"In 963, with the support of the Transalpine clergy, Otto returned to Rome and summoned John to trial before an ecclesiastical council. Cardinals charged that John had taken bribes for consecrating bishops, had made a boy of ten a bishop, had committed adultery with his father's concubine and incest with his father's widow and her niece and had made the papal palace a very brothel.

"John refused to attend the council or to answer the charges. Instead he went out hunting. The council deposed him and unanimously chose Otto's candidate, a layman, as Pope Leo VIII (963-5).

"After Otto had returned to Germany John seized and mutilated the leaders of the Imperial party in Rome and had himself restored by an obedient council to the papacy (964).

"When John died (964) the Romans elected Benedict V. Ignoring Leo, Otto came down from Germany, deposed Benedict, and restored Leo, who thereupon officially recongnized the right of Otto and his Imperial successors to veto the election of any future pope.

"On Leo's death Otto secured the election of John XIII (965-72). Benedict VI (973-4) was imprisoned and strangled by a Roman noble.

"Bonifazio Francone, who made himself pope for a month, then fled to Constantinople with as much papal treasury as he could carry. Nine years later he returned, killed Pope John XIV (983-4), again appropriated the papal office and died peaceably in bed (985).

"The Roman Republic again raised its head, assumed authority, and chose Crescentius as consul. Otto III descended upon Rome with an irresistible army and a commission from the German preltes to end the chaos by making his chaplain Pope Gregory V (996-9).

"The young Emperor put down the republic, pardoned Crescentius, and went back to Germany. Crescentius at once re-established the Republic and deposed Gregory (997). Geregory excommunicated him but Crescentius laughed and arranged the election of John XVI as pope. Otto returned, deposed John gouged out his eyes, cut off his tongue and nose and paraded him through the streets of Rome on an ass, with his face to the tail. Crescentius and twelve Republican leaders were beheaded and their bodies were hung from the battlements of Sant' Angelo (998).

"At the abbot's suggestion, he went to Spain to study mathematics and in 970 Count Borel of Barcelona took him to Rome. Pope John XIII was impressed by the monk's learning and recommended him to Oto I.

"For a year Gerbert taught in Italy and at that time or later had Otto II among his pupils. Then he went to Reims to study logic in the cathedral school. Presently we find him head of the school (972-82).

"He taught an unusual variety of subjects including the classic poets. He wrote an excellent Latin and letters sometimes rivaling those of Sidonius. Wherever he went he collected books and spent his funds recklessly to have copies made of manuscripts in other libraries.

"Perhaps we owe to him the preservation of Cicero's orations. He led the Christian world in mathematics, introduced an early form of the 'Arabic' numerals, wrote on the abacus and the astrolabe, and composed a treatise of geometry. He invented a mechanical clock and an organ operaed by steam.

1 - Simony in the papacy and the episcopacy
2 - Marriage or concubinage in the secular clergy
3 - Sporadic incontinence among the monks.

"Simony - the sale of church offices or services -- was the ecclesiastical correlate of contemporary corruption in politics.

"Good people were one source of simony. So the mother of Gerbert of Nogent, anxious to elevate him to the Church, paid ecclesiastical authorities to make him a cathedral canon at eleven.

"A church council at Rome in 1099 mourned the frequency of such cases. As bishops in England, Germany, France and Italy administered profane as well as ecclesiastical affairs, and were feudally endowed with lands or villages or even cities to supply their necessary revenues, ambitious men paid secular powers great sums for such appointments and greedy potentates overrode all decencies to earn these bribes.

"In Narbonne a boy of ten was made archbishop on paying 100,000 solidi.

"Philip I of France consoled an unsuccessful applicant for an episcopal see with blithe counsel:-'Let me make my profit out of your rival, then you can try to get him degraded for simony and afterward we can see about satisfying him.'

"The French kings, following a tradition established by Charlemagne, regularly appointed the bishops of Sens, Reims, Lyons, Tours, and Bourges. Elsewhere in France the bishops were appointed by the dukes or counts.

"Many bishoprics became in the eleventh century the heriditary patrimony of noble families and were used as provision for bastards or younger sons.

