We shall fail to appreciate the inception of the crusades if we overlook the influence of the papal policy in the middle ages. These movements of Europe against Asia, being under the direct patronage of the popes, facilitated the plans of Rome to consolidate and universalize the ecclesiastical empire. To understand this policy we must recall the condition of the church in its relation to popular life and the secular powers. We have referred to the fact that the year 1000 had been looked forward to as that which should mark the end of the world. So common was the expectation of this termination of human affairs that many charters, which have been preserved from this period, begin with the words, “As the world is now drawing to its close.” When, however, the fatal day passed without any perceptible shock to the universe, the popular credulity added the thirty-three years of the life of our Lord to the calculation, and prolonged the gruesome foreboding. But if the chronological interpretation of the prophecy of the Book of Revelation was a mistaken one, there was not wanting an apparent fulfilment of the descriptive prediction, “Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.” The falsity and viciousness of men certainly took on fiendish proportions. The worst feature of the general demoralization was that the millennial fear had driven all sorts of men into church orders. The priesthood and monasteries were crowded with wretched characters, whose imagined immunity in their sacred refuges gave license to their carnal vices. The clergy were no longer the shepherds, but the bell-wethers of the wayward flock. Priests lived in open concubinage. When Hildebrand, previous to his elevation to the Papacy, took charge of the monastery of St. Paul in Rome, his first work was to drive out the cattle that were stabled in the basilica, and the prostitutes who served the tables of the monks. Courtesans reigned even in the palaces of the popes with more effrontery than in the courts of the secular princes. The offspring of such creatures as the infamous Theodora, and of her daughters Theodora and Marozia, had, in the tenth century, purchased the tiara with their vices. In those days the papal staff was wrenched by violence from the hands that held it with more frequency than the old Roman sceptre had been stolen in the worst days of the empire. It may well be credited that men began to pray again to pagan deities in sheer despondency under the darkness which veiled the Christian truth. The surviving religious sentiment was voiced in the solemn utterance of the Council of Rheims, which declared that the church was “ruled by monsters of iniquity, wanting in all culture, whether sacred or profane.”