The state of that country, however, was the least[545] propitious that it is possible to conceive for a crusade. The position of all the orders of society had undergone a change since the period when the wars of the Cross were first preached by Peter the Hermit; and of the many causes which had combined to hurry the armed multitudes to the Holy Land, none remained but the spirit of religious fanaticism and military enterprise. At the time of the first crusade, the feudal system had reached the acme of its power. The barons had placed a king upon the throne. They had rendered their own dominion independent of his, and though they still acknowledged some ties between themselves and the monarch--some vague and general power of restraint in the king and his court of peers--yet those ties were so loose, that power was so undefined in its nature, and so difficult in its exercise, that the nobles were free and at liberty to act in whatever direction enthusiasm, ambition, or cupidity might call them, without fear of the sovereign, who was, in fact, but one of their own body loaded with a crown. The people, too, at that time, both in the towns and in the fields, were the mere slaves of the nobility; and as there existed scarcely a shadow of vigour in the kingly authority, so there remained not an idea of distinct rights and privileges among the populace. Thus the baronage were then unfettered by dread from any quarter; and the lower classes--both the poorer nobility, and that indistinct tribe (which we find evidently[546] marked) who were neither among the absolute serfs of any lord, nor belonging to the military caste--were all glad to engage themselves in wars which held out to them riches and exaltation in this world, and beatification in the next; while they could hope for nothing in their own land but pillage, oppression, and wrong; or slaughter in feuds without an object, and in battles for the benefit of others.