"In Germany one baron possessed and transmitted eight bishoprics. A German cardinal alleged tht the simoniscal buyers of sees and benefices had sold the marble facings of churches, even the riles from their roofs, to reimburse themselves for the cost of their appointments.

"Such appointees were men of the world. Many lived in luxury, engaged in war, allowed bribery in episcopal courts, named relatives to ecclesiastical posts and worshiped Mammon with individed lyalty. Pope Innocent III would say of an archbishop of Narbonne that he had a purse where his heart should have been.

"The purchase of sees became so usual that practical men accepted it as normal.

"While Western Europe was shrouded in the darkness, misery and ignorance of the ninth and tenth centuries, the Eastern Empire, under the Macedonian emperors (867-1057), recovered some of the territory it had lost to the Arabs, reasserted its leadership in south Italy and experienced a new flowering of literature and art.

"Merovingian and Carolingian kings paid their generals and administrators with grants of land. In the ninth century these fiefs became hereditary and semi-independent through the weakness of the Carolingian kings.

"The Saracen, Norse and Magyar invasions of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries repeated and cemented the results of the German invasions six centuries before. Central protection failed, the local baron or bishop organized a localized order and defense and remained possessed of his own force and court.

"Since the invaders were often mounted, defenders who could afford a horse were in demand. Cavalry became more important than infantry. Just as in early Rome a class of equaites -- men on horseback -- had taken form between patrician and plebes, so in France, Norman England, and Christian Spain a class of mounted knights grew up between the duke or baron and the peasantry.

"The people did not resent these developments. In an atmosphere of terror, when attack might come at any time, they craved military organization. They built their homes as near to the baronial castle of fortified monastery as they could.

"They readily gave allegiance and service to a lord -- i.e. a law-ward -- or to a duke -- i.e. one who could lead. We must imagne their terror to understand their subjection. Freemen who could no longer protect themselves offered their land or labor to some strong man in return for shelter and support. In such cases of 'commendation' the baron usually assigned to 'his man' a tract to be held as a 'precarium' on a lease revocable by the donor at any time. This precarious tenure became the usual form of serf possession of land.

"Its origins lay in Italy and Germany but its most characteristic development came in France. In Britain it may have begun as the enserfment of Britons by Anglo-Saxon conquerors but for the most part it was there a Gallic importation from Normandy.

"It never matured in northern Italy or Christian Spain.

"In the Eastern Empire the great landowners never developed military or judicial independence nor that hierarchy of fealties which seemed in the West essential to feudalism.

"Large sectors of Europe's peasantry remained unfeudalized -- the shepherds and ranchers of the Balkans -- eastern Italy -- Spain -- the vine growers of western Germany and southern France -- the sturdy farmers of Sweden and Norway -- the Teutonic pioneers beyond the Elbe -- the mountaineers of the Carpathians, the Alps, the Apennines, and the Pyrenees.

"It was not to be expected that a continent so physically and climatically diverse should have a uniform economy. Even within feudalism conditions of contract and status varied from nation to nation, from manor to manor, from time to time.

"Freemen included nobles, clerics, professional soldiers, practitioners of the professions, most merchants and artisans, and peasants who owned their land with little or no obligation to any feudal lord, or leased it from a lord for a money rent.

"Such peasant proprietors constituted some four percent of the farming population of England in the eleventh century. They were more numerous in western germany, northern Italy, and southern France. They probably constituted a quarter of the total peasant population in Western Europe.

"Slavery diminished as serfdom increased.

"In twelfth-century England it was mostly confined to household service. In France north of the Loire it was negligible. In Germany it rose in the tenth century when no compunction was felt in capturing pagan Slavs for menial tasks on German estates, or for sale in Moslem or Byzantine lands.

"Conversely, Moslems and Greeks were kidnaped by slave traders along the shores of the Black Sea, western Asia, or northern Africa for sale as farm hands, domestic servants, eunuchs, concubines, or prostitutes in Islam or Christnedom.

