Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/234

 perhaps more than the others a war of speculation, the second a war of religion, the third a war of defence; in the fourth, again, speculation under Venetian influence threw both religion and defence into the shade: and all the later Crusades were wars of defence. Yet, although to say this is a partial condemnation, I cannot go further. The conquest of Palestine was to Robert of Normandy, Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Tarentum, a sanctified experiment of vikingism; but to Godfrey of Bouillon, to the great mass of the Crusading armies, to the popes even, it was something far different. It was a war of idea; a going forth to recover the heritage of Christ, the land, as they termed it, on which His feet had stood: it was a going out of the petty range of proprietary rights and wrongs, out of the petty interests of armed litigation. As I have said before in this place, the Crusades, with all their drawbacks, were the trial feat of a new world, a reconstituted Christendom, striving after a better ideal than that of piracy and fraternal bloodshed. In the character of wars of defence they need not be defended: they stemmed the tide that but for them must have covered Europe, as it had covered Asia, with desolation.

Perhaps I need go no further; but there is one class of wars which I have not yet noticed, and which yet are very characteristic in their history of the principle for which I have been contending. The civil wars which were waged for national liberties were not in any great measure wars for ideas, but wars for rights. I do not mean to say that this was quite the case in Italy: in Italy the question of rights had become so complicated that nothing but the infusion of an element of idea could have produced even a semblance of order out of the chaos. The old sway of Rome, the successive deluges of Goth, Lombard, Greek and German, had thrown rights and wrongs into an inextricable hotchpot. The restoration of order was the initiation of liberty; with liberty, or the idea of it, came new forms of organisation, democracies, aristocracies, municipalities, tyrannies, monarchies: each formulating rights and laws as they arose, but less bound by laws of rights and obligations because for the most part they lacked historic basis. What