This was the signal for an exploit so bold, that it seemed, if I may so express myself, like a particular inspiration. The Christians, unarmed as they were, started up, and though, as I have observed, they may be said to have scarcely tasted food for three days, rushed upon the eighteen Turcomans, bound their arms behind their backs, and showing them in this condition to their own troops who surrounded the house, protested that they would instantly put them all to death, unless they themselves were let go. It is difficult to see how this complication would have ended, in which neither side were in a condition either to recede or to advance, had not a third party interfered with a considerable force in the person of the military governor, himself a Pagan,[45] of a neighbouring city; and though, as our historian says, the Christians found it difficult to understand how Satan could cast out Satan, so it was, that they found themselves at liberty and their enemies marched off to punishment, on the payment of a sum of money to their deliverers. I need not pursue the history of these pilgrims further than to say, that, of 7,000 who set out, only 2,000 returned to Europe. * * * * * Much less am I led to enter into the history of the Crusades which followed. How the Holy See, twenty years after St. Gregory, effected that which St. Gregory attempted without result; how, along the very way which the pilgrims I have described journeyed, 100,000 men at length appeared cased in complete armour and on horseback; how they drove the Turk from Nicaea over against Constantinople, where he had fixed his imperial city, to the farther borders of Asia Minor; how, after defeating him in a pitched battle at Dorylaeum, they went on and took Antioch, and then at length, after a long pilgrimage of three years, made conquest of Jerusalem itself, I need not here relate. To one point only is it to our present purpose to direct attention. It is commonly said that the Crusades failed in their object; that they were nothing else but a lavish expenditure of men and treasure; and that the possession of the Holy Places by the Turks to this day is a proof of it. Now I will not enter here into a very intricate controversy; this only will I say, that, if the tribes of the desert, under the leadership of the house of Seljuk, turned their faces to the West in the middle of the eleventh century; if in forty years they had advanced from Khorasan to Jerusalem and the neighbourhood of Constantinople; and if in consequence they were threatening Europe and Christianity; and if, for that reason, it was a great object to drive them back or break them to pieces; if it were a worthy object of the Crusades to rescue Europe from this peril and to reassure the anxious minds of Christian multitudes;--then were the Crusades no failure in their issue, for this object was fully accomplished. The Seljukian Turks were hurled back upon the East, and