"It is true that Pope Gregory I freed two of his slaves with admirable words about the natural liberty of all men but he continued to use hundreds of slaves on the papal estates and approved laws forbidding slaves to become clerics or marry free Christians.

"The Church denounced the sale of Christian captives to Moslems but permitted the enslavement of Moslems and of Europeans not yet converted to Christianity.

"Thousands of captured Slavs and Saracens were distributed among monasteries as slaves and slavery on church lands and papal estates continued intil the eleventh century.

"Canon law sometimes estimatd the wealth of church lands in slaves rather than in money. Like secular law, it considered the slave as a chattel.

"It forbade church slaves to make wills and decreed that any peculium or savings of which they died possessed should belong to the Church. The archbishop of Narbonne, in his will of 1149 left his Saracen slaves to the bishop of Beziers.

"St. Thomas Aquinas interpreted slavery as one consequence of Adam's sin and as economically expedient in a world where some must toil in order that others may be free to defend them. Such views were in the tradition of Aristotle and, in the the spirit of the times.

"The rule of the Church tht her property should never be alienated except at its full market value was unfortunate for her slaves and serfs. Emancipation sometimes proved more difficult on eccelesiastical than on secular properties.

"Nevertheless the Church progressively restricted the slave traffic by forbidding the enslavement of Christians at a time when Christianity was spreading rapidly.

"The decline of slavery was due not to moral progress but to economic change. Production under direct physical compulsion proved less profitable or convenient than production under the stimulus of acquisitive desire. Servitude continued and the word servus served for both slave and serf but in time it became the word serf, as villein became villain and Slav became slave.

"He could be evicted at the owners's will and at his death the land passed to his children only by consent and satisfction of the lord. In France he could be sold independently of the land for some forty shillings (($400.00?) Sometimes he (i.e. his labor) was sold by his owner in part to one person, in part to another.

"In France he could abjure the feudal contract by surrendering the land and all his possessions to the seigneur. In England he was denied this right of migration and fugitive medieval serfs were recaptured as zealously as fugitive modern slaves.

"The feudal dues of the serf to the owner of his land were numerous and diverse. Some intelligence must have been required even to remember them.

"In such case he appointed a 'seneschal' to supervise his 'domain' -- i.e., all his manors -- and a steward or bailiff for each. He would move from manor to manor with his household to consume their products on the spot. He might have a castle on each of his estates.

"Descended from the walled camp (castrum, castellum) of the Roman legions, from the fortified villa of the Roman noble, or from the fortress or burg of the German chieftain, the feudal castle or chateau was built less for comfort than for security.

"Its outermost protection was a wide, deep fosse or moat. The earth thrown up and inward from the moat formed a mound into which were sunk square posts bound together to form a continuous stockade. Across the moat a cleated drawbridge led up to an iron gate or portcullis which protected a massive door in the castle wall.

"Within this wall were stables, kitchen, storehouses, outhouses, bakery, laundry, chapel, and servants' lodgings, usually all of wood. In war the tenants of the manor crowded with the cattle and movables into this enclosure. At its center rose the donjon, the house of the master.

"In most cases it was a large square tower, also of wood. By the twelfth century it was built of stone and took a rounded form as easier for defense. The lowest story of the donjon was a storehouse and dungeon. Above this dwelt the lord and his family.

"Windows were few and small and seldom glazed. Uually canvas, oiled paper, shutters, or lattices kept out most rain and much light. Artificial light was provided by candles or torches.

"In most cases there was but one room to each of the three stories. Ladders and trap doors, or winding stairs, connected the floors. On the second story was the main hall serving as the baron's court of justice and as dining room, living room, and bedroom for most of his household.

"At one end there might be a raised platform or dais on which the lord, his family, and his guest ate their meals. Others ate from removable tables placed before benches in the aisles.

"At retiring time mattresses were laid upon the floor or upon low wooden bedsteads in the aisles. All the household slept in this one room with screens providing privacy.

"The walls were whitewashed or painted. They were adorned with banners, weapons, and armor and the room might be protected from drafts by hangings or tapestries. The floor, paved with rile or stone, was covered with rushes and boughs.

