Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/661

CRUSADES 627 procession singing hymns and followed by tlie laity. Tlie Saracens, it is said, insulted them from the walls by throwing dirt upon crucifixes. On the second day of the final assault, when it seemed that in spite of almost superhuman efforts the crusaders must fail, a horseman was seen, or supposed to be seen, waving his shield on Mount Olivet. " St George the Martyr has again come to help us," shouted Godfrey, and the cry, taken up and carried along the ranks, banished every feeling of weariness, and sent them forth with overwhelming strength for the supreme effort. It was Friday; and at the moment in the afternoon when the last cry was uttered by the Saviour on His cross Letold of Touruay, it is said, stood on the wails of Jerusalem, followed first by his brother Engelbert, and then by Godfrey. The gate of St Stephen was stormed by Tancred ; the Provengals climbed up tho ramparts by ladders ; and the city was in the hands of the. Christians. So terrible, it is said, was the carnage which followed that the horses of the crusaders who rode up to the mosque of Omar were knee-deep in the stream, of blood. Infants were seized by their feet and dashed against the walls or whirled over the battlements, while the Jews were all burnt alive in their synagogue. In the midst of these horrors Godfrey entered the church of the Sepulchre, clothed in a robe of pure white, but bare-footed as well as bare-headed, and knelt at the tomb to offer his thanksgiving for the divine goodness which had suffered them to realize the yearning of their hearts. In the pro found enthusiasm and devotion of the moment his followers beheld the dead take part in the solemn ritual, and heard the voice of Adhemar rejoicing in the prayers and resolu tions of penitence offered by the prostrate warriors of the cross. Among the living, too, there were those who called forth the deepest gratitude ; and the vast throng fell at the feet of the hermit Peter, who thus saw the consummation of the enterprise which was mainly his work, and of whom after the completion of his task we hear no more. On the next day the horrors of that which had preceded it were deliberately repeated on a larger scale. Tancred had given a guarantee of safety to 300 captives. In spite of his indignant protest these were all brought out and killed; and a massacre followed in which the bodies of men, women, and children were hacked and hewn until their fragments lay tossed together in heaps. The work of slaughter ended, the streets of the city were washed by Saracen prisoners. So ended the first and the most important of the crusades. Its history shows us clearly the nature of these religious wars and the mode in which they were carried on. Those which follow may be more briefly noticed, as they tend generally to assume more and more of a political character. The first crusade had to all appearance fully . attained its object. Godfrey was really king of Jerusalem, although he would not bear the title in a city where his Lord had worn the crown of thorns. His reign lasted barely one year, and this year was signalized less by his victory over the Fatimite caliph of Egypt than by the promulgation of the code of laws known as the Assize of Jerusalem. These laws embodied the main principles of feudalism, while they added a new feature in the judicial courts, the king presiding in the court of the barons, his viscount in that of the burgesses. On Godfrey s death his brother Baldwin was summoned from his principality of Edessa, 1100, and crowned king by the Patriarch Daimbert. During his reign of eighteen years most of the old crusading chiefs passed away. Stephen of Chartres was slain at Ramlah in 1101. Four years later Raymond died on the sea coast. In 1112 Tancred was cut off in the prime of manhood, three years after Bohemond had ended his stormy career at Autioch. The Emperor Alexius, the only man who derived lasting benefit from these expedi tions, outlived them all. If his empire was to last, the Turks must be drawn off from the nearer regions of Asia Minor. This result the crusades accomplished, and thus prolonged the existence of the empire for three centuries and a half. The second successor of Godfrey was his kinsman Baldwin du Bourg, in whose reign, 1118-31, Tyre became the seat of a Latin archbishopric. After Baldwin II., the uneventful reign of Fulk of Aujou (1131-44) was followed by that of his sou Baldwin III., a boy thirteen years of age (1144-G2), in whose days the fall of Edessa called forth again the religious enterprize of the West. Of this second crusade St Bernard was the apostle, as the hermit Peter had been of the first. In the Council of the of Vezelai, 1146, Louis VII., the French king, put on secon f . CrUSTXlG UV the blood-red cross, and his example was reluctantly st Bernard, followed some months later by the Emperor Conrad. The story of this expedition brings before us a long series of disasters. Conrad lost thousands in an attempted march across Asia Minor; Louis took ship at Attaleia and succesded in making his way to Jerusalem. Conrad at length reached Ptolemais ; and the two sovereigns, abandoning the project of rescuing Edessa, resolved to turn their arms against Damascus, 1148. The siege was a miserable failure, brought about, it is said, by the treachery of the barons of Palestine. Bernard himself was for Failure of the moment overwhelmed by the completeness of the ^ e euter- catastrophe ; but the conviction of the reality of his own pr mission soon assured him that the fault lay in the siiifulness of the pilgrims an idea which, having fixed itself in some minds, had its issue in the pathetic and awful tragedies called the Children s Crusades. None but The innocent hands, it was thought, could accomplish the work ^ 1( ^ e " s of conquest in the Holy Laud; and in 1212 the great experiment was tried, with 30,000 children, so the tale went, under the boy Stephen, and 20,000 German boys and girls under the peasant lad Nicholas, to end in death by sea or on land, or in the more fearful horrors of the slave-market. For the present this notion was only in embryo ; and the monk John had more success in reviving old feelings by declaring that the places of the fallen angels had been filled by the spirits of those who had died as champions of the cross in Bernard s crusade. In 1162 Baldwin III. died at the early age of thirty-three. The great aim of his brother Amalric, who succeeded him, 1162, was to obtain possession of Egypt and thus to prevent Noureddin, the sultan of Aleppo, from establishing himself in a country which would enable him to attack the Latin kingdom from the south as he already could from the north. It may be said that nothing but his own greed for Suppres- money stood in the way of his success ; and Saladiu, the " of the nephew of Noureddin, was thus enabled to rise to power in Egypt, and finally, by setting aside the Fatimite caliph, to put an end to a schism which had lasted 200 years. Nor was this all. Anmlric s son and successor, Baldwin IV., was a leper, who, being obliged by his disease to appoint another as his delegate, fixed on Guy of Lusignan, the , husband of his sister Sibylla. For the time the arrange ment came to naught; but when in 1186 the death of Baldwin IV. was followed in a few months by that of Baldwin V., the infant son of Sibylla by her first marriage, Guy managed to establish himself by right of his wife as king of Jerusalem. Over his kingdom the storm was now ready to burst. The army of Saladin assailed Tiberias ; Battle of and Raymond, count of Tripolis, the .son of Raymond of Tl Toulouse, although he had refused to own his allegiance to Guy, hastened to Jerusalem to beg the king to confine himself to a defensive warfare, which could not fail to be crowned with success. His advice was rejected ; and the

fatal battle of Tiberias, 1187, almost destroyed the