Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/658

Rh 624 CRUSADES &quot;ou are soldiers of the cross; wear then on your breasts or on your shoulders the blood-red sign of Him who died for the salvation of your souls.&quot; So was sanctioned the mighty enterprize which hurled the forces of Latin Christendom on the infidels who had crushed the East under the yoke of Islam ; and so it received its name. Of the thousands who hastened to put on the badge the greater number were animated probably by the most disinterested motives, while some had their eyes fixed on the results of more politic calculations. For the multitude at large there was the paramount attraction of an enterprize which the abbot Guibert boldly put before them as a new mode of salvation, which en abled the layman without laying aside his habits of wild licence to reach a height of perfection scarcely to be attained by the most austere monk or the most devoted priest. Nay more, the assumption of the cross set the debtor free from his creditor so long as he wore the sacred badge, opened the prison door for the malefactor, annulled the jurisdiction of the lord over the burgher or the peasant, and enabled the priest and the monk to escape from the monotony of the parish and the cloister. It might be thought that these privileges would tell hardly on the creditor, the capitalist, and the usurer ; but these reaped the most solid benefits. The princes who bound themselves by the vow must provide equipments for themselves and their followers, and carry with them sums of money sufficient for their needs. These sums must be raised by loan or mortgage ; and as all wished to get horses, arms, and money in exchange for lands, the former became inor dinately dear, the latter absurdly cheap. Thus the real gain lay on the side of the merchant and the trader, or of the landowner who was prudent enough to add to his own domains by availing himself of the necessities of his neigh bour. All this, however, had been effected by the authority and sanction of the Holy See, which had taken under its protection the dominions of all crusading princes. It was for the Pope to decide whether those who had taken the vow should set off at once, whether some grace time should be allowed, or whether the vow should be remitted altogether. The Pope became therefore possessed of a dis pensing power which placed him virtually above all other sovereigns. His gains, moreover, were immediate. The crusades tended, beyond doubt, to merge the smaller into larger fiefs, which again were absorbed into the royal domain, thus largely promoting that growth of the sovereign power which in the end broke up the feudal system. Those results belonged to the distant future ; but the Pope was enabled, rather he was constrained, to send his legates into every land, both to enlist soldiers under the standard of the cross, and to collect money for their support. He be came thus at once the administrator of vast revenues which were raised partly by subsidies imposed as a necessary obli gation on the clergy, and in part by the voluntary contribu tions of the laity. With the Pope the ecclesiastical body generally acquired enormous power. The lands of the church, though money might be borrowed upon them, could not be alienated ; but it was only in comparatively a few instances that it was necessary to burden them at all. The monastic houses might send some of their members to the Holy Land ; the rest remained at home, and became mortgagees or trustees of estates belonging to the crusaders. If these died without heirs, the guardians became absolute owners ; and of those who returned not a few withdrew into the cloister, and endowed with their worldly goods the community which they joined. In the enterprize sanctioned by the Council of Clermont, no nation, as such, took any part ; and this fact serves per haps to explain the measure of its success and its failure. Had it been necessary to wait for strictly national action, the work perhaps would never have been done at all ; but had it been a national undertaking some attempt must have been made to establish a commissariat, and to insure something like harmonious and efficient generalship. As it was, the crusading army was simply a gathering of individual adventurers who depended on their own resources, or of reckless pilgrims who neither possessed nor cared to provide any. The contributions made to this army by the different countries of Europe varied largely. From Italy, where the charm was in great part dispelled Gei by the struggle between Pope and anti-Pope, few came con besides the Normans who had fought under the standards of J of Robert Guiscard. The Spaniards were fully occupied with a crusade nearer home, which was to turn the tide of Mahometan conquest that had once passed the barriers of the Pyrenees and threatened to flow onwards to the shores of the Baltic. In Germany there was no great eagerness among partisans of emperors whom popes had sought to humble, to undertake a difficult and dangerous pilgrimage. In England the condition of things which followed the victory of William over Harold prevented both the con querors and their subjects from committing themselves to distant enterprizes, while the Red King was more anxious to have the duchy of his brother Robert in pledge than ready to run the risk of losing his own kingdom. Thus the task of reconquering Palestine fell to princes of the second order. Foremost among these was Godfrey of Bouillon in Th&amp;lt; the Ardennes, duke of Lothringen (Lorraine), whose high of * personal character brought to his standard, we are told, not cr less than 10,000 horsemen and 80,000 infantry, and who was accompanied by his brothers Baldwin and Eustace count of Boulogne. Next to him, perhaps, may be placed (1) Hugh, count of Vermandois, surnamed the Great, according to some, as being the brother of Philip I., the French king, or as others would have it, simply from his stature ; (2) Robert, duke of Normandy, who had pawned his duchy to his brother the English king, and who was destined to end his days in the dungeons of Cardiff castle ; (3) Robert, count of Flanders, celebrated by his followers as the Sword and Lance of the Christians ; (4) Stephen, count of Chartres, Troyes, and Blois ; (5) Adhemar (Aymer), bishop of Puy, the first of the clergy who assumed the cross, and rewarded as such with the office of Papal legate ; (6) Raymond, count of Toulouse, lord of Auvergne and Languedoc, the leader, it is said, of 160,000 horse and foot, and widely known for his haughtiness and his avarice not less than for his courage and his wisdom ; (7) the politic and ambitious Bohemond, son of Robert Guiscard, who had left to him, not his Apulian domains, but only the principality of Tarentum, to which Bohemond was resolved to add a kingdom stretching from the Dalmatian coast to the northern shores of the ^Egean Sea ; (8) Tancred, son of the Marquis Odo the Good and of Emma, the sister of Robert Guiscard, the hero who beyond all his colleagues appears as the embodiment of those peculiar sentiments which gave rise to the crusades, and who approaches nearest to the idea of Chaucer s &quot; very perfect gentle knight.&quot; The Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1096, had Dej been fixed at the Council of Clermont as the day on which of .* the crusaders should set off for Constantinople ; but little Pei more than half the interval had gone by, when the hermit Her Peter undertook the task of leading to Palestine a motley crowd of men and women. Peter was accompanied as far as Cologne by Walter the Pennyless, who thence led his followers to Hungary, while another multitude marched under Emico, count of Leiningen, and a fourth followed the guidance of the monk Gotschalk. Behind those came, we are told, a throng of men, women, and children, amounting to 200,000, under standards on which were