In one respect we can indeed perceive the accidental operation of the Crusades, not so much in producing a benefit as in removing an evil. The larger portion of the inhabitants of Europe was chained to the soil, without freedom, or property, or knowledge; and the two orders of ecclesiastics and nobles, whose numbers were comparatively small, alone deserved the name of citizens and men. Among the cause that undermined that Gothic edifice, a conspicuous place must be allowed to the Crusades. The estates of the barons were dissipated, and their race was often extinguished, in these costly and perilous expeditions. Their poverty extorted from their pride those charters of freedom which unlocked the fetters of the slave, secured the farm of the peasant and the shop of the artificer, and gradually restored a substance and a soul to the most numerous and useful part of the community. The conflagration, which destroyed the tall and barren trees of the forest, gave air and scope to the vegetation of the smaller and nutritive plants of the soil.[d]
FOOTNOTES
[82] In the entertaining romance of Le Renard, written in the thirteenth century, it is said, that foreign pilgrimages had done no good to anybody, and that many good people had been made bad by them. In tracing the history of morals, it is curious to observe, that Piers Ploughman speaks of pilgrims and palmers, who on their return have leave to tell lies all the rest of their lives.
APPENDIX. FEUDALISM
[800-1450 A.D.]
To the average mind the term Middle Ages is a synonym for chaos. And, compared with the periods before and after, it is indeed chaos. But, in a sense, all human history is “without form,” even if not “void,” and the comparative simplicity which we see in certain periods is arrived at chiefly by a process of the cancellation of numberless confusing details and the concentration of the attention on certain large and picturesque personages or movements which were actually far from holding such stark and eminent importance in the eyes of contemporaries.
Thus in the case of Alexander’s conquest of that little segment of space which he called “the world,” to the contemporary Athenian, Alexander was almost a myth lost in the wilderness of the East as in a fog. The Athenian found his immediate troubles and triumphs in his own family, in his shop, in his deme. To myriads of other peoples, however, Alexander’s very existence was unknown; and splendid intrigues, superb politics, lofty feats of statecraft and of warfare were taking place far from the orbit of Alexander. These deeds were never chronicled, or the chronicles are lost, or perhaps only waiting discovery. Consequently we are ignorant of these confusing histories, and sum up in the exclusive phrase “Alexandrian epoch” a vast web of what were chaos, did we but know more of it.