And with the last beat of this grand and noble heart terminated the eighth crusade, the last on the heroic list of these adventurous expeditions in which the power and the influence of the Christian faith had been so signally manifested. It had indeed required all the personal influence of the revered monarch to re-awaken the religious enthusiasm, to quicken into life the zeal and faith of a state of society which had become more sceptical, if not more corrupt, as it had become more civilised, and which occupied itself less with the spiritual consolations of the soul than with the material pleasures of the body. Never again was the sceptre of France to pass into such sainted hands, never again was the martyr’s halo of glory to illuminate its crown. It is true that more than once since the death of St. Louis a call to the crusade has resounded from the pontifical chair and from the dais of the council hall, but it never found an echo in the heart of either prince or peasant. Nevertheless on two subsequent occasions have voices as persuasive as those of Peter the Hermit and the Monk of Clairvaux attempted to re-awaken popular enthusiasm. In the middle of the fifteenth century, while Mahomet II., master of Constantinople, was advancing full of confidence to conquer the West, John Corvin, vayvode of Transylvania, better known under the name of Huniades, put himself at the head of the Crusaders who had been assembled by the eloquent appeals of St. John of Capistran (Fig. 112). Carried away with the enthusiasm of this man of God, who, crucifix in hand, was wont to penetrate the ranks in the hottest part of an engagement, the Crusaders showed themselves worthy of their heroic leader, Huniades. At the close of a tremendous struggle, the Turks were put to flight; Belgrade remained in the hands of the Christians, and the haughty Mahomet II. was wounded and hurried off the field by his followers. Towards the close of the sixteenth century, the King of Spain and the Italian princes concluded arrangements with Pope Pius V. and the Venetians for a crusade to defend Christian Europe against the Turks. Don Juan of Austria (Fig. 113), who was appointed commander-in-chief of the troops by Pius V., obtained, on the 7th of October, 1571, that tremendous victory in which the Turks lost thirty thousand men and two hundred and twenty-four vessels, a loss that destroyed their naval supremacy and saved Europe. But in the meantime the Holy Land had again fallen beneath the yoke of the infidel, and there was soon no trace left of those principalities beyond the seas which the crusading nobles had founded in the Archipelago and in Asia Minor, and which for a brief, a very brief, space had seemed so flourishing; there was soon, indeed, no trace left of even the name of the ephemeral kingdom of Jerusalem, for the creation of which the nations of Europe had lavished, for nearly two centuries, so much blood, so much wealth, and so much heroism.