It is true again that the Crusades involved much social metabolism in Europe. The papal indulgence freed serfs from their masters, and debtors from their usurers, while the crusade lasted; the crusading barons freed many more serfs for a price down, and sold broad lands to middle-class buyers in order to furnish themselves for the campaign. And the mere stir of the exodus and the return, repeated for so many generations, was a vivifying shock to the torpor of medieval Europe, where war was for many the one relief to a vast tedium. But the torpor must go to the credit of the creed if the shock does, since the faith had vetoed the intercourse of peace; and to the same account must be put the throwing back upon itself of the Saracen civilization, of which Christian enmity directly or indirectly wrought the arrest and ruin, first in the East, later in Spain. Such wreckages surely block the path of the wrecker. If, finally, we seek to measure the reactions of crusading savagery on the life of those who wrought and those who applauded it--a reaction seldom reckoned in the discussion of the "results"--we shall be well prepared for the discovery that in the fourteenth century the general lot of men in Europe showed no betterment; that the tillers of the soil had still to sweat blood under feudal masters, save where the enormous loss of life through the pestilence known as the Black Death had for a time raised the price of labour; and that the institution which above all embodied for Europe the memory of the Crusades, the Order of the Knights Templars, was at length crushed in its home by as base a conspiracy and as cruel a slaughter as ever marked the struggle of Christian with Mohammedan. It was pretended by Philip the Fair of France, who began the plot, that the Order was anti-Christian, and devoted to blasphemous rites; but there is no proof of the occurrence of anything more than irregular acts of irreverence, answering to the artistic ribaldries of the mason-companies who built the cathedrals. That phenomenon is in itself noteworthy, as showing how the Crusades had tended to shake faith; but the Templars as a whole were no more unbelievers than the kings who coveted their wealth. It was for that wealth, which was indeed incongruously great, that they were conspired against by their fellow Christians, who in two hundred years of a precarious union of enmity against men of another faith had not learned goodwill towards those of their own. The drama ended as it began, in hatred and crime. CHAPTER IV THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE § 1. Superstition and Intolerance