The effect may be studied in relation to the spirit that was stimulated, and to the economic and educational influence involved. The Church originally favoured the Crusades as a means both of diverting the savagery of the fighting class from internecine strife to distant warfare and of intensifying religious faith and feeling. While it was not strong enough to crush the fighting spirit, it could consecrate it to some kind of an ideal, and thereby succeeded in tempering the stupid savagery of feudalism with the finer spirit of chivalry. An idealism of knighthood was encouraged that reverenced women, protected the weak, redressed the wrongs of the oppressed, and wedded to the courtesies of life a fervour of religious faith. Amidst the ugliness of the times there sprang up the blue flower of an ideal of beauty that affected in some measure both the spiritual and the social life. How real and intense was the spirituality of the times may be gathered from its excesses, as evidenced in the cruelties of the Crusade against the Albigenses for their heresies, and in the pathetic tragedies of the Children’s Crusades. In 1212 a French shepherd boy, named Stephen, induced thousands of boys to follow him to Marseilles, promising to lead them dry-shod through the sea to Palestine, and a boy of Cologne, named Nicolas, led an army of twenty thousand children toward Italy. Such of the French children as reached Marseilles were kidnapped and sold to slavery in Egypt, while the German host perished from privations, leaving only a memory that is preserved in the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. In the wake of military expeditions to the East there followed the adventurers of commerce. Trade routes were opened up, the earliest of which and for a long time the most important was by way of Venice, over the Brunner Pass and up the Rhine to Bruges. And commercial relations meant the continual passing backward and forward of persons in the pursuits of peace and, in consequence, a growing intercourse between the members of different nationalities. The old isolation of the western and northern nations was gradually removed, and the individual’s narrow horizon became broadened by travel, his restricted ideas of life enlarged and enlightened by contact with the alien and superior culture of the East. For it was in Constantinople and among the Arabs in Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt that secular learning at this period flourished.