Page:Orthodox Eastern Church (Fortescue).djvu/259



story of the Florentine Synod has brought us to the eve of the fall of Constantinople, Before we come to the effects of that calamity, we must go back for a moment to say something about the relations between Latins and Byzantines at the time of the Crusades.

The melancholy story of the Crusades themselves does not concern our subject. There are few so great disillusionments in history. The idea of a Crusade was everything that is chivalrous and unselfish. It was a triumph of the ages of faith that all Christian Europe could be moved to so great an effort for a purely religious motive. And the men who thought of saving the sacred land that our Lord had trod, and who preached the Crusades,, Pope Urban II, St. Bernard, were beautiful and ideal people, too. The first impulse was superb. One cannot remember that wave of enthusiasm, the Dieu le veult that rang through all the chivalry of Europe, the Truce of God, and the cross that they wore to show that they were going to fight for their Lord's fatherland, without still feeling something of the enthusiasm that Urban's voice called up in the church at Clermont. And then the Crusades were such superb pageants—the beautiful mediæval ships, with their gorgeous sails, ploughing through the Mediterranean, the men leaping out to kneel and kiss the sacred soil of Palestine, their