Many circumstances contributed to make Paris the capital of the intellectual world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. France has ever been the home of great enthusiasms and has not feared to "follow where airy voices lead." The conception and enforcement of a Truce of God (_Treve de Dieu_) whereby all acts of hostility in private or public wars ceased during certain days of the week or on church festivals; the noble ideal of Christian chivalry; the first crusade--all had their origin in France. The crusaders carried the prestige of the French name and diffused the French idiom over Europe. It was a French monk preaching in France who gave voice to the general enthusiasm; a French pope approved his impassioned oration; a French shout "_Dieu le veut_" became the crusader's war-cry. The conquest of the Holy Land was organised by the French, its first Christian king was a French knight, its laws were indited in French, and to this day every Christian in the East is a Frank whatever tongue he may speak. The French jurists were famed for their supreme excellence all over Western Europe. In the thirteenth century Brunette Latini wrote his most famous work, the _Livres dou Tresor_, in French, because it was _la parleure plus delitable, il plus commune a toutes gens_ ("the most delightful of languages and the most common to all peoples"). Martin da Canale composed his story of Venice in French for the same reason, and Marco Polo dictated his travels in French in a Genoese prison. When St. Francis was sending the brothers to establish the order in distant lands, he himself chose France, but was dissuaded by his friend, Cardinal Ugolin. "When inebriated with love and compassion for Christ," says the writer of the _Speculum_, "and overflowing with sweetest melody of the Spirit, ofttimes would he find utterance in the French tongue; the strains of the divine whisperings which his ear had caught he would express in a French song of joyous exultation, and making the gestures of one playing a viol, he would sing in French of our Lord Jesus Christ."