Forty years had elapsed since the ill-fated crusade of Louis VII. and Conrad (1147) to avenge the capture of Edessa by Zenghi, and the crowning calamity, the fall of Jerusalem into the hands of Saladin (1187). We may briefly note some of the conditions and changes in Europe during this period. Men were thinking, though the dense darkness of mediæval night yet remained, and the spectres of superstition which inhabited the human mind were as many and as strange as ever. For example, the year 1186 was looked for with alarm by the people of northern Europe, because of the predictions of astrologers that certain conjunctions of the stars then betokened dire evils to mankind. In the language of a contemporary: “The planets being in an aërial and windy sign, ... there shall arise in the East a mighty wind, and with its stormy blasts it shall blacken the air and corrupt it with poisonous stench.... The wind shall raise aloft the sands and dust from the face of the earth, and utterly overwhelm such cities as Mecca, Baldac [Bagdad], and Babylon. The regions of Egypt and Ethiopia shall become almost uninhabitable. In the West shall arise dissensions, raised by the wind, and seditions of the people shall take place; and there shall be one of them who shall levy armies innumerable, and shall wage war on the shores of the waters, on which a slaughter so vast will take place that the flow of blood will equal the surging waves. This conjunction signifies the mutation of kingdoms, the superiority of the Franks, the destruction of the Saracenic race, together with longer life to those who shall be born hereafter.”