CHAPTER III.
THE CRUSADES AND LAND TRAVEL.
CIRCA 1100-1300.
he pilgrims were the pioneers of the growth of Europe and of Christendom until Charlemagne, in one sense, in another and a broader sense until the Crusades.
Their original work, as far as it can be called original at all, was entirely overshadowed by the Vikings, who made real discoveries of the first importance in hunting for new worlds to conquer; but when first the Viking rovers themselves, and then the Northmen, settled in the colonies and the old home, took up Christianity as the Arabs had taken up Islam, the pilgrim spirit was translated, as it were, into new and more powerful forms. Through the conversion of Hungary and of Scandinavia,[22]—Europe, Christian Europe, was compacted together in a stronger Empire than that of Constantine or of Charlemagne—a spiritual federation, not a political unity—one and undivided not in visible subordination, but in a common zeal for a common faith. This was the state of the Latin world, and in a measure of the Greek and Russian world as well, by the middle of the eleventh century, when the Byzantine Emperors had broken the strength of the Eastern Caliphate, and recovered most of the realm of Heraclius; when the Roman Papacy under Leo IX., Hildebrand, and Urban began its political stage, aiming, and in great part successfully aiming, at an Imperial Federation of Europe under religion; when on every side, in Spain, in France, in England, in Germany, and in Italy, the nations that had been slowly built into that Domus Dei were filled with fresh life and purpose from the Norsemen, who, as pirates, or conquerors, or brothers, had settled among them. The long crusade that had gone on for four hundred years in Spain and in southern Italy and in the Levant, which had raged round the islands of the Mediterranean, or the passes of the Alps and Pyrenees, or the banks of the Loire and the Tiber,—was now, on the eve of the first Syrian Crusade of 1096, rapidly tending to decisive victory. Toledo was won back in 1084; the Norman dominion in the Two Sicilies had already taken the place of a weak and halting Christian defence against Arab emirs; pilgrims were going in thousands where there had been tens or units by the reopened land route through Hungary; only in the far East the first appearance of the Turks as Moslem champions,[23] threatened an ebb of the tide. Christendom had seen a wonderful expansion of the Heathen North; now that it had won the Northmen to itself, it was ready to imitate their example. The deliberate purpose of the Popes only gave direction to the universal feeling of restless and abundant energy longing for wider action. But it was not the crusading movement itself which brought so much new light, so much new knowledge of the world, to Europe, as the results of that impulse in trade, in travel, and in colonisation.