The sacred fire of enthusiasm for the "Cause of God" still flickered faintly in Europe during the years that immediately preceded the fall of Constantinople. Our own Henry V., during his lifetime, sent out a knight of Burgundy, Gilbert de Lannoy, to see what chances there were of the success of a new Crusade; and Henry's dying words showed that he had not forgotten his design. "Good Lord, Thou knowest that mine intent had been, and yet is, if I may live, to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem." But with the fall of Constantinople, all further hope of wresting the Holy Land from the infidel came to an end. Never again did a prince of the West set out to recover those "holy fields," and to this day they are ruled by the Sultan of Turkey. It is said of Columbus that he had in mind the idea of stirring up an Eastern War in the "Cause of God" before there had dawned upon him the vision of that Western {277} enterprise which was to open the gate to a new world. And that religious zeal did not die with the Crusades is to be seen in the constant stream of pilgrims to the Holy Land which, for a hundred years, followed the final defeat of Christendom, and which, suspended though it was during the spiritual apathy of the eighteenth century, has continued down to the present day. But the Age of Warfare was over when Constantinople fell, and with the dawn of that great awakening of thought and literature which we call the Renaissance, men turned away from bloodshed to the joys of discovery and enterprise in a new world. A little later, when the Wars of the Reformation broke out, and Europe took up the sword anew, the whole spirit of the Western world had changed. The East had lost its glamour, and the antagonism between religious and political parties had waxed so hot in Christendom that the old feud between Christian and pagan was entirely laid aside. Yet the Crusades, in spite of their apparent failure, had done a great work. First and foremost they had succeeded in deferring the rule of the Turk in Europe, and by the constant checks they offered to his progress, had prevented him from conquering anything but the merest fringe of the West. The advantage of this, apart from considerations of religion, will be seen at once if we compare the condition of the subjects of the Sultan with that of the more progressive of the Christian races of Europe. But the benefits conferred upon Europe by the Crusades are by no means only of this negative character. The Saracen of the Middle Ages was a learned and cultured gentleman, skilled in medicine, in music, and in various {278} other sciences, and, generally speaking, as much superior to the rough uneducated Crusader of the Western World as he was to the savage Ottoman Turk.