At the Council of Clermont, in 1094, Pope Urban II depicted the miseries of Christians in Palestine, and, with a power of eloquence unsurpassed in his day, called upon those who heard him to wipe off from the face of the earth the impurities which caused them, and to lift their oppressed fellow-Christians from the depths into which they had been trampled. He urged them to take up arms in the service of the Cross, at the same time setting before them the temporal, no less than the spiritual, advantages that would accrue from the conquest of a land "flowing with milk and honey," and which, he said, should be divided among them. He likewise offered them full pardon for all their sins. The enthusiasm of his hearers burst all bounds, and with one voice they cried: "God wills it! God wills it!" To all parts of Europe the fervor spread. The Pope was powerfully aided by an earnest and eloquent--if ignorant--monk, Peter the Hermit, of Amiens, who declared that he would rouse the martial spirit of Europe in the cause, and he himself was the first--with whatsoever of misguided zeal--to lead the way to the Holy Land. The crusades are so called from the simple circumstance that the badge chosen for the movement was the cross, which Pope Urban bade the Christian warriors wear on their breasts or on their shoulders, as the sign of Him who died for the salvation of their souls, and as the pledge of a vow that could never be recalled.) In the enterprise to which Latin Christendom stood committed, the several nations or countries of Europe took equal parts; or, rather, no _nation_, as such, took any part in it at all; and in this fact we have the explanation of that want of coherent action, and even decent or average generalship, which is commonly seen in national undertakings. For the crusade there was no attempt at a commissariat, no care for a base of supplies; and the crusading hosts were a collection of individual adventurers who either went without making any provisions for their journey or provided for their own needs and those of their followers from their own resources. The number of these adventurers was naturally determined by the political conditions of the country from which they came. In Italy the struggle between the pope and the antipope went far toward chilling enthusiasm; and the recruits for the crusading army came chiefly from the Normans who had followed Robert Guiscard to the sunny southern lands. The Spaniards were busied with a crusade nearer home, and were already pushing back to the south the Mahometan dominion which had once threatened to pass the barriers of the Pyrenees and carry the Crescent to the shores of the Baltic Sea. About ten years before the council of Clermont the Moslem dynasty of Toledo had been expelled by Alfonso, King of Galicia: the kingdom of Cordova had fallen twenty years earlier (1065), and while Peter the Hermit was hurrying hither and thither through the countries of Northern Europe, the