Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/272

246 be no reasonable doubt that the emperor did write some such letter, appealing for aid in his desperate need. "From Jerusalem," he says, "to the Ægean, the Turkish hordes have mastered all; their galleys, sweeping the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, threaten the imperial city itself, which, if fall it must, had better fall into the hands of Latins than of pagans."

Here then was a new motive for the Crusades unexpectedly sprung upon the Western world. Had Constantinople fallen into the hands of the Turks nearly four centuries earlier than the actual time of that fate, and this when the Asiatic invaders were flushed with their recent victories in Asia Minor, and before the kingdoms of Europe had become consolidated and strengthened as great national powers, it is difficult to see what could have prevented the westward rush of the devastating flood from sweeping over all Christendom, and reducing Italy and France to the condition of Syria and Anatolia. From this threatened doom of Christianity and civilisation the world was saved by the earlier Crusades. That, and not the sentimental glory of the recovery of the sacred sites, or the pitiable achievement of the temporary establishment of the little, shadowy kingdom of Jerusalem, is their supreme, their one solid result. Yet, stupendous as this task was and momentous as its consequences were, the thought of it was by no means uppermost in the minds of the Crusaders. They were jealous of the Greeks, as uneducated people commonly are jealous of their more cultivated neighbours, especially when the latter display the airs of superior persons, as the Greeks were only too ready to do. Besides, were not these Byzantine heretics excommunicated and cursed by the holy pope? The behaviour of the Crusaders at Constantinople and other Eastern cities was scarcely that of a lifeboat crew saving the victims of a shipwreck; nor did the people they rescued evince much gratitude towards their deliverers. The character and conduct of many of