Such were, in my opinion, the determining causes of the crusades in the twelfth century. At the end of the thirteenth century, neither the one nor the other of them any longer existed. Mankind and society were so changed, that neither the moral impulse nor the social wants which had precipitated Europe upon Asia, were any longer felt. It is a curious matter to compare the contemporary chroniclers of the first crusades with those of the end of the twelfth and of the thirteenth century; for example, Albert of Aix, Robert the monk, and Raymond of Agiles, who were present in the first crusade, with William of Tyre and James of Vitry. When we bring these two classes of writers together, we are immediately struck with the distance which separates them. The first are animated chroniclers, with excited imaginations, who relate the events of the crusade with great warmth. But their minds were prodigiously narrow, having no idea out of the petty sphere in which they lived, strangers to all science, filled with prejudices, and incapable of forming any judgment whatsoever upon what was passing around them, or upon the events which they recount. On the contrary, opening the history of William of Tyre, we are astonished to discover almost an historian of modern times, a developed, expansive, and unprejudiced mind, a rare political insight into events, comprehensive views, and a judgment based upon causes and effects. James of Vitry presents the example of another order of development; he is a learned man, who carries his inquiries beyond what has immediate reference to the crusades, and dilates upon the state of manners, upon geography, heathenism, and natural history; in fact, one who observes and describes the world. In fine, there is a vast interval between the chroniclers of the first crusades and the historians of the last, sufficient to convince us of a veritable revolution in the state of the human mind. {146}