All admired the power of God who had chosen the instruments of his designs from remote and little known regions; the crowd of the faithful looked upon the supreme head of the hordes of Tartary as another Cyrus, whom Providence had charged with the destruction of Babylon and the deliverance of Jerusalem. At the last sitting, the Council of Lyons decreed that a new crusade should be undertaken, and that during ten years a tenth should be levied upon all ecclesiastical property. Palæologus, who at length submitted to the Latin church, promised to send troops for the deliverance of the heritage of Christ; the Pope recognized Rodolph of Hapsbourg as emperor of the West, upon condition that he would go into Palestine at the head of an army. But notwithstanding the grand spectacle of such a council, the decisions and the exhortations of the Pope and the prelates could not arouse the enthusiasm of the faithful, which was no longer anything, to borrow an expression from Scripture, “but the smoking remains of a burnt cloth.” Gregory X. had succeeded in re-establishing peace among the Italian republics, and in terminating all the discords of Germany relative to the succession to the empire: no war interfered with the crusade; but the minds of both princes and nations had taken a fresh direction. We still possess a written document of this period, which, doubtless, obtained the approbation if not the encouragement of the pope, and which appears to us well calculated to throw a light upon the spirit of the age, and show us what was then the general opinion of expeditions to the East. In this document, which will be considered whimsical, at least in its form, the author, Humbert de Romanis, endeavours to revive the zeal of Christians for the holy war, and, while deploring the indifference of his contemporaries, he points out eight obstacles to the effects of his preaching: 1st. _A sinful habit_; 2nd. _The dread of fatigue_; 3rd. _Repugnance to quit their native country_; 4th. _An excessive love of family_; 5th. _The evil discourses of men_; 6th. _A weakness of mind that creates a belief that every thing is impossible_; 7th. _Bad examples_; 8th. _A faith without warmth_. To all these motives for indifference the author might have added other reasons drawn from the policy and the new interests of Europe; but without allowing himself to be stopped by so many obstacles, the intrepid defender of the crusades, proceeding always by enumerations and categories, hastens to denote seven powerful passions, which, according to him, ought to cause the partisans of the holy to triumph; these reasons were: 1st. _Zeal for the glory of God_; 2nd. _Zeal for the Christian faith_; 3rd. _Brotherly charity_; 4th. _Devotional respect for the Holy Land_; 5th. _The war commenced by the Mussulmans_; 6th. _The example of the first Crusaders_; 7th. _The blessings of the Church_. After these enumerations, Humbert de Romanis repeats the objections that were made in his time against