A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 2

Excerpt

CHAPTER XVII.

THE CRUSADES, THEIR DECLINE AND END.

In the month of August, 1099, the Crusade, to judge by appearances, had attained its object. Jerusalem was in the hands of the Christians, and they had set up in it a king, the most pious and most disinterested of the crusaders. Close to this ancient kingdom were growing up likewise, in the two chief cities of Syria and Mesopotamia, Antioch and Edessa, two Christian principalities, in the possession of two crusader-chiefs, Bohemond and Baldwin. A third Christian principality was on the point of getting founded at the foot of Libanus, at Tripolis, for the advantage of another crusader, Bertrand, eldest son of Count Raymond of Toulouse. The conquest of Syria and Palestine seemed accomplished, in the name of the faith, and by the armies of Christian Europe; and the conquerors calculated so surely upon their fixture that, during his reign, short as it was (for he was elected king July 23, 1099, and died July 18, 1100, aged only forty years), Godfrey de Bouillon caused to be drawn up and published, under the title of Assizes of Jerusalem, a code of laws, which transferred to Asia the customs and traditions of the feudal system, just as they existed in France at the moment of his departure for the Holy Land.

Forty-six years afterwards, in 1145, the Mussulmans, under the leadership of Zanghi, sultan of Aleppo and of Mossoul, had retaken Edessa. Forty-two years after that, in 1187, Saladin (Salah-el-Eddyn), sultan of Egypt and of Syria, had put an end to the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem; and only seven years later, in 1194, Richard Coeur de Lion, king of England, after the most heroic exploits in Palestine, on arriving in sight of Jerusalem, retreated in despair, covering his eyes with his shield, and saying that he was not worthy to look upon the city which he was not in a condition to conquer. When he re-embarked at St. Jean d'Acre, casting a last glance and stretching out his arms towards the coast, he cried, "Most Holy Land, I commend thee to the care of the Almighty; and may He grant me long life enough to return hither and deliver thee from the yoke of the infidels!" A century had not yet rolled by since the triumph of the first crusaders, and the dominion they had acquired by conquest in the Holy Land had become, even in the eyes of their most valiant and most powerful successors, an impossibility.

Nevertheless, repeated efforts and glory, and even victories, were not then, and were not to be still later, unknown amongst the Christians in their struggle against the Mussulmans for the possession of the Holy Land. In the space of a hundred and seventy-one years from the coronation of Godfrey de Bouillon as king of Jerusalem, in 1099, to the death of St. Louis, wearing the cross before Tunis, in 1270, seven grand crusades were undertaken with the same design by the greatest sovereigns of Christian Europe; the Kings of France and England, the Emperors of Germany, the King of Denmark, and princes of Italy successively engaged therein. And they all failed....