West to come to his help. The Eastern Empire had suffered heavy losses. Not only had the Saracens taken possession of its old territories of Egypt and {132} Africa, as well as Palestine and Syria and a large part of Asia Minor, but from the north had come raiders even to the very walls of Constantinople itself. A number of races from the north and east had taken part in these incursions--Huns, Tartars, Slavs, from the Carpathian Mountains. It is in the ninth century that we begin to hear of such a country as Russia, which was inhabited by all these races, and Russia already was beginning to stretch a hand down towards that Constantinople which she has hankered after ever since. Then that large and fertile land which is marked as Hungary in modern maps was already called by that name and had been lost to the Emperor at Constantinople. His was, in fact, an Empire restricted to a comparatively small western slice of Asia Minor, to some of the islands and to the fringes, along the northern shore of the Mediterranean, of all that it had once claimed in Greece and in what we know as Turkey in Europe. The aggression which the Emperor especially dreaded when, he summoned the West to help him was aggression by the Turks, who had by this time established themselves as the chief Mahommedan power in the East.

The Turks, a people of the same kin as those Tartars who formed part of the mixed population of Russia, had come down from the east and north and settled themselves in force in the eastern part of Asia Minor. It would seem that they were a tougher and a rougher race than the Arabians, whose religion they had adopted. But the fact that they had accepted the religion founded by the Arabian Mahomet, did not save the Arabs from the attacks of these invading Turks, who dispossessed them of all their conquests in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Further westward it was chiefly a race of African natives, who had adopted the religion of Mahomet, with but a small contingent of any Arabian people, that conquered Spain and had its {133} capital city at Cordova, in that country. And a little later in the story another Mahommedan African tribe, closely akin to the conquerors of Spain, seized and kept a long slice of that southern shore of the Mediterranean as far east as the Egyptian boundary.

It is the more necessary to make a note of these divisions, because it seems to have been the way of the Crusaders and of all Christian people of that time to group together all Mahommedans, no matter of what race they were, under the common name of Saracen, which originally was applied to one tribe only of the Arabian nation. By the end of the eleventh century, when the first Crusaders went to the Holy Land, the hold of the Moors in Spain was neither as firm nor nearly as extensive as it had been. The country was divided between Christian and Moslem, the Moslem still possessing the southern part, nearer that Africa whence he had come. The fighting was continual, with results that gave now one side and now the other the advantage, but it inclined, on the whole, to favour the Christians. This was the time to which belong the splendid stories about the Cid Campeador and many other great Spanish and Christian heroes.

But while, in the West, the Christian was thus forcing the African Saracen gradually to loosen his grip on Spain, in the East the Turkish Saracen was pressing the Christian so hard as to cause the ruler of Constantinople, though still claiming the title of Eastern Emperor, to send a prayer to all Christians to come to his aid.

[Sidenote: Plague in Europe]

The conditions of the people in most parts of Europe was probably more miserable about this date, that is to say about 1100, than ever before or since. Besides the misery caused by the perpetual fighting, there was disease, in the form of a plague, which killed large numbers; and a very bad season for farming had brought great scarcity of food. Therefore when the {134} call went forth for volunteers to help the Christians of the East and to regain the Holy Places from the infidel, very many were ready to respond to the summons. The Crusade was preached first by a religious zealot called Peter the Hermit, and attracted the poor people who were so wretched in Europe that any change must have seemed likely to be for the better health of their bodies, quite apart from the saving of their souls. This call of the Hermit's seems to have been the summons of a man full of zeal, but of little wisdom. Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Empire, whence the prayer for help had come, was named as the place in which the Crusaders were to collect for the attack on Palestine. Thither Peter the Hermit led his followers; but very few survived even to reach that city. On the way across Hungary wild tribes set upon them and destroyed a great number. So that poor effort came to nothing, as it was certain that it must from the way in which it was undertaken.

But in the meantime a more orderly movement had been started, with a great Churchman, acting as the Pope's legate, at its head. So it had the Pope's blessing, and many of the great feudal lords were its leaders. There were lords of Italy, of France, of Germany, and we may note especially that there were lords of Normandy.

[Sidenote: War for the Cross]

The Northmen had not stopped, in their sea-borne incursions, at England and the northern coasts of France. They had established themselves in parts of Spain, they had come through the Straits of Gibraltar, they had ousted, or had greatly helped in ousting, the Saracens who had taken possession of Sicily and of the south of Italy. They had set themselves up as rulers of that Italian south, with Naples as their capital. Thus enterprising, and ever further pushing, were these people from the north.

