“I will perform my penitence
Between the sea and swift Durance,
Near to my lady’s bower.”
These sentiments belonged to the manners of troubadours and knights; but at the time of the first crusades, religious ideas were much more mixed up with ideas of gallantry; a poet, invited to take the cross, would not have dared to speak of his ladye-love,[258] without likewise speaking of the mercy of God and the captivity of Jerusalem.
During the other crusades, the religion and morality of the Gospel resumed their empire, and spread their benefits everywhere; at the voice of the holy orators, Christians became penitent and reformed their morals; all political tempests were laid by the simple name of Jerusalem, and the West remained in profound peace.[259] It was not so at the period we have just described; Europe was perhaps never more agitated, or, perhaps, more corrupted than during the thirty years which this crusade lasted.
In the relations between the Christians and Mussulmans, little respect had, to this time, certainly, been paid to treaties; but in this crusade, contempt for sworn faith and forgetfulness for the laws of nations were carried to an extreme: signing a truce was a preparation for war;—the Christian armies owed their safety to a treaty of peace; and the sovereign pontiff, far from respecting the conditions of it, preached a new crusade against the infidels. It must be allowed, also, that the most solemn treaties were often violated by the Mussulmans. The duration of peace depended solely upon the want of power in both parties to resume hostilities with advantage. The least hope of success was sufficient to induce them to fly to arms; the slightest circumstance was an excuse for rekindling all the flames of war. The continuator of William of Tyre says, with great ingenuousness, when speaking of the death of a sultan of Damascus: “When the sultan died, all the truces died with him.” These words alone are sufficient to give an idea of the state of the East during the sixth crusade, and of the small degree of respect then entertained for the laws of peace and war.
If, in the preceding crusade, the expedition of the soldiers of the cross against Greece did not produce great advantages to the West, it at least illustrated the arms of the Venetians and the French. In the war we have just described, the knights and barons who took the cross, added nothing to their glory or their renown. The Crusaders who were fortunate enough to revisit their homes, brought back with them nothing but the remembrance of most shameful disorders. A great number of them had nothing to show their compatriots but the chains of their captivity; nothing to communicate but the contagious disorders of the East.
The historians we have followed are silent as to the ravages of the leprosy among the nations of the West; but the testament of Louis VIII., an historical monument of that period, attests the existence of two thousand léproseries (hospitals for lepers) in the kingdom of France alone. This horrible sight must have been a subject of terror to the most fervent Christians; and was sufficient to disenchant, in their eyes, those regions of the East, where, till that time, their imaginations had seen nothing but prodigies and marvels.
Among the abuses then made of the spirit of the crusades, and the misfortunes they brought in their train, we must not forget the civil and religious wars of which France and several other countries of Europe were the theatre. In their expeditions into the East, Christians had become familiarized with the idea of employing force and violence to change men’s hearts and opinions. As they had long made war against infidels, they were willing to make it, in the same manner, against heretics; they first took up arms against the Albigeois, then against the pagans of Prussia; for the same reason, and in the same manner, that they had armed themselves against the Mussulmans.
Modern writers have declaimed with great vehemence and eloquence against these disastrous wars; but long before the age in which we live, the Church had condemned the excesses of blind fanaticism.[260] Saint Augustine, St. Ambrose, the fathers of councils, had long taught the Christian world that error is not destroyed by the sword, and that the truths of the Gospel ought not to be preached to mankind amidst threats and violences.
The crusade against the Prussians shows us all that ambition, avarice, and tyranny can exhibit that is most cruel and barbarous; the tribunal of history cannot judge with too much severity the leaders of this war, the ravages and furies of which were prolonged during more than a century; but, whilst condemning the excesses of the conquerors of Prussia, we must admit the advantages Europe gained by their victories and exploits. A nation that had been separated from all other nations by its manners and customs, ceased to be a foreigner in the Christian republic. Industry, laws, religion, which marched in the train of the conquerors, to moderate and remove the evils of war, spread their blessings among hordes of savages. Many flourishing cities arose from amidst the ashes of forests, and the oak of Remove,[261] beneath the shade of which human victims had been immolated, was replaced by churches, in which the virtues and charity of the Gospel were inculcated. The conquests of the Romans were sometimes more unjust, then wars more barbarous; they procured less advantages to the civilized world, and yet they have never ceased to be objects of the admiration and eulogy of posterity.
The war against the Albigeois was more cruel and more unfortunate than the crusade directed against the nations of Prussia. Missionaries and warriors outraged, by their conduct, all the laws of justice and of the religion whose triumph they pretended to aim at. The heretics, naturally, sometimes employed reprisals against their enemies; both sides armed with the steel and axe of murderers and executioners, humanity had to deplore the most guilty excesses.