The Crusades were in reality but the general application, upon a larger scale, of those pilgrimages to the Holy Land which the inhabitants of Christian Europe had so long been performing. In the rear of the armed hosts marched with unfurled banners a tribe of infirm pilgrims, women, children, and old men (Fig. 288), led by priests in their sacerdotal vestments--undisciplined multitudes, into whose ranks inevitably crept a number of those miscreants who were the real authors of all the misdeeds with which history has reproached the Crusaders. As to the pilgrimages, the immediate result of this great movement of the European population towards Palestine was the creation, along the road which they had to travel, of a number of receiving-houses, supported and managed by certain religious and military orders, who entertained the wearied and sick pilgrims, and helped them on their journey. [Illustration: Fig. 287.--Reliquary in chased copper (front and reverse), with movable Panels, and containing round the Crucifixion Scene, and in the space between the columns, Relics of Apostles, Fathers of the Church, Saints, and Martyrs.--Flemish work of the Thirteenth Century, preserved in the Convent of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, at Mons.] [Illustration: Fig. 288.--Robert I., Duke of Normandy, father of William the Conqueror, seized with illness during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem (1035), is carried in his litter by negroes: hence his jocular saying, “I am being taken by demons into Paradise.”--From a Miniature in the “Chroniques de Normandie,” a Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the Library of M. Ambroise Firmin Didot.]