The Crusades

The CRUSADES - PREFACE - 1923 - The Signficance of the Crusades. - THE Crusades may be regarded partly as the decumanus fEuctus in the tide of religious revival, which had begun in western Europe during the tenth century, and had mounted high during the eleventh partly as a chapter, and a most important chapter, in the history of the interaction of East and West. Contemporaries regarded them in the former of these two aspects, as holy wars and pilgrims progresses towards Christs Sepulchre the reflective eye of the historian must perhaps regard them no less from the latter point of view. Considered as holy wars the Crusades must be interpreted by the ideas of an age which was dominated by the spirit of otherworldliness, and accordingly ruled by the clerical power which represented the other world. They are a novum salutis genus, a new path to Heaven, to tread which counted for full and complete satisfaction pro omni poenitentia and gave forgiveness of sins peccaminum remissio l they are, again, the foreign policy of the papacy, directing its faithful subjects to the great war of Christianity against the infidel. As a new way of salvation, the Crusades connect themselves with the history of the penitentiary system as the foreign policy of the Church, they belong to that clerical purification and direction of feudal society and its instincts, which appears in the institution of Gods Truce and in chivalry itself. The penitentiary system, according to which the priest enforced a code of moral law in the confessional by the sanction 1 Fulcher of Chartres, I, i. For what follows, with regard to the Churchs conversion of guerra into the Holy War, cf. especially the passage- Procedant contrainfideles ad pugnam iam incipi dignam . . . qui abusive privatum cerramen contra fideles consuescebant distendere quondam. 4 The Sig ificautce of the Crusades of penancepenance which must be performed as a condition of admission to the sacrament of the Eucharist-had been from early times a great instrument in the civilization of the raw Germanic races. Penance might consist in fasting it might consist in flagellation it might consist in pilgrimage. The penitentiary pilgrimage, which seems to have been practised as early as A. D. 700, was twice blessed not only was it an act of atonement in itself, like fasting and flagellation it aIso gained for the pilgrim the merit of having stood on holy ground. Under the influence of the Cluniac revival, which began in the tenth century, pilgrimages became increasingly frequent and the goal of pilgrimage was often Jerusalem. Pilgrims who were travelling to Jerusalem joined themselves in companies for security, and marched under arms the pilgrims of 1064, who were headed by the archbishop of Mainz, numbered some 7,000 men...