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 258 A Short History of The World into life with the development of the missionary -teaching religions. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus and his disciples, Mani, Muhammad, were all exhorters of men's individual souls. They brought the per- sonal conscience face to face with God. Before that time religion had been much more a business of fetish, of pseudo-science, than of conscience. The old kind of religion turned upon temple, initiated priest and mystical sacrifice, and ruled the common man like a slave by fear. The new kind of religion made a man of him. The preaching of the First Crusade was the first stirring of the common people in European history. It may be too much to call it the birth of modern democracy, but certainly at that time modern democracy stirred. Before very long we shall find it stirring again, and raising the most disturbing social and religious questions. Certainly this first stirring of democracy ended very pitifully and lamentably. Considerable bodies of common people, crowds rather than armies, set out eastward from France and the Rhineland and Central Europe without waiting for leaders or proper equip- ment to rescue the Holy Sepulchre. This was the " people's crusade." Two great mobs blundered into Hungary, mistook the recently con- verted Magyars for pagans, committed atrocities and were massacred. A third multitude with a similarly confused mind, after a great pogrom of the Jews in the Rhineland, marched eastward, and was also destroyed in Hungary. Two other huge crowds, under the leader- ship of Peter the Hermit himself, reached Constantinople, crossed the Bosphorus, and were massacred rather than defeated by the Seljuk Turks. So began and ended this first movement of the Euro- pean people, as people. Next year (1097) the real fighting forces crossed the Bosphorus. Essentially they were Norman in leadership and spirit. They stormed Nicsea, marched by much the same route as Alexander had fol- lowed fourteen centuries before, to Antioch. The siege of Antioch kept them a year, and in June 1099 they invested Jerusalem. It was stormed after a month's siege. The slaughter was terrible. Men riding on horseback were splashed by the blood in the streets. At nightfall on July 15th the Crusaders had fought their way into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and overcome all opposition there : blood-stained, weary, and " sobbing from excess of joy " they knelt down in prayer. Immediately the hostility of Latin and Greek broke out again. The crusaders were the servants of the Latin Church, and the Greek