The chapter of history that followed we would fain on all sides obliterate, if we could, from the records of humanity, and we doubt not that the strictest Catholic as much as the most indignant Protestant would share this wish; but that, alas, cannot be done. And no such feeling was in any mind of the time. The remedy was not thought to be too terrible for the disease, for centuries after: and the most Christian souls rejoiced in the victories of the Crusade, the towns destroyed, the nests of heretics broken up. The very heretics themselves, who suffered fiercely and made reprisals when they could, had no doctrine of toleration among themselves, and would have extirpated a wicked hierarchy, and put down the mass with a high hand, as four hundred years later their more enlightened successors did, when the power came to them. There are many shuddering spectators who now try to represent to themselves that Innocent so far off was but half, or not at all, acquainted with the atrocities committed in his name; that his legates over-stepped their authority, as frequently happened, and were carried away by the excitement of carnage and the terrible impulse of destruction common to wild beasts and men when that fatal passion is aroused; and that his generals soon converted their Crusade, as Crusades more or less were converted everywhere, into a raid of fierce acquisition, a war for booty and personal enrichment. And all this is true for as much as it is worth in reducing the guilt of Innocent; but that is not much, for he was a man very well acquainted with human nature, and knew that such things must be. As for Simon de Montfort and his noble companions, they were not, much less were the men-at-arms under their orders, superior to all that noble chivalry of France which had started from Venice with so fine a purpose, but had been drawn aside to crush and rob Constantinople on their way, only some seven years before. Baldwin of Flanders became Emperor of the great eastern city in 1204. Simon de Montfort named himself Count de Toulouse in 1215. Both had been sent forth with the Pope's blessing on quite a different mission, both had succumbed to the temptation of their own aggrandisement. But of the two, at the end Simon was the more faithful. If he committed or permitted to be committed the most abominable cruelties, he nevertheless did stamp out heresy. Provence regained her gaiety, her courts of love, her gift of song. Innocent, for once in his life, with all the dreadful drawbacks accompanying it, was successful in the object for which he had striven.