"In the middle of the room a kind of central heating was generated by a wood fire in a hearth. Until the later Middle Ages there was no chimney. Smoke escaped througha louver or 'lantern' in the roof.

"At his belt swung a scabbard and sword. From his neck usually hung some pendant like a cross.

"To distinguish one helmeted and armored knight from another in the First Crusade, European nobles adopted the Islamic practice of marking their garments, livery, standards, armor, and equipage with heraldic devices or coats of arms. Henceforth, heraldry developed an esoteric jargon intelligible only to heralds and knights.

"Despite all adornments the lord was no parasitic idler. He rose at dawn, mounted his tower to detect any approaching peril, hastily breakfasted, perhaps attended Mass, had 'dinner' at 9 a.m., supervised the multifarious operations of the manor, shared actively in some of them, gave orders of the day to steward, butler, groom, and other servitors, received wayfarers and visitors, had 'supper' with them and his family at five, and usually retired at nine. On some days the routine was broken by hunting, more rarely by tournaments, now and then by war.

"He entertained frequently and exchanged presents lavishly with his guests.

"His wife was almost as busy as himself.

"She bore and reared many children. She directed the many servants (with an occasional box on the ear), kept an eye on bakery, kitchen and laundry, superintended the making of butter and cheese, the brewing of beer, the salting down of meat for the winter and that major household industry of knitting, sewing, spinning, weaving, and embroidery, which made most of the family's clothing.

"If her husband went to war she took over the military and economic management of the estate and was expected to supply his financial needs as he campaigned. If he was taken prisoner she had to squeeze a ransom for him out of the toil of his serfs or from the sale of her finery and gems.

"If her husand died sonless she might inherit the seigneury and become its domina, dame. But she was expected to remarry soon to provide the estate and her suzerain with military protection or service. The suzerain limited her choice to a few candidates capable of meeting these obligations.

"The sons of the aristocracy were rarely sent to public schooling. In many cases no effort was made to teach them how to read. Literacy was left to clerks or scribes who could be hired for a pittance.

"Intellectual knowledge was scorned by most feudal knights. du Gueselin, one of the most honored figures of chivalry, trained himself in all the arts of war and learned to face all weathers stoutly but never bothered to learn how to read. Only in Italy and Byzantium did the nobles carry on a literary tradition.

"Instead of going to a school, the boy of knightly family was sent, about the age of seven, to serve as page in another aristocratic household. There he learned obedience, discipline, manners, dress, the knightly code of honor and the skills of joust and war. Perhaps the local priest addded some training in letters and reckoning.

"Girls were taught a hundred useful or pretty arts by merely seeing and doing. They took care of guests and of the knight returning from battle or tounament. They unbuckled his armor, prepared his bath, laid out clean linen and raiment and perfumes for him and waited on him at table with modest courtesy and tutored grace.

"The vassal was a man who, in return for his military service, personal attendance, or political support, received from the lord some substantial boon or privilege -- usually a tract of land with its serfs. In such cases usufruct belonged to the vassal, ownership remained with the lord.

"A man too proud or strong to be a serf, yet too limited to provide his own military security performed an act of 'homage' to a feudal baron, knelt bareheaded and weaponless before himn, placed his hands in the hands of the seigneur, declared himself that lord's homme or man (while retaining his rights as a freeman) and by an oath on sacred relics or the Bible pledged the lord eternal fealty. The seigneur raised him, kissed him, invested him with a fief, and gave him, in symbol thereof, a straw, stick, lance or glove.

"Thenceforward the seigneur owed his vassal protection, friendship, fidelity, and economic and legal aid. He must not, says a medieval lawyer, insult his vassal or seduce his vassal's wife or daughter. If he does, the vassal may 'throw down the glove' as a de-fy -- i.e. as a release from fealty -- and yet keep his fief.

"The vassal might 'subinfeudate' part of his land to a lesser vassal who would then bear the same relation and responsibility to him that he bore to his lord.>P>"A man might hold fiefs from several lords and owe them 'simple homage' and limited service but to one 'liege' lord he pledged 'liege homage' -- full allegiance and service in peace and war.

