Asia Minor, the land generally crossed by the pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem, was also in the power of the Turks. In the principal towns, Nicea, Tarsus, Antioch, Edessa, &c., whose names are inseparable from the glorious memories of the first centuries of the Church, neither the Greek nor the Roman Catholic ritual could be publicly celebrated. The precepts of the Koran were the only ones that were rigorously observed; and Christians everywhere experienced from the Mohammedans the same injustice, the same annoyances, and the same hardships.
The accounts of these persecutions, which seemed intended to utterly annihilate the faith of the cross, filled the hearts of the faithful with gloom and anger. The day was already fast approaching when the groans and complaints that reached them from the Holy Land were to rouse and arm the nations of the West for the deliverance of Christ’s tomb, and the formidable struggle, soon to take place between the Christian and the Moslem—a struggle fated to last for two hundred years with alternate successes and reverses on either side—was destined to decide the future of European civilisation.
So far back as the commencement of the eleventh century, Gerbert, a French monk, one of the most remarkable men of his time, who had succeeded to the papacy as Silvester II., attempted, under the influence of the impressions he had brought back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to make a fresh appeal to Christendom against the persecutions he had witnessed in the East. Roused by his summons, an expedition of Pisans, of Genoese, and of the subjects of the King of Arles, had put to sea and disembarked on the coasts of Syria, where it inflicted a certain amount of injury on the cruel votaries of Islamism; without, however, being able to penetrate very far inland, but not without influencing to some extent the fate of the inhabitants of Palestine.
In fact, persecution for the time ceased, or at any rate was sensibly diminished, and it was not until half a century later that a fresh crusading appeal rang through Christendom. This time the cry of sorrow and indignation was uttered by Pope Gregory VII., that illustrious pontiff whose ardent and resolute nature, in the midst of the universal disorder and disorganization of government and society, seemed to have a divine mission to fulfil in settling upon an indestructible basis the supreme authority of the Church. “The miseries suffered by the Eastern Christians,” he wrote, “have so stirred up my heart that I almost long for death, and I would rather expose my life in delivering the holy places than reign over the universe. Come, sons of Christ, and you will find me at your head!”
Such words as these at such an epoch necessarily rekindled faith and hope in every heart that received them. Fifty thousand Christians bound themselves by an oath to follow the successor of St. Peter to Constantinople, when the Emperor Michael Ducas promised to put an end to the dissensions that had so long separated the Greek from the Latin Church, and to Jerusalem, where the standard of Christ, supported by heroic hands and hearts, could not fail soon to replace the standard of the Prophet. Rumours were rife in Europe that a part of Asia was already christianised, and that Prester-John, a powerful sovereign of Tartary (Figs. 98 and 99), had forced his subjects to adopt the precepts of the Gospel.
Fig 98.—Prester-John, Chief of a Christian Tribe in Tartary.
Fig. 99.—Prester-John’s Page.
From Cesare Vecelli’s “Degli Habiti Antichi e Moderni:” 8vo, Venice, 1560.