Page:France and the Levant peace conference 1920.djvu/14

2 Venetians, was largely French in composition; it established at Constantinople the line of French Emperors who ruled the shrinking Byzantine Empire for half a century, and created a number of petty principalities with French rulers in Greece. In the Fifth Crusade, proclaimed by Innocent III at the Lateran Council in 1215 and carried out by Germany and Austria, France took no part; and she also stood apart from the Sixth, in which the Emperor Frederick II regained Jerusalem in 1229 by negotiation. When the Holy City was lost again in 1244, St Louis in the Seventh Crusade revived the ardent piety of the First. Conquering Damietta, which had been won and lost in the Fifth Crusade, he essayed the conquest of Egypt, but was captured with his whole army in 1250. Winning his liberty by a heavy ransom, he spent three years in the Holy Land, fortifying Acre and other coast cities. On his return to France in 1254 he attempted to secure peace among the rulers of Christendom in order to combine against the infidel; but Europe had outgrown its crusading fervour, and in the Eighth Crusade St Louis found himself alone at the rendezvous. His death in 1270 in Tunis, which he had resolved to regain for the faith, consecrated the life of the last and noblest of the Crusaders. Acre was stormed by the Mamelukes in 1291, and the last Christian posts in the Levant were abandoned.

The result of two centuries of effort, marred as they were by cruelty, treachery and self-seeking, was to leave the infidel even more strongly entrenched in the possession of the Holy Places. Yet France had more to show for her pains than any of her comrades or rivals. The kingdoms and principalities founded during the Crusades in Palestine and Syria, Asia Minor and Cyprus, were French. The Latin Emperors at Constantinople were French, and French princelets retained some fragments of territory in Greece. The French tongue was never forgotten; and for centuries to come the Christians of Europe were "Franks" to dwellers in the Levant. In any future rivalry for power or privilege in the Eastern Mediterranean, France, with her memories