"The lord himself, however great, might be vassal to another lord by holding property or privilege in fief from him. He might even be vassal to -- hold a fief from -- the vassal of another lord. All lords were vassals of the king.

"In these intricate relationships the prime bond was not economic but military. A man gave or owed military service and personal fealty to a lord. Property was merely his reward.

"Though many monks labored with their hands and many monasteries and cathedrals sharedin parish tithes, additional support was necessary for greater ecclesiastical establishments and this came mostly from kings and nobles in gifts of land or share in feudal revenues.

"As these gifts accumulated, the Church became the largest landholder in Europe, the greatest of feudal suzerains. The monastery of Fulda owned 15,000 small villas, that of St. Gall had 2000 serfs. Alcuin at Tours was lord of 20,000 serfs.

"Archbishops, bishops, and abbots received investiture from the king, pledged their fealty to him like other feudatories, carried such titles as duke and count, minted coin, presided over episcopal or abbey courts and took on the feudal tasks of military service and agricultural management.

"Bishops or abbots accoutered with armor and lance became a frequent sight in Germany and France. Richard of Cornwall, in 1257, mourned that England had no such 'warlike and mettlesome bishops.'

"So enmeshed in the feudal web, the Church found herself a political, economic, and military, as well as a religious, institution. Her 'temporalities' or material possessions, her 'feudalities' or feudal rights and obligations, beame a scandal to strict Christians, a talking point for heretics, a source of consuming controversy between emperors and popes.

"Theoretically the king was the vassal of God and governed by divine right in the sense that God permitted, and thereby authorized, his rule. Practically, however, the king had been elevated by election, inheritance or war.

"Men like Charlemagne, Otto I, William the Conqueror, Philip Augustus, Louis IX, Frederick II, and Louis the Fair enlarged their inherited power by force of character or arms. But normally the kings of feudal Europe were not so much the rulers of their peoples as the delegates of their vassals. They were chosen or accepted by the great barons and ecclesiastics.

"Their direct power was limited to their own feudal domain or manors. Elsewhere in their kingdom the serf and vassal swore fealty to the lord who protected them, rarely to the king whose small and distant forces could not reach out to guard the scattered outposts of the realsm.

"In this perfected feudalism the king was primus inter pares. He stood an inch or two above the princes, dukes, marquises, and counts. But in practice he was, like these 'peers of the realm,' a feudal baron limited for revenue to his own lands, forced to move from one royal manor to another for sustenance and dependent in war and peace upon the military aid or diplomatic service of rich vassals who seldom pledgd him more than forty days of armed attendance in the year and spent half ther time plotting to unseat him.

"To win or reward support, the crown had granted estate after estate to powerful men. In the tenth and eleventh centuries too small a domain remained to the French king to give him secure ascendancy over his vassal lords. When they made their estates hereditary, established their own police and courts and minted their own coinage, he lacked the force to prevent them.

"He could not interfere with the jurisdiction of these vassals over their own lands except in the capital cases that appealed to him. He could not send his officers or tax collectors into their domains. He could not stop them from making independent treaties or waging independent war.

"The zeal for martial contests absorbed the aristocracies of feudal Europe in private and public wars. The Crusades, the Hundred Years War, the Wars of the Roses and finally the wars of religion drank up their blood.

"Some of them, impoverished and recognizing no law, became robber barons who pilllaged and murdered at will. The excesses of liberty called for a unified power that would maintain order throughout the realm.

"Commerce and industry generated a growing and wealthy class outside the feudal bond. Merchants resented feudal tolls and the insecurity of transport through feudal domains. They demanded that private law should be superseded by a central government.

"The king allied himself with their class and the rising towns. They provided the finances for the assertion and extension of his authority. All who felt opposed or injured by the lords looked to the king for rescue and redress.

"The ecclesiastical barons were usually vassal and loyal to the king. The popes, however often at odds with royalty, found it easier to deal with a monarch than with a scatterd and half-lawless nobility.

"Upheld by these diverse forces, the French and English kings made their power hereditary instead of elective by crowning a son or brother before their own death. Men accepted hereditary monarchy as the alterntive to feudal anarchy.

