element was the Italian commercial colony, which lived in separate quarters in the towns under governors and laws of its own. Venetians settled largely in the kingdom of Jerusalem, where the Marseilles merchants had exceptionally an enclosed factory of their own in the capital. Genoese mainly occupied the fiefs of Antioch and Tripoli. Pisa was already rather crowded out by her younger rivals. Through Italian hands the commerce between West and East almost exclusively passed. In the country, Syrian peasants, mainly of the Orthodox faith, tilled the lands of their Latin and Catholic masters, and like the Mohammedans and Jews, paid taxes from which the Franks were exempt. The paucity of numbers of the Franks led to extreme care being devoted to building castles and fortifying towns. The feudal stronghold became bigger, harder to take, and more elaborate than ever it had been in the West, and to this day there remain ruins of eastern castles that rival in dignity and strength Coucy, Carnarvon, or Caerphilly. Even in the desert beyond Jordan, the remnants of a vast fortress like Kerak shows how real and solid was the crusading state. Side by side with the Latin state went the Latin Church. Catholic bishops and priests were brought in everywhere, and the various sects of Oriental Christians—Greeks, Armenians, Nestorians, and the rest—shared in a common condemnation as schismatics, though at first common interests and common enemies kept the churches better together than might have been expected. Churches and monasteries grew up beside the new castles. The Holy Sepulchre was soon enclosed in a newer and grander sanctuary. The mediæval ideal—half martial, half ascetic—never had so fair a chance of development as in this land of Christians, forced to fight for their lives against Islam. It found its most characteristic expression in the martial monasticism of the military orders. For the present all looked well. Besides the constant crowd of pilgrims, there was a permanent population growing attached to its new home, which with strange quickness of sympathy, was adopting the conditions of Eastern life, and not seldom intermarrying with Syrians, Armenians, and Greeks. ‘God has poured the West into the East,’ boasted the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres. ‘We who were Westerns are now Easterns. We have forgotten our native land.’ [Sidenote: The Military Orders.]