Chapter LVI: Section 4: The Crusades

Amongst the events which stand out most distinctly in the history of the Church in the Middle Ages, the long series of warlike expeditions known as the {113} Crusades bear a prominent part, stretching out as they do from the end of the eleventh to nearly the end of the thirteenth centuries.

The empire of the Arabs had died out, but they had been succeeded in their schemes of conquest as well as in their adherence to the false faith of Mahomet, by the savage Turks, whose ferocity and hatred of Christianity were especially displayed in the ill-treatment of those Christians whose piety led them to visit the scenes of our Blessed Lord's Life and Death. [Sidenote: Cause of the Crusades.] The indignation excited in Europe by the stories of outrage and desecration which were from time to time brought back by pilgrims to the Holy Land, at length found an outlet and expression in the First Crusade, which was preached, A.D. 1095, by Peter the Hermit, with the sanction both of the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople. This expedition resulted in the taking of the Holy City by the armies of the Cross (A.D. 1099), and the establishment in it of a Christian sovereignty.

[Sidenote: Their transient results.]

The First Crusade was the only one which had any real success, and even this was a transient one, for less than ninety years afterwards (A.D. 1187) Jerusalem was again taken by the Saracens, and has never since been a Christian power. But though the deliverance of the Holy Land from the yoke of the infidels was not accomplished by the Crusades, and though they caused much misery and bloodshed, and were stained by much lawlessness and plunder, yet the advance of the barbarous and anti-Christian influences of Mahometanism was checked, the Churches of Europe were saved from the soul-destroying apostasy which had over-run so large a portion of Asia, and the Crescent waned before the Cross.

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[Sidenote: Reasons for their ill-success.]

Much of the ill success with which the Crusaders met during several of these expeditions, may be traced to jealousies and heart-burnings between the different princes and nobles who took part in them, whilst disagreements on a larger scale were amongst the evil fruits of the unhappy division between Eastern and Western Christendom. Latin Christians appear in too many instances to have made use of the opportunities afforded them to injure and oppress their weaker brethren of the Greek Church, even whilst marching against the common foe of both, and the Fourth Crusade (A.D. 1203) was actually diverted from its legitimate purpose in order to conquer Constantinople, and establish a Latin Emperor, as well as a Latin Patriarch within its walls.

[Sidenote: Good directly brought about by them.]

Still, whatever may have been the want of single-mindedness on the part of many of the professed soldiers of the Cross, whatever the amount of failure with regard to the immediate objects of the Crusades, it is clear that much good was brought about through them by God's Providence, not only in the check given to the encroachments of the unbelievers, but also more indirectly in the quenching of rising heresies, in the greater purity of life which in many cases accompanied the taking of the Cross, the weakening of the feudal system, the impulse given to learning and civilization. Earnestness and self-devotion such as were shown by Godfrey de Bouillon, St. Louis of France, and no doubt by many more amongst the Crusaders, were rewarded and blessed, though not in what might have seemed at first sight the only way of success.

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