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] of Gesta Dei per Francos, would start with more substantial assets and richer traditions than any of her competitors.

For two and half centuries after the death of St Louis Christendom turned a deaf ear to the appeals of successive Popes to stem the tide of Turkish conquest. France averted her glance from the East, being fully occupied with the Hundred Years' War and with the consolidation of her Monarchy. Her place in the foreground of the stage was taken by the City Republics of Italy, whose steps were drawn to the Levant not by religion but by lure of gain, and who witnessed the rapid growth of the Ottoman dominion without a qualm. Bertrandon de la Brocquière, a French traveller in Syria and Asia Minor in 1432, found that the Turks were well disposed towards the French; but, whenever he or any other Frenchman was in a difficulty, he was compelled to have recourse to the protection of the Venetians or the Genoese. On reaching Constantinople he discovered that these two States possessed not only their own markets but officials corresponding to modern Consuls, and that no other Christian nation could boast of similar representatives in the capital of the Byzantine Empire. When the city was besieged and fell in 1453 no Christian Power lifted a finger to avert its fate. For one moment alone did the old glamour of the East reassert its sway, and it is characteristic of the atmospheric change of the fifteenth century that the vision of a new crusade was vouchsafed to an eccentric, if not half-witted, ruler. It was the dream of Charles VIII to prepare for the domination of the East by the conquest of Italy, and at Naples he crowned himself King of Jerusalem. But his invasion of Italy led to a combination not against the Turks but against the French, and he had enough to do to withdraw his forces to France.

A new chapter in the history of France and of Europe opens with Francis I, who boldly broke with the traditional hostility to Islam and summoned the infidel