name came the very term "slave" in the modern languages); while the Christian Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans for centuries maintained a trade in kidnapped Anglo-Saxon or British children and young women, selling them to Ireland after they were no longer saleable on the continent. A similar traffic went on among the Bohemians, before the eyes of St. Adalbert. What the Church did, broadly speaking, was to restrain the enslavement of Christians by their fellows; and to raise funds to redeem Christian captives from the Saracens. To a certain extent the motive was religious: otherwise it was self-regarding. In similarly indirect ways, organized Christianity tended at times to restrain feudal tyranny. The bishop and the abbot were territorial magnates, who to some extent counterpoised the baron; and though the bishops were too often only barons with a difference, they were often a barrier to lay ambition and violence. Even as the king's rule might protect the common people as against their local lords--though the feudal system did not originally suppose this--so the Church might be a local benefactor in virtue of its local interests. Here again, however, the influence was not doctrinal; and Churchmen in general endorsed the feudal law in letter and in spirit, always availing themselves of its machinery to extort their own dues. On the other hand, insofar as the papacy in the twelfth century began to throw its weight on the side of the popular party in Italy as against the aristocratic and imperial party, thus constituting the Guelph faction as against the Ghibeline, it indirectly furthered the cause of self-government; and even in its official doctrine there thus came to be inserted provisions in favour of the claim of subjects to choose their rulers. The teaching of Thomas Aquinas to this effect must have counted for something in the later evolution of political doctrine. Nothing however is more remarkable than the ease with which dutiful kings, as those of later Spain and France, secured the assent of the Church, as the early barbarian kings had done, to the suppression of all popular liberties. The economic or administrative interest of the Church was always the determinant of its action. It supplied no fixed principle conducive to peace; on the contrary, it was always a force the more for war in Europe. § 4. Influence of the Crusades