Perhaps the chief effect of the Crusades on Europe generally was the stimulus of new influences. Men and women, if they live in a rut and feed their brains continually on the same ideas, grow prejudiced. It is good for them to travel and come in contact with opposite views of life and different manners and customs, however much it may annoy them at the time. The Crusades provided this kind of stimulus not only to the commerce of Mediterranean ports but in the world of thought, literature, and art. The necessity of transport for large armies improved shipbuilding; the cunning of Turkish foes the ingenuity of Christian armourers and engineers; the influence of Byzantine architecture and mosaics the splendour of Venice in stone and colour. Western Europe continued to hate the East; but she could not live without her silks, spices, and perfumes, nor forget to dream of the fabulous wonders of Cathay. Thus the age of the Crusades will be seen at last to merge its failures in the successes of an age of discovery, that were to lay bare a new West and another road to the Orient. XIII THE MAKING OF FRANCE Amongst those who took the Cross during the Second Crusade had been Louis VII of France and his wife, Queen Eleanor. They were an ill-matched pair, the King of mediocre ability, weak, peace-loving, and pious; Eleanor, like all the House of Aquitaine, to which she belonged, imperious, fierce-willed, and without scruples where she loved or hated. Restless excitement had prompted her journey to Palestine; and Louis was impelled by the scandal to which her conduct there gave rise, and also by his annoyance that they had no son, to divorce her soon after they returned home. The foolishness of this step from a political point of view can be gauged by studying a map of France in the middle of the twelfth century, and remembering that, though king of the whole country in name, Louis as feudal overlord could depend on little but the revenues and forces to be raised from his own estates. These lay in a small block round Paris, while away to the north, east, and south were the provinces of tenants-in-chief three or four times as extensive in area as those of the royal House of Capet. By marrying Eleanor, Countess of Poitou and Duchess of Aquitaine, Louis had become direct ruler of the middle and south-west of France as well as of his own crown demesnes, but when he divorced his wife he at once forfeited her possessions. [Sidenote: Henry II of England]