It is scarcely necessary to say that this was not a notion which can be traced back to the earliest ages of the Christian church, and that the creed of the first believers was in this respect in complete antagonism with the idea which brought the Jews year by year to Jerusalem for the celebration of the Passover. The local ritual which belonged to the only temple known to the Jews had for them been displaced by a purely spiritual worship, which proclaimed that men were as near to God in one place as in another. In whatever channel their feelings might otherwise have run, the circumstances of the Christian church in the first century left absolutely no room for the development of local association. Yet a few years, and the history of this weary world would be closed by the return of the Son of man to judgment, and by the summons which should call the dead from their graves. But the course of events which led to the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Roman empire insured the growth of a sentiment far more nearly allied to that of the Jewish pilgrims, when gathered for the great annual feast in the city of David. The Christian converts in Rome and Corinth, in Athens and Alexandria, had been worshippers of the Capitoline Jupiter, or the Olympian Zeus, of Isis and Osiris, of Phaebus, Artemis, or Mithras. That these converts had undergone a vast change for the better we need not and we cannot doubt; but the framework of their old associations had not been broken, and the men who had followed the jotirneyings of Phaebus from his birthplace in Delos to his final home in Delphi, might now with feelings immeasurably deeper and more earnest move from spot to spot noted, in the gospel narratives, until the pilgrimage begun in the grotto of Bethlehem ended on the mount of the ascension. The whole of Palestine thus became sacred soil, but for a time the rapid growth of this local veneration called forth something like remonstrance or warning. Teachers like Augustine could remind their hearers that they were not to seek righteousness in the East, nor mercy in the West, and that a voyage to the Holy Land was a useless task for men whose faith placed them at once in the immediate presence of their Lord. But the practice of some among them was not altogether consistent with their precepts. Jerome could insist that heaven was not more easily approached from Palestihe than from Britain; but the saint had crossed the sea to take up his abode in a cave at Bethlehem, and had no rebuke to offer to the Roman ladies who followed him, partly to feast upon his eloquence, and in part to derive strength and comfort from contemplating the scenes of the Saviour’s ministry. Such feelings seldom fail to provide their own „nourishment. The vehement devotion stirred by the sight of Calvary would impart a priceless value to that instrument of punishment which by bearing the body of Jesus had become veritably a tree of life; and in due time the yearning for this relic was rewarded by its discovery. Its genuineness had been attested by the healing of a dying woman who derived no benefit from touching the crosses to which the two thieves had been fastened; and the great churches built by the first Christian emperor and his mother over the Holy Sepulchre and the Cave of the Nativity became sanctuaries which the Christians regarded with a devotion immeasurably more passionate than that which the Jews felt for the temple at Jerusalem. The stream of pilgrims, which probably had long been gathering volume, now swelled into something like the proportions of a flood; and each man found not merely that he could worship on spots which brought him nearer to heaven, but that the devotion of the faithful had done or was doing much to smooth the difficulties or lessen the dangers of his journey. It was not wonderful that the enthusiasm thus fostered should give birth to convictions which no calamities could destroy or even shake. According to this new belief the shirt which the pilgrim wore when he entered Jerusalem would, if used as his winding-sheet, carry him straight to heaven. His death, if it happened during his sojourn in Palestine, made him an object of envy to his kinsfolk and friends. If he returned home, he was treated as one whose sins had been washed away, and perhaps as the bearer of relics whose virtues were so potent as to make the weary journey to Jerusalem a work of supererogation.

The tide of pilgrimage thus flowing steadily onwards was first arrested by the armies of the Persian king, Khosru III., the grandson of Nushirvan. Jerusalem was taken, 611 a.d.; 90,000 Christians, it is said, were slaughtered; and the disaster was crowned by the carrying away of the true cross into Persia. Marching on into Egypt, Khosru received a letter from a citizen of Mecca, charging him to acknowledge Mahomet as the prophet of the one God. He tore the letter into shreds. Mahomet replied only by warning him that his treatment of the letter was a sign of the way in which his kingdom would be treated by-and-by. The punishment of Khosru was to come, however, not from Mahomet, but from the Emperor Heraclius, who, waking from the sluggish inactivity of the earlier part of his reign, defeated the Persians in the passes of Mount Taurus, and destroyed the birthplace of Zoroaster. In tho end Khosru was murdered by his son Siroes, from whom Heraclius recovered the true cross by a treaty which also delivered those of his subjects who had been taken prisoners by the Persians. In the following year, 629, Heraclius himself knelt among the worshippers in the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Eight years later, 637, the disciples of Mahomet, now lords of Damascus, laid siege to Jerusalem; but after a blockade of four months a treaty made with the caliph Omar in person secured to the Christians not merely the safety of their persons and goods, but the free exercise of their religion, subject only to the conditions that Mahometans should have the right of admission to their churches at all hours; that the cross should not be seen on the exterior of any building, or be carried about the streets; and finally, that the Christians should be disarmed, and should show respect to their conquerors by wearing a distinguishing dress and by rising up at the approach of true believers. The hardships thus imposed may have been sensibly felt; but pilgrims and merchants still came and went practically without let or hindrance; and even the attack of the Fatimite caliph Hakem, four centuries later, 1010, scarcely changed things for the worse. The rule of his predecessors in Egypt had for the Christians been lighter than that of the Abbasside caliphs of Baghdad; but the object on which the mad Hakem had set his heart was nothing less than the destruction of the great Christian sanctuary. Such persecution as there was fell on the Jews only, and the tax imposed on each pilgrim and levied on his entering Jerusalem was pïobably not resented as a wrong. To the wealthier Christians it brought an opportunity for securing a higher degree of merit by paying the charge for their poorer brethren; while the completion of the first Christian millennium removed a burden which had lain with increasing heaviness on the spirits and energies of men, and gave a fresh impetus to the feeling which carried the devout to the Holy Land. The end of the 10th century, it was almost universally believed, would be the end of the world. The beginning of a new age relieved them of this mental incubus, and the stream of pilgrims became larger than ever. The path followed by these devotees was not always strewn with roses. Inclement seasons, poverty, and sickness proved fatal to many; but these disasters were not caused by the attack of open enemies, and the conversion of Hungary removed a formidable obstacle for those who had to traverse the heart of Europe in order to reach Palestine.

