The crusades happily exhausted the military spirit of Europe, and prepared the way for advancement in the arts of peace. This done, the decline of the feudal system was hastened by the necessity of meeting the enormous expenses thereby incurred. Many baronial estates were consequently sold, and thus by degrees were abolished those impediments which had long been adverse to all the varied forms of culture by which the afflictions of man are mitigated, or his toils abridged. The great evil which then required to be abolished had given strength to a greater good that was to succeed; the commerce which was mainly created to carry supplies to the crusaders, was ready, on the decline of martial renown, to go still further in search of a new world, or to hold mercantile speculations with the remotest regions of the old. Consequent upon the facilities and refinements of navigation, followed all those arts of utility and convenience by which the productions of nature are applied or improved. The arts of weaving and dyeing, the perfection of paper and the press, as well as gunpowder and the compass, were the results of quickened industry and enlarged commerce. All great civilizing powers then attained a simultaneous and distinct culmination over a new field and under brighter auspices, when each department of progressive pursuit, the commercial, the literary, and the military, was furnished, at the fall of the feudal system, with its own peculiar instrument of invincible conquest. Bearing in mind that Charles Martel, Peter the Hermit, Richard of the Lion Heart, and John Sobieski, with their mighty co-agents in the great preparatory work above described, all arose on the western edge of the field and age we are now exploring, let us proceed briefly to notice the still grander developments which followed thereupon.