"The improvement of communication and the increased circulation of money made regular taxation possible. The mounting royal revenue financed larger royal armies. The rising class of jurists attched themselves to the throne and strengthened it by the centralizing influence of revived Roman law.

"By the year 1250 the jurists asserted the royal jurisdiction over all persons in the realm. By that time the oath of allegiance was taken by all Frenchmen not to their lord but to their king.

"When question rose as to law or penalty, the oldest members of the community were asked what had been the custom thereon in their youth. The community itself was therefore the chief source of law.

"The baron or king might give commands but these were not laws. If he exacted more than custom sanctioned he would be frustrated by universal resistance, vocal or dumb.

"Southern France had a written law as a Roman heritage. Northern France, more feudal, preserved for the most part the laws of the Franks.

"When in the thirteenth century these laws too were put into writing, they became even harder to change than before and a hundred legal fictions rose to reconcile them with reality.

"The feudal law of property was complex and unique.

"It recognized three forms of land possession:-

1 - The allod, unconditional ownership
2 - The fief-land whose usufruct, but not ownership, was ceded to a vassal on condition of noble service
3 - Tenure - where the usufruct was ceded to a serf or tenant on condition of feudal dues.

"In feudal theory only the king enjoyed absolute ownership. Even the loftiest noble was a tenant whose possession was conditional on service.

"Nor was the lord's possession completely individual. Every son had a birthright in the ancestral lands and could obstruct their sale. Usually the whole estate was bequeathed to the eldest son. This custom of primogeniture, unknown to Roman or barbarian law, became advisable under feudal conditions because it put the military protection and economic management of the estate under one head, presumably the most mature.

"Younger sons were encouraged to venture forth and carve out new estates in other lands.

"Despite its limitations on ownership, feudal law yielded to no other in reverence for property and in severity of punishments for violating property rights.

"A German code held that if a man removed the bark from one of the willow trees that held a dyke, 'his belly shall be ripped up and his bowels shall be taken out and wound around the harm he has done.' As late as 1454 a Westphalian ordinance held tht a man who had criminally removed his neighbor's landmark should be buried in the earth with his head sticking out and the land should then be plowed by oxen and men who had never plowed before.

"The Normans re-established it in Britain after its disuse by the Anglo-Saxons and it remained on the English statue book until the nineteenth century.

"In 1127 a knight named Guy was accused by another named Hermann of complicity in the assassination of Charles the Good of Flanders. On Guy denying it, Hermann challenged him for a judicial duel. They fought for hours until they were both unhorsed and weaponless. They passed from fencing to wrestling and Hermann demonstrated the justice of his charge by tearing Guy's testicles from his body. Whereupon Guy expired.

"Perhaps ashamed of such barbarities, feudal custom accumulated restrictions on the right to challenge. The accuser, to acquire such a right, was required to make out a probable case. The defendant might refuse to fight if he had proved an alibi.

"A serf could not challenge a freeman, nor a leper a sound man, nor a bastard a man of legitimate birth. In general one might challenge only a person of equal rank with himself.

"The laws of several communities gave the court the right to forbid any judicial duel at its discretion. Women, ecclesiastics, and persons suffering physical disability were exempt from challenge but they might choose 'champions' -- professionally skilled duelists -- to represent them. As early as the tenth century we find paid champions used as substitutes even by able-bodied males. Since God would decide the issue according to the justice of the accusation, the identity of the combatants seemed irrelevant.

"Otto I submitted to duel by champions the question of his daughter's chastity and the disputed succession to certain estates.

"In the thirteenth century King Alfonso X of Castile had recourse to such a duel to decide whether he should introduce Roman law into his kingdom.

"Embassies were sometimes supplied with champions in case diplomatic quarrels should admit of resolution by duels. Until 1821 such a champion figured in the coronation ceremony of English kings.

"The feudal army was the feudal hierarchy organized by ties of feudal allegiance and strictly stratified according to grades of nobility.

