To their lowest stage of misery, however, the Jews were reduced during one of the most holy enterprises which the papacy launched during the Middle Ages--the Crusades. "The crusading movement was inaugurated by a wholesale massacre and persecution first of the Jew, and afterwards of the Mussulman. . . . Shut out from all opportunity for the development of their better qualities, the Jews were gradually reduced to a decline both in character and condition. From a learned, influential, and powerful class of the community, we find them, after the inauguration of the Crusades, sinking into miserable outcasts; the common prey of clergy and nobles and burghers, and existing in a state worse than slavery itself. The Christians deprived the Jews even of the right of holding real estate; and confined them to the narrower channels of traffic. Their ambition being thus fixed upon one subject, they soon mastered all the degrading arts of accumulating gain; and prohibited from investing their gain in the purchase of land, they found n more profitable employment of it in lending it at usurious interest to the thoughtless and extravagant." In course of time the borrowers recouped their losses by inaugurating raids upon the Jews. Jew-baiting, persecutions, expatriations of Jewish settlers, were of frequent occurrence. Towards the end of the thirteenth century 16,000 Jews were expelled from England and their property confiscated. In Germany "they had to pay all manner of iniquitous taxes--body tax, capitation tax, trade taxes, coronation tax, and to present a multitude of gifts, to mollify the avarice or supply the necessities of emperor, princes, and barons. It did not suffice, however, to save them from the loss of their property. The populace and the lower clergy also must be, satisfied; they, too, had passions to gratify. A wholesale slaughter of the 'enemies of Christianity' was inaugurated. Treves, Metz, Cologne, Mentz, Worms, Spires, Strassburg, and other cities were deluged with the blood of the 'unbelievers.' The word _Hep_ (said to be the initials of _Hierosolyma est perdita_, Jerusalem is taken) throughout all the cities of the empire became the signal for massacres, and if an insensate monk sounded it along the streets, it threw the rabble into paroxysms of murderous rage. The choice of death or conversion was given to the Jews; but few were found willing to purchase their life by that form of perjury. Rather than subject their offspring to conversion and such Christian training, fathers presented their breast to the sword after putting their children to death, and wives and virgins sought refuge from the brutality of the soldiers by throwing themselves into the river with stones fastened to their bodies." (_McClintock and Strong Cyclop_., 4, 908 f.)