The revival of the fine arts announced that of letters. But if it be true that letters owed a part of their progress to the influence of the crusades, it must be confessed that the Crusaders did not always show themselves disposed to profit by them for themselves: nothing can exceed the ignorance of the Crusaders who then set out for the East. History informs us that after the taking of Jerusalem, they burnt at Tripoli a library which contained the most precious monuments of oriental literature: at the taking of Constantinople, a conflagration devoured the literary treasures of ancient Greece. The Crusaders beheld this misfortune with so much indifference, that not one of their chronicles makes mention of it, and posterity would have been ignorant of it but for the eloquent complaints of Nicetas.
The science which gained most by these distant expeditions was doubtless geography. Before the crusades, this science was quite unknown. Countries, the least distant from each other, had no intercommunication. Burgundy was scarcely known at Paris; in Burgundy Paris was considered as a very remote place. The Crusaders who followed Peter the Hermit were not acquainted with the names of the cities of Germany and Hungary which they passed through. They experienced a defeat at Mersbourg, and the contemporary chronicles that speak of it content themselves with calling the Hungarian city Malleville, or the city of misfortune.
If the Franks scarcely knew their own country, what must have been their ignorance of the countries of the East? We may judge by the necessity they felt for taking their guides from among the Greeks, whom they mistrusted, and by their extreme embarrassment whenever these guides abandoned them. Several armies perished from want of knowing the places to which victory conducted them. Most of the chroniclers knew no more about the matter than the Crusaders; and this it is that renders it so difficult to follow them in Asia Minor and Syria.
One most remarkable circumstance is, that out of more than two hundred chronicles that speak of Egypt, we have not been able to find more than one that makes mention of the Pyramids. James of Vitry, who sojourned for a long time in Syria, and who appears to have possessed as much knowledge as was then common to the learned, repeats, in his descriptions of the East, the fables of Herodotus; such as the history of the Amazons and that of the phœnix. We can scarcely forbear laughing at the simple credulity of Joinville, who tells us gravely, in his memoirs, that the trees of the terrestrial paradise produce cinnamon, ginger, and cloves, and that these spices are fished out of the waters of the Nile, whither they have been carried by the winds.
The Crusaders, constantly engaged in fighting, never entertained the idea of making themselves acquainted with the countries subdued by their arms. Nevertheless, in consequence of them, religion and commerce,—the one led by the desire of spreading the Gospel, the other by the hopes of gaining wealth, opened some new routes, and gained useful notions concerning the East during the crusades. The missionaries sent by the court of Rome and by St. Louis travelled over the vast regions of Asia, and commerce either followed or went before them in these distant journeys. The accounts of Rubruquis, Asselin, John Plan Carpin, and Marco Paolo, contain observations of which the truth and correctness are recognised at the present day.
We may add that the Crusaders, who went from all the countries of Europe, became acquainted with each other beneath the standard of the cross. Nations were no longer foreign to each other; which dissipated the ignorance in which they had been regarding the names of the cities and provinces of the West.
The geographical charts of this period neither give the configuration of the globe, nor the extent of countries, nor the position or limits of emperors; they merely trace, by vague designations, that which struck travellers most forcibly,—such as the curiosities of each country, the animals, the buildings, and the various dresses of men. We have seen a map of the world, which is attached to the chronicle of St. Denis, and which appears to have been made in the thirteenth century: we do not find, as in modern maps, the names of the four cardinal points set down, but on the four sides are written the names of the principal winds, to the number of twelve. Jerusalem, according to the opinion of the time, is placed in the centre of the three parts of the known world; a large edifice surmounted by a cross represents the holy city. Around this queen of cities, the author of the map has figured, by other edifices, the cities of Palestine, Syria, Egypt, &c.: the distances are marked without any attention to exactness; all appears thrown at random on the paper: this confused mass of edifices or houses, seems to be less a representation of the universe than the shapeless picture of a great city, built without plan or regularity.
We may judge by this how completely geography was then in its infancy; but, at the same time, it renders it evident that it was not quite neglected, as till that time it had been. Thus, we have a right to believe they would not stand still there, and that geographical knowledge would soon advance. In the fourteenth century, the countries of the East were already much better known, if we may judge by the chart which Sanuti presented to the pope, and which may be seen in the collection of the historians of the crusades by Bengars.
The sciences most useful to man, such as medicine, might have made some progress during the crusades, if the Crusaders had profited by the knowledge of the Orientals. In medicine particularly, the Arabians had more positive knowledge than the Latins. At the siege of Ptolemaïs, we have seen that Saladin sent his physicians to Richard; but we do not learn that the king of England sent his to Saladin, when he fell ill. In the first crusade of St. Louis, the physicians who accompanied the army of the Crusaders understood nothing of the scurvy and other epidemic diseases, which exercised such ravages in the camp of the Christians. Their ignorance was not less fatal than the contagion: when Louis IX. and his warriors became the prisoners of the Mussulmans, the diseases which desolated them ceased all at once, because they were no longer attended by their own physicians, but were placed under the care of the Arabians.
The East then furnished Europe with several processes and remedies from which modern medicine, for a length of time, derived great advantage. Cassia and senna came from Asia, and became known in the West at the period of the crusades. Theriaca, which played so great a part in the medicine of the middle ages, was brought from Antioch to Venice. Robert of Normandy, on his return from the Holy Land, after the taking of Jerusalem, obtained from the school of Salerno a collection of Hygeian precepts, which became proverbs among all the nations of Europe.