Bloody Welcome in Bulgaria
Three Thousand Killed
One more band, or army rather, of ten thousand started ten years later with the Archbishop of Mayence and the Bishops of Spires, Cologne, Bamberg, and Utrecht. They were almost in sight of Jerusalem when the Bedouins besieged and captured them. Saved from death by a neighboring Emir, they followed the news of their tribulations to Jerusalem, where they were received with joy. They lost during the whole journey three thousand of their number, and went back to fire Europe with accounts of their impressions, their perils, and their undeserved dangers.
Rejoicing in Martyrdom
Fanaticism of Turks
Degenerate Greeks
As the tolerance of the earlier caliphs was succeeded by the fanaticism of the Turks, the Christians of Jerusalem ceased to be treated with any other consideration than that accorded to despised slaves. Pilgrims were no longer guests, but intruders. No persecution, however, stopped the flow of pilgrims. The harder the way, the greater the
cost, the greater the merit. The pilgrim might, under these later conditions, easily become a martyr. The martyr's crown was sure, by the faith of the times, to become a heavenly crown. Few now survived the journey. These often came back starved, cut, and mutilated. Their appearance and the great gaps in the ranks of those who returned, kindled a smoldering fire under all Europe. Such had been the pre-eminence of Constantinople and the Greek Empire that if the Greeks had retained their former quality, the Turks might have been driven back by those who sat on that famous throne. But when the corruption of decay was attacked by the vigor of an almost savage state, there could be but one result.
Greeks Truculent
Among the Greeks the lowest qualities and the basest acts found justification under the name of policy. Courage in battle was supplanted by the shield and mechanism of bodily safety. They killed the men who tried to rouse them. They had wasted all their inheritance but great memories, and had acquired a truculent and factious spirit. While they were nearing the utter decay of their influence the infant West was found to have grown until all that was noble in character and all that was true in Christianity, all which could respond in courage and self-sacrifice to the call of Jerusalem for deliverance,