Oriental luxury introduced into Europe.
This new commerce had a most important influence in bringing the West into permanent relations with the Orient. Eastern products from India and elsewhere—silks, spices, camphor, musk, pearls, and ivory—were brought by the Mohammedans from the East to the commercial towns of Palestine and Syria; then, through the Italian merchants, they found their way into France and Germany, suggesting ideas of luxury hitherto scarcely dreamed of by the still half-barbarous Franks.
Tomb of a Crusader
Results of the Crusades.
Some of the results of the Crusades upon western Europe must already be obvious, even from this very brief account. Thousands and thousands of Frenchmen, Germans, and Englishmen had traveled to the Orient by land and by sea. Most of them came from hamlets or castles where they could never have learned much of the great world beyond the confines of their native village or province. They suddenly found themselves in great cities and in the midst of unfamiliar peoples and customs. This could not fail to make them think and give them new ideas to carry home. The Crusade took the place of a liberal education. The crusaders came into contact with those who knew more than they did, above all the Arabs, and brought back with them new notions of comfort and luxury.
Yet in attempting to estimate the debt of the West to the Crusades it should be remembered that many of the new things may well have come from Constantinople, or through the Saracens of Sicily and Spain, quite independently of the armed incursions into Syria.[132] Moreover, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries towns were rapidly growing up in Europe, trade and manufactures were extending, and the universities were being founded. It would be absurd to suppose that without the Crusades this progress would not have taken place. So we may conclude that the distant expeditions and the contact with strange and more highly civilized peoples did no more than hasten the improvement which was already perceptible before Urban made his ever-memorable address at Clermont.[133]
General Reading.—A somewhat fuller account of the Crusades will be found in Emerton, Mediæval Europe, Chapter XI. Their results are discussed in Adams, Civilization, Chapter XI. Professor Munro has published a number of very interesting documents in Translations and Reprints, Vol. I, Nos. 2, 4 (Letters of the Crusaders), and Vol. III, No. 1 (The Fourth Crusade). See also his Mediæval History, Chapter XI, on the Crusades. Archer and Kingsford, The Crusades (G.P. Putnam's Sons, $1.50), is probably the best modern work in English.