Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/362

 3 i2 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE brought home tales of ill-treatment of themselves and of the native Christians living there. Also Urban offered the participants in the crusade, not the wages of mercena- ries, but the hope of an eternal reward. The result was that, while in 1074 the lords of western Europe had received Gregory's request for troops to aid the Byzantine emperor rather coldly, and he himself had finally dropped the pro- ject, in 1095 Urban's eloquent appeal brought forth from the assembled throng shouts of " It is the will of God," and within a year hundreds of thousands had been persuaded to undertake the perilous pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There were yet other reasons why so many hastened to take the cross. For a long time Western Christians had Other been * n t ^ ie habit of making pilgrimages to the causes of Holy Sepulcher, and of late they had often gone in large numbers and armed. The crusades were a further development of this practice upon a still larger and more warlike scale. We have seen, too, that the feudal noble had wandering and adventurous instincts, that he loved fighting, and that he ever craved to gain new territory. Recently William the Conqueror had led a host against England and Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger had invaded Saracen Sicily, in each case with the approval of the pope and with a consecrated banner; while in Spain many knights from other lands had fought with the Chris- tian princes to win lands from the Moslems. The taking of Toledo in 1085 had been followed, however, by the defeat of the Christians at Zalaca in 1086 by the Almoravides. Perhaps the pope thought to offset this repulse in the West by striking a blow against the Mohammedans in the East. Moreover, the princes of the West were already of their own accord beginning to cast covetous eyes upon the East, as the recent effort of Robert Guiscard to conquer the Byzan- tine Empire had demonstrated. France was now an over- populated country where there were frequent famines and economic distress, but it was also a land overflowing with vigor and enterprise. Many of its knights would eagerly seize an opportunity to conquer new fiefs for themselves in