It is not easy to estimate the vast amount of good which the labours of the Benedictine monks conferred on the Church of the Middle Ages, good which has left many traces to the present day. Not only did they provide in a vast number of instances for the spiritual wants of the parishes in and near which they lived, as well as for the education of the young, both rich and poor, but they were also the philosophers, the authors, the artists, and the physicians, nay, even the farmers and the mechanics of Mediaeval times. They built cathedrals and churches, made roads and bridges, copied books when writing stood in the place of printing, and were in general the props and pioneers of civilization. Amongst the very large number of men who embraced the monastic life, it is no marvel that some were not all they professed to be, or that occasional causes for scandal arose, but the popular idea of the universal corruption of the inhabitants of the monasteries is unsupported by facts, and much of what helped to give rise to this false notion is traceable to the doings of the mendicant or preaching friars. These begging orders were offshoots from the regulars, and were but too often very unworthy representatives of the parent stock[2]. 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.]