Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/54

26 of the state of Europe in the fourteenth century. The Papacy and Chivalry between them were responsible for the crusades, and it was on the popes and barons that the worst immediate results of the irruption were to fall. Apart from the rash aggressions of the earlier crusades, which clearly (to us in these days) involved the ultimate rebound of the Turk into Europe, the light-hearted wickedness of the fourth crusade was enough in itself to account for all that followed. The Marquis of Montferrat, the Count of Flanders, and the host of adventurers in their train, presumably stirred to religious enthusiasm against the infidel, devoted themselves to two years of ravage and plunder in Christian Europe. They pillaged Constantinople, usurped the Empire of Byzantium, and destroyed the human barrier against barbarism, which needed to be strengthened by every conceivable means. This was in 1202-1204. The Byzantine Greeks regained their empire in 1261; but by this time the natural guards and sentinels of Europe were not only demoralised beyond recovery, but also completely alienated from the Church and the States of the west.

It had been proved by this expedition, and it was confirmed on many occasions within the next century and a half, that the descent was easy from militant chivalry to wholesale rapine. In the fourteenth century it had become apparent that Chivalry, the Feudalism on which it was based, and the Papacy which had played into the hands of both, were involved in a common catastrophe. The popes had lost their hegemony, the barons were losing their