A few years later these fairer prospects were permanently clouded by the advance of the Seljukian Turks, who in their inroads into the Eastern empire found themselves effectually aided by the subjects of the emperor. Thecauses of discontent were indeed many and deep. Extortion and tyranny, both secular and ecclesiastical, had alienated thousands, while the population was seriously lessened by the accumulation of land in the hands of a few owners. Before the close of the Γlth century, 1076, Jerusalem had opened her gates to the Seljukian Toucush; and in place of a legal toll the pilgrims found themselves subjected henceforth to indefinite extortion, to wanton insult, and to massacre. The sanctuaries of the Christians were profaned, their worship was interrupted, their patriarchs were thrown into dungeons. The effect of these changes was felt not by the devout only. The supplying of their wants had called forth the energies of merchants; and the fleets of Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi hurried to the ports of the Holy Land for the great Easter fair at Jerusalem. All these were now driven away, and there remained only the miserable train of pilgrims, who returned to Europe, if they returned at all, with tales of dire indignities done to men, women, and children alike.

The recital of these wrongs went far towards fanning into flame the feelings which the popes had hitherto failed to waken in sufficient strength. The idea of an armed host which should inflict summary vengeance on the oppressors of the Christians had already dawned on the mind of the great Hildebrand, Gregory VII.; it had been vehemently urged by his successor Victor III.; but neither had struck the right chord. Such enterprizes can never be set in motion, with any solid results, except when the flood tide of popular feeling gives its own weight to the sanction of religious authority. Nor was this result more satisfactory when, in 1081, Robert Guiscard set out from Brundusium (Brindisi) with a fleet of 150 ships and a force of 30,000 men. Guiscard himself besieged Dyrrhachium (Durazzo) in vain; under his son Bohemond his fleet was miserably defeated. Four years later Guiscard made another attempt, which was frustrated by his death at Cefalonia (Kephallenia). But Hildebrand had been dead only ten years when a vast throng of clerks and laymen was gathered to meet Urban II. at Piacenza (Placentia). In Italy, however, Urban felt that he could not look for the enthusiasm which would justify him in making the final venture. From Piacenza he made his way to his old home in the great abbey of Cluny, and in the autumn of 1095 appeared at Clermont, in the territories of the count of Auvergne.

Here he found that there was no longer any need of holding back. To the north of the Alps the indignation of the people had been roused to fever heat by the preaching of Peter the Hermit. With the stature and ungainliness of a dwarf, emaciated by the austerities of his self-imposed discipline, this man, who had forsaken his wife and abandoned his military standard under the counts of Boulogne, had returned from the Holy Land with his heart on fire, not so much from the memory of the hardships which he had himself undergone as for the cruelties and tortures which he had seen inflicted on his fellow-Christians. Simeon, the patriarch of Jerusalem, to whom he first betook himself, could only bewail the weakness of the emperor and of his government. “The nations of the West shall take up arms in your cause,” was the reply of the hermit, who soon afterwards, armed with the special blessing of Urban II., mounted his ass, and with bare head and feet, carrying a huge crucifix, traversed the Teutonic lands, rousing everywhere the uncontrollable indignation which devoured his own soul. His vehemence carried all before him, none the less, perhaps, because he bade them remember that no sins were too heinous to be washed away by the waters of the Jordan, no evil habits too deadly to be condoned for the one good work which should make them champions of the cross. Urban, however, and his counsellors, knew well that before the fatal die could be prudently cast a serious task lay before them. The system of feudalism substituted personal ascendency for the dominion of law; and wherever the personal bond failed, the resort was inevitably to private war. The practice of such wars had become virtually an organized trade; and if a large proportion of the population should be drawn away to fight against the infidel in Palestine, those who remained at home would be without defence. Such wars were therefore formally condemned; the women and the clergy, merchants and husbandmen, were placed under the special protection of the church, and the Truce of God was solemnly confirmed. The nearer and more immediate dangers being thus guarded against, Urban from a lofty scaffold addressed the assembled multitude, dwelling in the first place, and perhaps not altogether prudently, on the cowardice of the Turks, and on the title to victory which birth in a temperate climate conferred on the Christians. They were thus sure of success, and sure, too, to win an infinitely higher blessing—the remission of their sins. Sufferings and torments more excruciating than any which they could picture to themselves might indeed aw ait them; but the agonies of their bodies would redeem their souls. “Go then,” he said, “on your errand of love which will put out of sight all the ties that bind you to the spots which you have called your homes. Your homes, in truth, they are not. For the Christian all the world is exile, and all the world is at the same time his country. If you leave a rich patrimony here, a better patrimony awaits you in the Holy Land. They who die will enter the mansions of heaven, while the living shall pay their vows before the sepulchre of their Lord. Blessed are they who, taking this vow upon them, shall obtain such a recompense; happy they who are led to such a conflict, that they may share in such rewards.” With the passionate outburst, “It is the will of God, it is the will of God,” the vast throng broke in upon the Pontiff’s words. “It is, indeed, His will,” the Pope went on, “and let these words be your war-cry when you find yourselves in presence of the enemy.