"Princes, dukes, marquises, counts, and archbishops were generals. Barons, seigneurs, bishops, and abbots were captains. Knight or chevaliers were cavalrymen. Squires were servitors to barons or knights. 'Men at-arms' -- the militia of communes or villages -- fought as infantry.

"Behind the feudal army as we see it in the Crusades, a crowd of 'varlets' followed on foot without officers or discipline. They helped to despoil the conquered and eased the suffering of fallen and wounded enemies by despatching them with battle-axes or clubs.

"But essentially the feudal army was the man on harseback multiplied. Infantry, insufficiently mobile, had lost its pre-eminence since Hadrianople (378) and would not regain it until the fourteenth century.

"An army defeated in the field might find refuge within manor walls and a last stand could be made in the donjon tower.

"The science of siege declined in the Middle Ages. The complex organization and equipment for battering down enemy walls proved too costly or laborious for dignified knights but the art of the sapper or military miner held its own.

"Navies, too, were reduced in a world whose will to war outran its means. War galleys remained like those of the ancients -- armed with battle towers on the decks and propelled by freemen or galley slaves.

"What was lacking on power was made up in ornament, on the ship as on the man. Over a coat of pitch that preserved the wood of the vesel from water and air, medieval shipwrights and artists painted brilliant colors mixed with wax -- white, vermillion, ultramarine blue. They gilded the prow and rails and sculptured figures of men, beasts, and gods on prow and stern.

"A knight was a person of aristocratic birth -- i.e. of titled and landowning family -- who had been formally received into the order of knighthood. Not all 'gentle' men (i.e. men distinguished by their gens of ancestry) were eligible to knighthood or title. Younger sons, except of royal blood, were normally confined to modest properties that precluded the expensive appurtenances of chivalry. Such men remained squires unless they carved out new lands and titles of their own.

"The youth who aimed at knighthood submitted to long and arduous discipline. At seven or eight he entered as a page, at twelve or fourteen as a squire -- into the service of a lord -- waited upon him at table -- in the bedchamber -- on the manor -- in joust or battle -- fortified his own flesh and spirit with dangerous exercises and sports -- learned by imitation and trial to handle the weapons of feudal war.

"When his apprenticeship was finished, he was received into the knightly order by a ritual of sacramental awe. The candidate began with a bath as a symbol of spiritual, perhaps as a guarantee of physical, purification. Hence he cold be called a 'knight of the bath,' as distinguished from those 'knights of the sword' who had received their accolade on some battlefield as immediate reward for bravery.

"He was clothed in white tunic, red robe, and black coat, representing respectively the hoped-for purity of his morals, the blood he might shed for honor or God, and the death he must be prepared to meet unflinchingly. For a day he fasted. He passed a night at church in prayer, confessed his sins to a priest, attended Mass, received communion, heard a sermon on the moral, religious social, and military duties of a knight, and solemnly promised to fulfill them.

"He then advanced to the altar with a sword hanging from his neck. The priest removed the sword, blessed it, and replaced it upon his neck. The candidate turned to the seated lord from whom he sought knighthood and was met with a stern question:-'For what purpose do you desire to enter the order? If to be rich, to take your ease, and be held in honor without doing honor to knighthood, you are unworthy of it, and would be to the order of knighthood what the semoniacal clerk is to the prelacy.' The candidate was prepared with a reassuring reply.

"Knights or ladies then clothed him in knightly array of hauberk, cuirass or breastplate, armlets, gauntlets (armored gloves), sword and spurs. The lord, rising, gave him the accolade (i.e. on the neck) -- three blows with the flat of the sword upon the neck of shoulder and sometimes a slap on the cheek, as symbols of the last affronts that he might accept without redress. and 'dubbed' him with the formula, 'In the name of God, St. Michael, and St. George, I make thee knight.'

"The church partly succeeded in diverting feudal pugnacity into the Crusades. Perhaps she was helped by the rising adoration of Mary the Virgin Mother.

"Once more the feminine virtues were exalted to check the bloody ardor of vigorous men. But it may be that living women, appealing to sense as well as soul, had even more influence in transforming the warrior into a gentleman. The Church repeatedly forbade tournaments and was gaily ignored by the knights. The ladies attended tournaments and were not ignored.

