Just as the moral enthusiasm awakened by the monastic ideal gave a special character and trend to much of the history of the age of its ascendancy,--inspiring or helping to inspire the missionary propaganda among the barbarian tribes of Europe, giving birth to a special literature (the _Lives of the Saints_), and fostering the spirit of benevolence and self-renunciation,--so did the unmeasured enthusiasm created by the chivalric ideal give a distinctive character to much of the history of the age of its predominance--lending a romantic cast to the Crusades, creating a new form of literature, and giving a more assured place in the growing European ideal of character to several attractive traits and virtues. Respecting each of these matters we shall offer some observations in the immediately following pages, and then shall proceed to speak briefly of some reform movements which belong to the general moral history of the epoch under review. [Sidenote: Chivalry and the Crusades] The Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries against the Moslems of the East, in so far as those enterprises were inspired by moral feeling,--and religious-ethical feeling was the chief motive force behind them,--were largely the translation into action of the ideal of chivalry now commended and consecrated by the Church. The oath of the Knights of Malta, who were a perfect incarnation of the spirit of chivalry, was “to make eternal war upon the Turks; to recognize no cessation of hostilities with the infidel, on any pretext whatsoever.” It is an amazing change that, in the course of a few generations, has come over the ethical spirit and temper of the peoples of Christendom. In the earlier medieval time the best conscience of the age was embodied in the monk-saints Augustine, Columba, Winfrid, and a great company of other unarmed missionary apostles to the pagan Celts and Germans; in this later time the best conscience of the age is incarnated in the armor-clad warriors Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond, Bohemond, Tancred, and a multitude of other knightly leaders of the hosts of Crusaders who go forth to redeem with blood and slaughter the tomb of their martyred Lord. [Sidenote: Romance literature as an expression of the ethical spirit of the age] No element of civilization responds more quickly to the changing ethical ideal of a people than its literature. The change that passed over the popular literature of Christendom in the transition of Europe from the age of asceticism to the age of chivalry is finely summarized by Lecky in these words: “When the popular imagination [in the earlier age] embodied in legends its conception of humanity in its noblest and most attractive form, it instinctively painted some hermit-saint of many penances and many miracles.... In the romances of Charlemagne and Arthur we may trace the dawning of a new type of greatness. The hero of the imagination of Europe is no longer the hermit but a knight.”[683]