Such words as these at such an epoch necessarily rekindled faith and hope in every heart that received them. Fifty thousand Christians bound themselves by an oath to follow the successor of St. Peter to Constantinople, when the Emperor Michael Ducas promised to put an end to the dissensions that had so long separated the Greek from the Latin Church, and to Jerusalem, where the standard of Christ, supported by heroic hands and hearts, could not fail soon to replace the standard of the Prophet. Rumours were rife in Europe that a part of Asia was already christianised, and that Prester-John, a powerful sovereign of Tartary (Figs. 98 and 99), had forced his subjects to adopt the precepts of the Gospel. [Illustration: Fig 98.--Prester-John, Chief of a Christian Tribe in Tartary. Fig. 99.--Prester-John’s Page. From Cesare Vecelli’s “Degli Habiti Antichi e Moderni:” 8vo, Venice, 1560.] But the political struggles which Gregory VII. had to sustain against the princes of the West, and the refusal of the King of Germany, Henry IV., to grant him the assistance he had demanded, prevented him from undertaking the sacred expedition which was to have crowned his apostolic work. Victor III., his successor, inspired by his example, continued to preach the Holy War against the infidels. The latter not only manifested throughout the entire East their implacable hatred to the Christian race, but, having founded large settlements on the shores of Africa, they infested the seas, endangered the security of all maritime trading, ceaselessly pillaged the coasts of Italy, ravaged the greater part of Spain, and seemed to be within very little of making Europe a tributary of Islam. But if Victor III. was unable to give birth to a real crusade, he at least succeeded in persuading the Italians to take up arms. An army of Pisans and Genoese landed in Africa (1087), gave battle to the Saracens, killed more than a hundred thousand of them, took and sacked two of their towns, and returned victorious with an immense booty, which they devoted to the embellishment of the churches of Genoa and of Pisa. But this daring enterprise, in spite of its important results, is not mentioned by any of the historians of the Crusades, although in every respect it had the characteristics of a holy war. This appears to prove that its guiding principle was by no means entirely a religious one, but was one bound up with many more material interests, particularly with that of Italian commerce, which had suffered so much from African piracy that it naturally wished at any price to punish the accursed race from which it sprung.