This interpretation of the nature and mission of war was reënforced by a like unfortunate interpretation of the records of the Old Testament. The good bishop Ulfilas was right when, in translating the Hebrew Bible into the Gothic tongue, he omitted the war chronicles through fear that these records of wars and massacres would fan into too fierce a flame the martial zeal of his Gothic neophytes. To these terrible chronicles, which represent God as commanding the Israelites to wage war against his enemies, and even as ordering the most horrid atrocities upon war captives, is due in large part the idea so dominant even to-day among Christian nations that God is a God of War, and that through the ordeal of battle he gives judgment on the earth.[677] [Sidenote: (_d_) The armed propaganda of Islam] The transformation taking place in the ethical standard of the Church under the various influences we have named was hastened and completed by the reaction upon Christian ethics of the martial ethics of Islam.[678] This new influence began to be exerted in the seventh century. By infection the crusading spirit of the Mohammedan zealots was communicated to the Christian Church. Toward the close of the eleventh century the spiritual head of Christendom, Pope Urban II, summoned the Christian nations of Europe to arms for the recovery of the Holy Sepulcher from the hands of the unbelievers. Feudalism by this time had flowered in chivalry. The Christian lands were filled with brave young knights, especially knights of Norman descent, aflame with martial enthusiasm and eager for warlike adventure. It was the ancestors of these very men, instinct with the military spirit, that Rome had once enlisted in her legions to fight the battles of the Empire; it is the children of those legionaries that the Christian Church now summons in the name of Christ to her standard to fight the battles of the Cross. The transformation of that Church was now complete. The age of the Crusades had opened. Christ and Mars were co-sovereigns in Christian Europe. The teachings of the Prince of Peace and the war spirit of the civilization of antiquity and of the German barbarians were reconciled.[679] As Lecky finely portrays it, “At the hour of sunset when the Christian soldier knelt down to pray before his cross, that cross was the handle of his sword.”[680] II. THE COMPOSITE IDEAL OF KNIGHTHOOD [Sidenote: The composite character of the ideal: its pagan-Christian virtues]