438 G. L. Burr Is it so strange, then, that the panic of the year looo is only a nightmare of modern scholars ? But there is another myth of the year lOOO whose relation to the Crusades is more patent. Among the letters of Gerbert, who in that year sat upon the papal throne as Silvester II., there has come down to us a curious document. It bears no date of year or place, and only its presence there suggests its authorship. " She who is Jerusalem " — for so the document begins — appeals to the universal church for aid. At first glance its fervid phrases seem a call to arms against her pagan spoilers, and in it scholars long saw the earliest suggestion of the Crusades. It was imputed to the pope among whose papers it was found, and some believed that it was the terrors of the year lOOO which had called it forth. It has, however, nothing in common with a papal utterance, and those who were content to count it Gerbert's were by no means agreed to count it his as Pope. In 1877 that arch-skeptic Julius Harttung (later Pflugk-Harttung) denied it to him altogether, advancing much cogent argument to prove it an effusion of a century later which had somehow strayed into Gerbert's papers.' In 1881 his view received the weighty adhesion of Count Paul Riant, who strengthened it by further argument. " Their verdict met accept- ance at the hands of other scholars, including the authoritative ed- itors of the Papal Rcgesta, ^ though Heinrich von Sybel refused to be convinced. But in 1889 that prince of historical mousers, the lamented Julien Havet, propounded a more satisfying theory. ^ It is not, he points out, a call to arms, but only a call for money — "a sort of circular, meant to be carried about by a collector of alms for the Christian establishments at Jerusalem." It may well have been written, Havet thinks, by Gerbert, but probably in the spring of 984, long before his papacy, and perhaps for the use of his friend the abbot Guarin, known to have been interested in this collection of alms for the Holy Land. So passes one of the most famous of the antecedents of the Crusades. And with it, at the hands of the critics — they are again Harttung and Riant — has fallen the bull ostensibly called forth by the Moslem destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in 10 10. Pope Sergius, addressing the princes and prelates of Catholic Christen- ^ Forschungen ziir Deutschen Geschichte, XVII. 390-396 (GSttingen, 1877). The article is called Zur Vorgcschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges. 2 In his hiventaire des Lettres Hutoriques des Croisades, in the Archives de /' Orient Latin, I. (Paris, 1881.) ^Wattenbach and his colleagues, in the edition of 1885. In J.affe's original edi- tion it does not appear.
- In his edition of the Lettres de Gerbert, 983-987 (Paris, 1889), p. 22, note.