Vou are soldiers of the cross; wear then on your breasts or on your shoulders the blood-red sign of Him who died for the salvation of your souls.”

So was sanctioned the mighty enterprize which hurled the forces of Latin Christendom on the infidels who had crushed the East under the yoke of Islam; and so it received its name. Of the thousands who hastened to put on the badge the greater number were animated probably by the most disinterested motives, while some had their eyes fixed on the results of more politic calculations. For the multitude at large there was the paramount attraction of an enterprize which the abbot Guibert boldly put before them as a new mode of salvation, which enabled the layman without laying aside his habits of wild licence to reach a height of perfection scarcely to be attained by the most austere monk or the most devoted priest. Nay more, the assumption of the cross set the debtor free from his creditor so long as he wore the sacred badge, opened the prison door for the malefactor, annulled the jurisdiction of the lord over the burgher or the peasant, and enabled the priest and the monk to escape from the monotony of the parish and the cloister. It might be thought that these privileges would tell hardly on the creditor, the capitalist, and the usurer; but these reaped the most solid benefits. The princes who bound themselves by the vow must provide equipments for themselves and their followers, and carry with them sums of money sufficient for their needs. These sums must be raised by loan or mortgage; and as all wished to get horses, arms, and money in exchange for lands, the former became inordinately dear, the latter absurdly cheap. Thus the real gain lay on the side of the merchant and the trader, or of the landowner who was prudent enough to add to his own domains by availing himself of the necessities of his neighbour. All this, however, had been effected by the a it hority and sanction of the Holy See, which had taken under its protection the dominions of all crusading princes. It was for the Pope to decide whether those who had taken the vow should set off at once, whether some grace time should be allowed, or whether the vow should be remitted altogether. The Pope became therefore possessed of a dispensing power which placed him virtually above all other sovereigns. His gains, moreover, were immediate. The crusades tended, beyond doubt, to merge the smaller into larger fiefs, which again were absorbed into the royal domain, thus largely promoting that growth of the sovereign power which in the end broke up the feudal system. Those results belonged to the distant future; but the Pope was enabled, rather he was constrained, to send his legates into every land, both to enlist soldiers under the standard of the cross, and to collect money for their support. He became thus at once the administrator of vast revenues which were raised partly by subsidies imposed as a necessary obligation on the clergy, and in part by the voluntary contributions of the laity. With the Pope the ecclesiastical body generally acquired enormous power. The lands of the church, though money might be borrowed upon them, could not be alienated; but it was only in comparatively a few instances that it was necessary to burden them at all. The monastic houses might send some of their members to the Holy Land; the rest remained at home, and became mortgagees or trustees of estates belonging to the crusaders. If these died without heirs, the guardians became absolute owners; and of those who returned not a few withdrew into the cloister, and endowed with their worldly goods the community which they joined.

In the enterprize sanctioned by the Council of Clermont, no nation, as such, took any part; and this fact serves perhaps to explain the measure of its success and its failure. Had it been necessary to wait for strictly national action, the work perhaps would never have been done at all; but had it been a national undertaking some attempt must have been made to establish a commissariat, and to insure something like harmonious and efficient generalship. As it was, the crusading army was simply a gathering of individual adventurers who depended on their own resources, or of reckless pilgrims who neither possessed nor cared to provide any. The contributions made to this army by the different countries of Europe varied largely. From Italy, where the charm was in great part dispelled by the struggle between Pope and anti-Pope, few came besides the Normans who had fought under the standards of Robert Guiscard. The Spaniards were fully occupied with a crusade nearer home, which was to turn the tide of Mahometan conquest that had once passed the barriers of the Pyrenees and threatened to flow onwards to the shores of the Baltic. In Germany there was no great eagerness among partisans of emperors whom popes had sought to humble, to undertake a difficult and dangerous pilgrimage. In England the condition of things which followed the victory of William over Harold prevented both the conquerors and their subjects from...