Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/656

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    HE Crusades were a series of wars undertaken pro- JL fessedly for the purpose of delivering the Holy Land from the dominion of the infidel, and so named from the cross worn as a badge by those who devoted themselves to the eiiterprize. These wars, it was held, were rendered neces sary, not only by the profanation involved in the fact of Mahometan rule over the country which had been the birth place and cradle of Christianity, but by the insults and Belief in injuries constantly inflicted on Christian pilgrims. From the duty^of a g e to a g e ^ Q bgjjgf k a( j b een growing that no work could conduce more to the soul s health than a visit to the holy places of Palestine. In proportion to the rapidity with which this belief had spread over the Christian world, a feeling of vehement indignation was awakened by the likelihood, if not the certainty, that the Saracen conqueror would put his ban on the performance of that which was deemed to be an act of the highest Christian duty.

It is scarcely necessary to say that this was not a notion which can be traced back to the earliest ages of the Christian church, and that the creed of the first believers was in this respect in complete antagonism with the idea which brought the Jews year by year to Jerusalem for the celebration of the Passover. The local ritual which belonged to the only temple known to the Jews had for them been displaced by a purely spiritual worship, which proclaimed that men were as near to God in one place as iu another. In whatever channel their feelings might otherwise have run, the circumstances of the Christian church in the first century left absolutely no room for the development of local association. Yet a few years, and the history of this weary world would be closed by the return of the Son of man to judgment, and by the summons which should call the dead from their graves. But the course of events which led to the establishment of Chris tianity as the religion of the Roman empire insured the growth of a sentiment far more nearly allied to that of the Jewish pilgrims, when gathered for the great annual feast in the city of David. The Christian converts in Rome and Corinth, in Athens and Alexandria, had been wor shippers of the Capitoline Jupiter, or the Olympian Zeus, of Isis and Osiris, of Phoebus, Artemis, or Mithras. That these converts had undergone a vast change for the better we need not and we cannot doubt ; but the framework of their old associations had not been broken, and the men who had followed the journeyings of Phoebus from his birthplace in Delos to his final home in Delphi, might now with feelings immeasurably deeper and more earnest move from spot to spot noted in the gospel narratives, until the pilgrimage begun in the grotto of Bethlehem ended on the mount of the ascension. The whole of Palestine thus became sacred soil, but for a time the rapid growth of this local veneration called forth something like remonstrance or warning. Teachers like Augustine could remind their hearers that they were not to seek righteous ness in the East, nor mercy in the West, and that a voyage to the Holy Land was a useless task for men whose faith placed them at once in the immediate presence of their Lord. But the practice of some among them was not alto gether consistent with their precepts. Jerome could insist that heaven was not more easily approached from Palestine than from Britain ; but the saint had crossed the sea to take up his abode in a cave at Bethlehem, and had no re buke to offer to the Roman ladies who followed him, partly to feast upon his eloquence, and in part to derive strength and comfort from contemplating the scenes of the Saviour s ministry. Such feelings seldom fail to provide their own .nourishment. The vehement devotion stirred by the sight of Calvary would impart a priceless value to that instrument of punishment which by bearing the body of Jesus had become veritably a tree of life ; and in due time the yearning for this relic was rewarded by its discovery. Its genuineness had been attested by the healing of a dying woman who derived no benefit from touching the crosses to which the two thieves had been fastened ; and the great churches built by the first Christian emperor and his mother over the Holy Sepulchre and the Cave of the Nativity became sanctuaries which the Christians regarded with a devotion immeasurably more passionate than that which the Jews felt for the temple at Jerusalem. The stream of pilgrims, which probably had long been gather ing volume, now swelled into something like the propor tions of a flood ; and each man found not merely that he could worship on spots which brought him nearer to heaven, but that the devotion of the faithful had done or was doing much to smooth the difficulties or lessen the dangers of his journey. It vas not wonderful that the enthusiasm thus fostered should give birth to convictions which no calami ties could destroy or even shake. According to this new belief the shirt which the pilgrim wore when he entered Jerusalem would, if used as his winding-sheet, carry him straight to heaven. His death, if it happened during his sojourn in Palestine, made him an object of envy to his kinsfolk and friends. If he returned home, he was treated as one whose sins had been washed away, and perhaps as the bearer of relics whose virtues were so potent as to make the weary journey to Jerusalem a work of supererogation.

The tide of pilgrimage thus flowing steadily onwards was first arrested by the armies of the Persian king, Khosru III., the grandson of Nushirvan. Jerusalem was taken, 611 A.D. ; 90,000 Christians, it is said, wore slaughtered; and the disaster was crowned by the carrying away of tho true cross into Persia. Marching on into Egypt, Khosru received a letter from a citizen of Mecca, charging him to acknowledge Mahomet as the prophet of the one God. He tore the letter into shreds. Mahomet replied only by warning him that his treatment of the letter was a sign of the way in which his kingdom would be treated by-and-by. The punishment of Khosru was to come, however, not from Mahomet, but from the Emperor Heraclius, who, waking from the sluggish inactivity of the earlier part of his reign, defeated the Persians in the passes of Mount Taurus, and destroyed the birthplace of Zoroaster. In the end Khosru was murdered by his son Siroes, from whom Heraclius recovered the true cross by a treaty which also delivered those of his subjects who had been taken prisoners by the Persians. In the following year, 629, Heraclius himself knelt among the worshippers in the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Eight years later, 637, the disciples of Mahomet, now lords of Damascus, laid siege to Jeru salem ; but after a blockade of four months a treaty made with the caliph Omar in person secured to the Christians not merely the safety of their persons and goods, but the free exercise of their religion, subject only to the conditions that Mahometans should have the right of admission to their churches at all hours ; that the cross should not be seen on the exterior of any building, or be carried about the streets ; and finally, that the Christians should be disarmed, and should show respect to their conquerors by wearing a distinguishing dress and by rising up at the approach of true believers. The hardships thus imposed may have been sensibly felt ; but pilgrims and merchants 