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Crusaders....
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The origin of the Crusades is directly traceable to the
moral and political condition of Western Christendom in the eleventh
century. At that time Europe was divided into numerous states whose
sovereigns were absorbed in tedious and petty territorial disputes while the
emperor, in theory the temporal head of Christendom, was wasting his
strength in the quarrel over Investitures. The popes alone had maintained a
just estimate of Christian unity; they realized to what extent the interests
of Europe were threatened by the Byzantine Empire
and the Mohammedan tribes, and they alone had a foreign policy whose
traditions were formed under Leo IX and Gregory VII. |
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From the end of the fifth century there had been no break
in their intercourse with the Orient. In the early Christian period colonies
of Syrians had introduced the religious ideas, art, and culture of the East
into the large cities of Gaul and Italy. The Western
Christians in turn
journeyed in large numbers to Syria,
Palestine, and Egypt, either to visit
the Holy Places or to follow the ascetic life among the monks of the Thebaid
or Sinai. There is still extant the itinerary from Bordeaux
to Jerusalem, dated 333; in 385 St. Jerome and St. Paula founded the first
Latin monasteries at Bethlehem.
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As early as the eighth century Anglo-Saxons underwent the
greatest hardships to visit Jerusalem. The journey of St. Willibald, Bishop
of Eichstädt, took seven years (722-29) and furnishes an idea of the varied
and severe trials to which pilgrims were subject (Itiner. Latina, 1,
241-283). After their conquest of the West, the Carolingians endeavoured to
improve the condition of the Latins settled in the East; in 762 Pepin the
Short entered into negotiations with the Caliph of Bagdad. In
Rome, on 30
November, 800, the very day on which Leo III invoked the arbitration of
Charlemagne, ambassadors from Haroun al-Raschid delivered to the King of the
Franks the keys of the Holy Sepulchre, the banner of
Jersualem. |
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In 870, at the time of the pilgrimage of Bernard the Monk
(Itiner. Hierosol., I, 314), these institutions were still very prosperous,
and it has been abundantly proved that alms were sent regularly from the
West to the Holy Land. In the tenth century, just when the political and
social order of Europe was most troubled, knights, bishops, and abbots,
actuated by devotion and a taste for adventure, were wont to visit
Jerusalem
and pray at the Holy Sepulchre without being molested by the Mohammedans.
Suddenly, in 1009, Hakem, the Fatimite Caliph of Egypt, in a fit of madness
ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre and all the
Christian
establishments in Jerusalem. For years thereafter
Christians were cruelly persecuted. |
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