Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/276

 256 A Short History of The World the Turks swept forward until not a trace of Byzantine rule remained in Asia. They took the fortress of Nicsea over against Constanti- nople, and prepared to attempt that city. The Byzantine emperor, Michael VII, was overcome with terror. He was already heavily engaged in warfare with a band of Norman adventurers who had seized Durazzo, and with a fierce Turkish people, the Petschenegs, who were raiding over the Danube. In his extremity he sought help where he could, and it is notable that he did not appeal to the western emperor but to the Pope of Rome as the head of Latin Christendom. He wrote to Pope Gregory VII, and his successor Alexius Comnenus wrote still more urgently to Urban II. This was not a quarter of a century from the rupture of the Latin and Greek churches. That controversy was still vividly alive in men's minds, and this disaster to Byzantium must have presented itself to the pope as a supreme opportunity for reasserting the supremacy of the Latin Church over the dissentient Greeks. More- over this occasion gave the Pope a chance to deal with two other matters that troubled western Christendom very greatly. One was the custom of " private war " which disordered social life, and the other was the superabundant fighting energy of the Low Germans and Christianized Northmen and particularly of the Franks and Normans. A religious war, the Crusade, the War of the Cross, was preached against the Turkish captors of Jerusalem, and a truce to all warfare amongst Christians (1095). The declared object of this war was the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre from the unbelievers. A man called Peter the Hermit carried on a popular propaganda throughout France and Germany on broadly democratic lines. He went clad in a CRUSADER TOMBS IN EXETER CATHEDRAL Photo: Manscli.