These sentiments belonged to the manners of troubadours and knights; but at the time of the first crusades, religious ideas were much more mixed up with ideas of gallantry; a poet, invited to take the cross, would not have dared to speak of his ladye-love,[258] without likewise speaking of the mercy of God and the captivity of Jerusalem. During the other crusades, the religion and morality of the Gospel resumed their empire, and spread their benefits everywhere; at the voice of the holy orators, Christians became penitent and reformed their morals; all political tempests were laid by the simple name of Jerusalem, and the West remained in profound peace.[259] It was not so at the period we have just described; Europe was perhaps never more agitated, or, perhaps, more corrupted than during the thirty years which this crusade lasted. In the relations between the Christians and Mussulmans, little respect had, to this time, certainly, been paid to treaties; but in this crusade, contempt for sworn faith and forgetfulness for the laws of nations were carried to an extreme: signing a truce was a preparation for war;—the Christian armies owed their safety to a treaty of peace; and the sovereign pontiff, far from respecting the conditions of it, preached a new crusade against the infidels. It must be allowed, also, that the most solemn treaties were often violated by the Mussulmans. The duration of peace depended solely upon the want of power in both parties to resume hostilities with advantage. The least hope of success was sufficient to induce them to fly to arms; the slightest circumstance was an excuse for rekindling all the flames of war. The continuator of William of Tyre says, with great ingenuousness, when speaking of the death of a sultan of Damascus: “When the sultan died, all the truces died with him.” These words alone are sufficient to give an idea of the state of the East during the sixth crusade, and of the small degree of respect then entertained for the laws of peace and war. If, in the preceding crusade, the expedition of the soldiers of the cross against Greece did not produce great advantages to the West, it at least illustrated the arms of the Venetians and the French. In the war we have just described, the knights and barons who took the cross, added nothing to their glory or their renown. The Crusaders who were fortunate enough to revisit their homes, brought back with them nothing but the remembrance of most shameful disorders. A great number of them had nothing to show their compatriots but the chains of their captivity; nothing to communicate but the contagious disorders of the East.