When men pressed on with streaming eyes,
Themselves to offer at God’s seat.
They send, instead, wax tapers now;
God has no true hearts left below.
The fatal thing, however, was a feeling slowly growing up that it was God’s will that the Church of the Sepulchre should belong to the infidel; and a bishop of a somewhat later time gives three reasons for this; namely, first, as a plea for the Christians; second, for the confusion of the Saracens; and thirdly, for the conversion of the Jews. And for the first reason he argues that Christians will never be allowed to have the city again till they are sinless, because God will not have his children commit sin in such a place; as for the Saracens, they are, of course, only dogs; now the master of a house is not very careful about the behaviour of his dogs, but he cannot bear ill behaviour on the part of his children.
Little now remains to tell, because Jerusalem passes away from history, and the events which follow are hardly even indirectly concerned with the Holy City. Louis led another Crusade and met his death at Tunis. Edward of England, with his brother Edmund and eight hundred men came to Acre, but were, of course of little use with so small a reinforcement; and, after concluding a treaty with the Sultan of Egypt, they too departed. Then twenty years of expectation and fear pass away: Europe looks with indifference upon the Holy Land: Laodicea is taken: Tripoli is taken: and lastly, Acre itself is taken. The siege of this, the last place held by the Christians, lasted a month, when the Mohammedans entered the city after a furious assault. They were driven back by arrows and stones hurled from the houses: day after day they came on, were repelled with slaughter, and every day the Christians saw their camp growing larger and larger. The military orders fought with a heroism which caused the Saracens to think that two men were fighting in every knight. But the end came at length, with a great and terrible carnage. The nuns, trembling, and yet heroic, actually preserved their honour by cutting off their noses, so that the Saracens only killed them. The Patriarch of Jerusalem was put on board a ship, entreating to be allowed to die with his flock. The ship sank and he was drowned, so that his prayer was granted. A violent storm was raging. Ladies rushed to the port, offering the sailors all they had, diamonds, pearls, and gold, to be put on board. Those who had no money or jewels were left on the shore to the mercies of the victors. The Templars held out in their castle a few days longer and then fell. All were killed. So ended, after two hundred years of continued fighting, the Christian settlements in Palestine.[[80]] The West heard the news of the fall of Acre with a sort of unreasoning rage, and instantly set about mutual accusations as to the cause of its fall. And the wretched Pullani, the Syrian Christians, who had survived the taking of Acre, dropped over one by one to Italy and begged their bread in the streets while they told the story of their fall.
[80]. In the same year the house of the Virgin was miraculously transferred from Nazareth to a hill in Dalmatia; whence, by another miracle, it came to Loretto. Why did not the Holy Sepulchre come too?
Pilgrims and travellers continued to visit Jerusalem. Sir John Mandeville was there, early in the fourteenth century, and describes the churches and sacred sites, but says little enough about the condition of the people. Bertrandon de la Roquière was there a hundred years later. He says that though there were many other Christians in Jerusalem, the Franks experienced the greatest amount of persecution from the Saracens, and that there were only two Cordeliers in the Church of the Sepulchre. And in the same century Ignatius Loyola twice went on pilgrimage. He wished to end his days in Palestine, but this was, unhappily, denied him, and he returned, to be a curse to the world by establishing his society. Among other pilgrims, passing over various princes and kings, may be mentioned Korte, the bookseller of Altona early in the eighteenth century, who was the first to assail the authenticity of the sites, and that of Henry Maundrell, chaplain to the English factory at Aleppo.
But during the interval of five hundred years Jerusalem has been without a history. Nothing has happened but an occasional act of brutality on the part of her masters towards the Christians, or an occasional squabble among the ecclesiastics. Perhaps, some time, the day may come when all together will be agreed that there is no one spot in the world more holy than another, in spite of associations, because the whole earth is the Lord’s. Then the tender interest which those who read the Scriptures will always have for the places which the writers knew so well may have a fuller and freer play, apart from lying traditions, monkish legends and superstitious impostures. For, to use the words which Cicero applied to Athens, there is not one spot in all this city, no single place where the foot may tread, which does not possess its history.