A noticeable incident in the above description is its incongruous mixture of Christian and Pagan allegories. It bears witness to the anti-religious tendency of the school of thought of the Renaissance, and is a faithful reflection of the alteration in custom and belief. In the Middle Ages, sailors, and indeed all classes of society, were imbued with a strong spirit of faith, tinged, however, with a great deal of superstition. As in our day, they had a sincere belief in Providence, and professed great devotion to the Virgin; in seasons of peril they invoked those saints who were supposed to take special interests in ships and sailors; but, in spite of their natural reverence for religion, they allowed themselves to be influenced by childish superstition, and confused the promptings of their orthodox faith with all kinds of vain imaginings. Sailors have ever been superstitious; their credulous brains are the parents of all the fantastic beings and animals that they persuade themselves they have seen in their wanderings, and with which they have peopled the mysterious depths of the ocean. The sirens of antiquity, the monsters of Scylla and Charybdis, have been far surpassed by modern legendary creations, such as the _kraken_, a gigantic mass of pulp, which attacked and dragged down the largest ships; the _bishop fish_, which, mitre on head, blessed and then devoured shipwrecked mariners; the _black hand_, which, even in the days of Columbus, was depicted on the map as marking the entrance to the _sunless ocean_; and the numerous troops of hideous demons, one of whom, in the sight of the whole French fleet of Crusaders on their way to attack the island of Mitylene, in the reign of Louis XII., clutched and swallowed up a profligate sailor, who, over his dice, had “blasphemed and defied the Holy Virgin.” Blasphemy was by no means uncommon among seamen; in spite of the laws of the Church and the regulations of the Admiralty, they insisted on using the most frightful oaths; they swore continually by bread, by wine, and by salt, meaning thereby the very principles of life itself, and by their soul--an oath which was forbidden on pain of the severest punishment. Yet the mariners of the Middle Ages had strong reasons for avoiding open blasphemy, for, an offence against Heaven being considered far more criminal than any injury to mankind, a blasphemer was liable to fine, to the cat, and to death itself. Even in the thirteenth century the Danish code inflicted a comparatively moderate punishment on a thief; it shaved his head, tarred and feathered him, and made him run the gauntlet of the whole crew, after which it contented itself with dismissing him from his ship. [Illustration: Fig. 96.--Seal of La Rochelle (1437).] THE CRUSADES.