Among the many good things for which the Christian Church was working was peace. It was working for peace in a world that was at constant war, in spite of the Church's efforts. It may seem a strange thing to say, that the Crusades were partly due to the Church's wish for peace, but it is probably true that part of the reason why the Church gave them its blessing was they were a means by which Christian soldiers, instead of fighting against each other, might be united in fighting against non-Christians, against Mahommedans. This is one reason which might have led the Church to favour the Crusades. Another was that it seemed a dreadful thing that a city so sacred as Jerusalem should be in the hands of the Saracens. Naturally the Church favoured the attempt to recover the Holy Places by the Christian powers. Yet a third reason which brought about the first of the many Crusades was that the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, in Constantinople, was being hard pressed at the moment by the Mahommedans in Asia Minor, and made a request to the Christians in the West to come to his help. The Eastern Empire had suffered heavy losses. Not only had the Saracens taken possession of its old territories of Egypt and {132} Africa, as well as Palestine and Syria and a large part of Asia Minor, but from the north had come raiders even to the very walls of Constantinople itself. A number of races from the north and east had taken part in these incursions--Huns, Tartars, Slavs, from the Carpathian Mountains. It is in the ninth century that we begin to hear of such a country as Russia, which was inhabited by all these races, and Russia already was beginning to stretch a hand down towards that Constantinople which she has hankered after ever since. Then that large and fertile land which is marked as Hungary in modern maps was already called by that name and had been lost to the Emperor at Constantinople. His was, in fact, an Empire restricted to a comparatively small western slice of Asia Minor, to some of the islands and to the fringes, along the northern shore of the Mediterranean, of all that it had once claimed in Greece and in what we know as Turkey in Europe. The aggression which the Emperor especially dreaded when, he summoned the West to help him was aggression by the Turks, who had by this time established themselves as the chief Mahommedan power in the East.