[53] The following table of the Ayyubite rulers serves to illustrate the text:—
[54] Though Europe indulged in dreams of Mongol aid, the eventual results of the extension of the Mongol Empire were prejudicial to the Latin East. The sultans of Egypt were stirred to fresh activity by the attacks of the Mongols; and as Syria became the battleground of the two, the Latin principalities of Syria were fated to fall as the prize of victory to one or other of the combatants.
[55] Of the four Latin principalities of the East, Edessa was the first to fall, being extinguished between 1144 and 1150. Antioch fell in 1268; Tripoli in 1289; and the kingdom itself may be said to end with the capture of Acre, 1291.
[56] Michael Palaeologus had actually appealed to Louis IX. against Charles of Anjou, who in 1270 had actively begun preparations for the attack on Constantinople.
[57] The dream of a Crusade to Jerusalem survived de Mézières; a society which read “romaunts” of the Crusades, could not but dream the dream. Henry V., whose father had fought with the Teutonic knights on the Baltic, dreamed of a voyage to Jerusalem.
[58] The union of 1274, conceded by the Palaeologi at the council of Lyons in order to defeat the plans of Charles of Anjou, had only been temporary.
[59] Bréhier, L’Église el l’Orient, p. 347.
[60] Cambridge Modern History, i. 11. It is perhaps worth remarking that something of the old crusading spirit seems still to linger in the movement of Russia towards Constantinople.
[61] While from this point of view the Crusades appear as a failure, it must not be forgotten that elsewhere than in the East Crusades did attain some success. A Crusade won for Christianity the coast of the eastern Baltic (see [Teutonic Order]); and the centuries of the Spanish Crusade ended in the conquest of the whole of Spain for Christianity.