The American Encyclopedia of History, Biography and Travel: Comprising Ancient and Modern History: the Biography of Eminent Men of Europe and America, and the Lives of Distinguished Travelers.Prescott, Thomas H.
History
The American Encyclopedia of History, Biography and Travel: Comprising Ancient and Modern History: the Biography of Eminent Men of Europe and America, and the Lives of Distinguished Travelers.
Prescott, Thomas H.
Biography; World history
cruel barbarities of the first Crusaders. In his last will he ordered
alms to be distributed among the poor, without distinction of Jew,
Christian, or Mohammedan; intending by this bequest to intimate that
all men are brethren, and that when we would assist them, we ought not
to inquire what they believe, but what they feel――an admirable lesson
to Christians, though from a Mohammedan. But the advantages in
science, in moderation, and humanity, seem at this period to have been
all on the side of the Saracens.
There were no more great Crusades. Considerable bands of private
adventurers still continued to move eastward; but disaster and
disgrace attended every effort, and Europe at last became disheartened
when the bones of two millions of her sons lay whitened on the plains
of Asia, and so little had been accomplished. Nevertheless, in the
year 1202, Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was able to raise another
considerable army for the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre; but having
reached Constantinople at a time when there was a dispute in the
succession to the throne, he readily laid aside the project of the
Crusade, took part in the quarrel, and in the course of five months he
was himself the emperor. The citizens of Venice in Italy, who had lent
their vessels for this enterprise, shared in the triumphs of the
piratical Crusaders: they obtained the Isle of Candia, or Crete.
Baldwin, however, was soon driven from the throne, and murdered;
though the Latins, as his successors from the West were called, kept
possession of Constantinople for fifty-seven years.
At this period (1227) a great revolution took place in Asia. Ghenghis
Khan, at the head of a body of Tartars, broke down from the north upon
Persia and Syria, and massacred indiscriminately Turks, Jews, and
Christians, who opposed them. The European settlements in Palestine
must soon have yielded to these invaders, had not their fate been for
a while retarded by the last attempt at a Crusade under Louis IX of
France. This prince, summoned, as he believed, by Heaven, after four
years’ preparation set out for the Holy Land with his queen, his three
brothers, and all the knights of France (1248). His army began their
enterprise, and we may say ended it also, by an unsuccessful attack on
Egypt. The king went home, and reigned prosperously and wisely for
thirteen years; but the same frenzy again taking possession of him, he
embarked on a Crusade against the Moors in Africa, where his army was
destroyed by a pestilence, and he himself became its victim (1270).
Before the end of the thirteenth century (1291) the Christians were
driven out of all their Asiatic possessions. ‘The only common
enterprise,’ says Robertson, ‘in which the European nations were
engaged, and which they all undertook with equal ardor, remains a
singular monument of human folly.’
INSTITUTION OF CHIVALRY, ETC.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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