But the Church also taught that forgiveness for sins might be gained by doing penance, that is to say by punishment and suffering; and one of the forms of this punishment which the Church advised as most efficacious was to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Holy City. That is a fact of which it is worth your while to make a special note in your minds, because it was out of this habit of pilgrims going to Jerusalem for the good of their souls that those great expeditions called the Crusades came to be made.
Among the many good things for which the Christian Church was working was peace. It was working for peace in a world that was at constant war, in spite of the Church's efforts. It may seem a strange thing to say, that the Crusades were partly due to the Church's wish for peace, but it is probably true that part of the reason why the Church gave them its blessing was they were a means by which Christian soldiers, instead of fighting against each other, might be united in fighting against non-Christians, against Mahommedans.
This is one reason which might have led the Church to favour the Crusades. Another was that it seemed a dreadful thing that a city so sacred as Jerusalem should be in the hands of the Saracens. Naturally the Church favoured the attempt to recover the Holy Places by the Christian powers.
Yet a third reason which brought about the first of the many Crusades was that the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, in Constantinople, was being hard pressed at the moment by the Mahommedans in Asia Minor, and made a request to the Christians in the West to come to his help. The Eastern Empire had suffered heavy losses. Not only had the Saracens taken possession of its old territories of Egypt and Africa, as well as Palestine and Syria and a large part of Asia Minor, but from the north had come raiders even to the very walls of Constantinople itself. A number of races from the north and east had taken part in these incursions—Huns, Tartars, Slavs, from the Carpathian Mountains. It is in the ninth century that we begin to hear of such a country as Russia, which was inhabited by all these races, and Russia already was beginning to stretch a hand down towards that Constantinople which she has hankered after ever since. Then that large and fertile land which is marked as Hungary in modern maps was already called by that name and had been lost to the Emperor at Constantinople. His was, in fact, an Empire restricted to a comparatively small western slice of Asia Minor, to some of the islands and to the fringes, along the northern shore of the Mediterranean, of all that it had once claimed in Greece and in what we know as Turkey in Europe. The aggression which the Emperor especially dreaded when, he summoned the West to help him was aggression by the Turks, who had by this time established themselves as the chief Mahommedan power in the East.
The Turks, a people of the same kin as those Tartars who formed part of the mixed population of Russia, had come down from the east and north and settled themselves in force in the eastern part of Asia Minor. It would seem that they were a tougher and a rougher race than the Arabians, whose religion they had adopted. But the fact that they had accepted the religion founded by the Arabian Mahomet, did not save the Arabs from the attacks of these invading Turks, who dispossessed them of all their conquests in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Further westward it was chiefly a race of African natives, who had adopted the religion of Mahomet, with but a small contingent of any Arabian people, that conquered Spain and had its capital city at Cordova, in that country. And a little later in the story another Mahommedan African tribe, closely akin to the conquerors of Spain, seized and kept a long slice of that southern shore of the Mediterranean as far east as the Egyptian boundary.
It is the more necessary to make a note of these divisions, because it seems to have been the way of the Crusaders and of all Christian people of that time to group together all Mahommedans, no matter of what race they were, under the common name of Saracen, which originally was applied to one tribe only of the Arabian nation. By the end of the eleventh century, when the first Crusaders went to the Holy Land, the hold of the Moors in Spain was neither as firm nor nearly as extensive as it had been. The country was divided between Christian and Moslem, the Moslem still possessing the southern part, nearer that Africa whence he had come. The fighting was continual, with results that gave now one side and now the other the advantage, but it inclined, on the whole, to favour the Christians. This was the time to which belong the splendid stories about the Cid Campeador and many other great Spanish and Christian heroes.
But while, in the West, the Christian was thus forcing the African Saracen gradually to loosen his grip on Spain, in the East the Turkish Saracen was pressing the Christian so hard as to cause the ruler of Constantinople, though still claiming the title of Eastern Emperor, to send a prayer to all Christians to come to his aid.
Plague in Europe
The conditions of the people in most parts of Europe was probably more miserable about this date, that is to say about 1100, than ever before or since. Besides the misery caused by the perpetual fighting, there was disease, in the form of a plague, which killed large numbers; and a very bad season for farming had brought great scarcity of food. Therefore when the call went forth for volunteers to help the Christians of the East and to regain the Holy Places from the infidel, very many were ready to respond to the summons. The Crusade was preached first by a religious zealot called Peter the Hermit, and attracted the poor people who were so wretched in Europe that any change must have seemed likely to be for the better health of their bodies, quite apart from the saving of their souls. This call of the Hermit's seems to have been the summons of a man full of zeal, but of little wisdom. Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Empire, whence the prayer for help had come, was named as the place in which the Crusaders were to collect for the attack on Palestine. Thither Peter the Hermit led his followers; but very few survived even to reach that city. On the way across Hungary wild tribes set upon them and destroyed a great number. So that poor effort came to nothing, as it was certain that it must from the way in which it was undertaken.
But in the meantime a more orderly movement had been started, with a great Churchman, acting as the Pope's legate, at its head. So it had the Pope's blessing, and many of the great feudal lords were its leaders. There were lords of Italy, of France, of Germany, and we may note especially that there were lords of Normandy.