It is curious to note the different modes of government which prevailed in the different States of Italy in the fifteenth century. There was, nearly halfway down the long peninsula, this Papal State or State of the Church, firmly established by 1450. In the extreme south was the kingdom, that is to say a State governed by a monarchy, of Naples, with which the island of Sicily was at one time included, while at another time the kingdom was separated from it. In the extreme north there was Milan, of which the Duke was the head. Another of the five great States by which all Italy at that time was held was Florence, under a republican government, and there was the powerful naval State of Venice, also in name a republic, though its mode of government differed from the mode of Florence. In Italy more than in any other country, although conditions everywhere were constantly changing, we find what we may call experiments in ways of government being attempted. I do not think that there is any form of government, or even of anarchy—which is absence of all government—under which mankind ever has tried to live that was not put upon its trial in Italy during these years. Yet, through all the shifting scene, so unsettled that even the Pope himself had to fly from the Holy City, the power of the Church still increased and increased. And one of the means of its increase we have to recognise in the Crusades. Although the later Crusades lost much of the high spiritual motives which had inspired the first Crusades, even the worst of them was waged with the underlying idea in the minds of the warriors that they were fighting in the sacred cause of religion.

The earlier Crusades had been fired with the project, which for a while had been achieved, of rescuing the Holy Places of Palestine from the infidel. The first Crusaders of all had been invited thither by the Emperor at Constantinople. The fourth Crusaders had attacked and taken Constantinople itself and had put one of their leaders, Baldwin, the Norman, on the imperial throne. But there were other so-called Crusades that never went eastward at all. Only a few years later than the date, 1204, of the expedition which captured the imperial capital of the East, that so-called Crusade against the Albigenses swept over the beautiful country of the troubadours. The people of this part of France had been disposed, for many years, to adopt a view of the nature of God which had been brought from the east of Europe and was opposed to the doctrine of the Church of Rome. Moreover, these heretics, as the Church deemed them, set their faces firmly against some of the evil practices of the clergy.

It is not only in the south of France, but it is in whatever part of Christendom we look at this time, that we find these evil practices. Doubtless there were very many good and zealous priests and monks, but the records leave no doubt that there were very many who were idle, and worse than idle. From the Pope himself came parchments on which were written pardons for sins committed, and these pardons could be bought, for money, from the clergy. Also there were other parchments on which were written "indulgences," as they were called—that is to say leave to commit sins, up to a certain date, without penalty. These too were sold, for the benefit of the clergy and the Church.

It was against such bad doings as these that the Albigensian heretics protested, and probably it was this protesting, quite as much as their heretical belief, which led the Church to incite an active war against them. They were under the protection of the lords of the castles in which, as we have seen, the troubadours were welcomed and entertained, for these lords themselves appear to have been inclined to their doctrine. One of these lords was excommunicated by the Pope's legate who had been sent to try to suppress the heresy. In the uproar which this caused the legate was killed, and the result of his murder was that the Pope incited the lords of the north of France to take up arms against the south and sweep the Albigensian heretics off the face of the earth.

STATUE OF KNIGHT IN CHAIN ARMOUR.

It was a sweeping which was not perfectly accomplished at the first passage of the broom. The heresy continued to linger on in secret places until the Church, by the use of that most cruel institution called the Inquisition, finally destroyed it. But it was an immediate result of the Crusade that the independence of the lords of the south of France was lost. Their demesnes were gathered in under the sovereignty of the King of France, and all that graceful and picturesque and highly cultivated life in which the troubadours had taken so very large a part came to an end. Their music was silenced: their poems were composed no more.

You may read in your history books that the "era of the Crusades" comes to an end in 1270. You will also find the Crusades divided up into first, second, third, and so on. But, as we have seen, there was a continual going to and from Palestine. There was, too, one European country in which we may say that a perpetual Crusade, or war for the Cross against the Crescent, went on without ceasing for close on 800 years. That country is Spain, from its first invasion by the Moslems, which was early in the eighth century, until their final expulsion at the end of the fifteenth.

The Moorish "conquest"