Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846Various
History
Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Very different was the result of the last Crusade, under Saint Louis,
which shortly after terminated in the capture of Ptolemais, and the
final expulsion of the Christians from the shores of Palestine.
Melancholy, however, as are the features of that eventful story, it
excites a deeper emotion than the triumphant storm of Constantinople by
the champions of the Cross. St Louis was unfortunate, but he was so in a
noble cause; he preserved the purity of his character, the dignity of
his mission, equally amidst the arrows of the Egyptians on the banks of
the Nile, as in the death-bestrodden shores of the Lybian Desert. There
is nothing more sublime in history than the death of this truly
saint-like prince, amidst his weeping followers. England reappeared with
lustre in the last glare of the flames of the crusades, before they sunk
for ever; the blood of the Plantagenets proved worthy of itself. Prince
Edward again erected the banner of victory before the walls of Acre, and
his heroic consort, who sucked the poison of the assassin from his
wounds, has passed, like Belisarius or Coeur de Lion, into the
immortal shrine of romance. Awful was the catastrophe in which the
tragedy terminated; and the storm of Acre, and slaughter of thirty
thousand of the Faithful, while it finally expelled the Christians from
the Holy Land, awakened the European powers, when too late, to a sense
of the ruinous effect of those divisions which had permitted the
vanguard of Christendom, the bulwark of the faith, to languish and
perish, after an heroic resistance, on the shores of Asia.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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