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So these, too, took a part, and a leading part, in the great war for the Cross. Crusade is from the French _croissade_, which is from _croix_, a cross. You may have seen figures on tombs in churches, of knights in armour with one leg crossed over the other. This distinction of the crossed legs is only given to the figures of knights who had taken part in one or other of the Crusades.

[Illustration: A CRUSADER.]

It was in the year following the disastrous enterprise of Peter the Hermit, that these Crusaders, starting from different points in Europe, came together at Constantinople. Trouble arose then, because the Emperor of the East wished the leaders to do homage to him. That meant that any victory they might win in the Holy Land would be a victory gained for him. Homage is a word derived from _homo_, a man, and the meaning of "doing homage" was that you confessed yourself the _homo_, or man, of him to whom you did it.

Thus the Emperor desired these leading Crusaders to be his "men," in the sense that any lands and cities that they conquered should be his. That was not quite the idea which they had in their own minds, when they came to his assistance. The Emperor's view was that all Asia Minor and Palestine and other lands such as Egypt, which the Saracens had taken, really belonged to his Empire and should be given back to the Empire if the Crusaders could gain them.

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The outcome of this difference of opinion seems to have been that the leaders of the Crusade did homage, reluctantly, to the Emperor, but perhaps they had the thought in the back of their minds, as they did it, that it was an oath which they might break. However that may be, when the time came to fulfil their vow--for they won a quick and easy success over the Turks in Asia Minor and Syria--they did not give up Palestine and the Holy Places to the Emperor. A portion of Asia Minor which they regained from the Saracens was handed over to the Emperor, but as for Palestine itself, that was taken, and it was retained, by the Crusaders; and the chief result of that first and most successful of the Crusades was that a Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was set up, and was maintained for nearly a century--from 1097 to 1187. The name of Kingdom of Jerusalem and the title of king endured for many years more, but the kingdom then consisted of no more than a strip of the coast-line of the Levant and did not include the city of Jerusalem at all.

But though the Christians were able to hold this new kingdom in the East for nearly a hundred years, it was within less than fifty that the very important frontier city of the Eastern Empire, Edessa, in Asia Minor, was taken by the Saracens. The Emperor at once sent out another appeal to the West, and this appeal became the occasion of the second Crusade, undertaken in 1146.

It began with even brighter promise than the first; for whereas knights were the leaders of the former, two kings, the King of France and the King of Germany, put themselves, in person, at the head of the second. But in spite of the fair promise the main result was failure. It was the occasion of some successful enterprises by the way; and we may note that whereas the first Crusade had been almost entirely French and Norman, English, as well as Germans, took part in the {137} latter. Also, whereas the route taken by the first had been entirely overland, through Hungary, some of the second Crusaders, from England and Flanders, made their way to the East by sea.

In course of that sea voyage some of the soldiers of the Cross, landing up the Tagus from their ships, took the city of Lisbon from the Moors, and this capture was the beginning of the little kingdom of Portugal. Thence the force went upon its voyage eastward.

[Sidenote: The Wends]

In the north of Germany some of the forces assembled for the Crusade never went very far from home. They seem to have received the permission of the Pope to fight against a tribe, called Wends, on their eastern frontier, instead of against the Saracens; and seeing that these Wends were heathen, this might perhaps be regarded in the light of a Holy War no less than that in Asia Minor.

It is possible to state very shortly the achievements of the forces that did get to the East--they achieved nothing at all. The two kings seem to have been jealous of each other. They acted separately, with no joint action, and were defeated in turn. They returned home with no glory, and left the Kingdom of Jerusalem in a worse plight than before, just because of their failure, after such preparations and expectations. The Saracen might well think that if this was all that the West, under its two greatest kings, could do, they need not be much afraid.

Therefore they pressed continually closer and closer about the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Christians held their own, with a success that is rather surprising, until the reign of the great Saladin. Until his reign the Saracens in Asia Minor and in the country east of the Jordan had not acted in unison with the Saracens in Egypt. Saladin brought all together; so that now the situation of this Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was even worse than we saw the position {138} of Palestine to be in the very early days of the great story. Then it had lain between the two powerful empires of Egypt and Babylonia. Now it was lying like an island in the midst of a sea of enemies all fighting, not against each other, but united to fight against it.

And then this Jerusalem, taken from the Saracens in 1099, was by them retaken in 1187.

We may be sure that the Christians in the East could not possibly have held their own against the Saracens, as they did during these years, if they had not been constantly receiving reinforcements from the West. History speaks to us of certain definite dates for the first, second, third Crusades, and so on, but we also have to imagine a continual going to and from the East of knights with larger or smaller followings. In this way the strength of the garrisons in the kingdom were maintained, and in this way happened that continual bringing of Eastern ideas to the West, which was really of more importance in the making of this greatest of all stories than any of the victories won or cities taken.

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