"The Church frowned upon the role of women in tournaments and in poetry. A conflict arose between the morals of noble ladies and the ethics of the Church. In the feudal world the ladies and the poets won.

"Romantic love -- i.e. love that idealizes its object -- has probably occurred in every age, in degree loosely corresponding with the delay and obstacles between desire and fulfillment. Until our own age it was rarely the cause of marriage. If we find it quite apart from marriage when knighthood was in flower, we must view that condition as more normal than our own.

"In most ages and above all in feudalism, women married men for their property and admired other men for their charm. Poets, having no property, had to marry at low level or love at long range and they admired their fairest songs at inaccessible dames.

"The distance hbetween lover and beloved was usually so great that even the most passionate poetry was taken as only a pretty compliment and a well-mannered lord rewarded poets for inditing amorous verses to his wife. So the viscount of Vzuzx continued his hospitality and favors to the troubadour Peire Vidal after Peire addressed love poems to the vicountess -- even after Peire had tried to seduce her -- although this was a degree of amiability not usually to be presumed upon.

The troubadour argued that marriage, combining a maximum of opportunity with a minimum of temptation, could hardly engender or sustain romantic love. Even the pious Dante seems never to have deamed of addressing love poems to his wife or to have found any unseemliness in addressing them to another woman, single or married. The knight agreed with the poet that knightly love had to be for some other lady than his own wife usually for the wife of another knight. Most knights,though we must not often suspect them of marital fidelity, laughed at 'courtly love,' resigned themselves in time to their mates and consolved themselves with war.

"We hear of knights turning cold ears to ladies offering romance. Roland, in the Chanson, died with scarce a thought of his affianced bride Aude who would die of grief on hearing of his death. Women, too, were not all romantic but from the twelfth century it became a convention with many of them that a lady should have a lover, Platonic or Byronic, added to her husband.

"If we may believe the medieval romances, the knight was pledged to the devoir or service of the lady who had given him her colors to wear. She could impose dangerous exploits to test or distance him. If he served her well she was expected to reward him with an embrace or better. This is the 'guerdon' that he claimed. To her he dedicated all his feats of arms. It was her name that he invoked in the crises of combat or the breath of death.

"As in Ovid's days, authors dealt with these questions with all the nicety of casuists. Some time between 1174 and 1182 one Andreas Capellanus -- Andrew the Chaplain -- composed a Tractatus de amore et de amoris remedio (Treatise on Love and Its Cure) in which, among other matters, he laid down the code and principles of 'courtly love.'

"Andrew limits such love to the aristocracy. He unblushingly assumes that it is the illicit passion of a knight for another knight's wife but considers its distinguishing characteristic as the homage, vassalage, and service of the man to the woman.

"This book is the chief authority for the existence of medieval 'courts of love' in which titled ladies answered queries and handed down decisions about l'amour courtois. In Andrew's time, if we may credit his account, the leading lady in this procedure was the princess poetess Marie, Countess of Champagne. A generation earlier it had been her mother, the most fascinating woman in feudal society, Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, sometime Queen of France and later of England. Occasionally, according to the Tractatus, mother and daughter presided together as judges in the court of love at Poitiers.

"Andrew knew Marie well, served her as chaplain, and apparently wrote his book to publish her theories and judgments of love. He says:-'Love teaches everyone to abound in good manners.'

"He no longer denounces their ignorance and superstition, their political disintegration, their economic and cultural poverty. He marvels, rather, that Europe ever recovered from the successive blows of Goths, Huns, Vandals, Moslems, Magyars, and Norse and preserved through the turmoil and tragedy so much of ancient letters and techniques.

"He can feel only admiration for the Charlemagnes, Alfreds, Olafs, and Ottos who forced an order upon this chaos -- for the Benedicts, Gregorys, Bonifaces, Columbas, Alcuins, Brunos who so patiently resurrected morals and letters out of the wilderness of their times -- for the prelates and artisans that could raise cathedrals and the nameless poets that could sing.

"Between one war or terror and the next State and Church had to begin again at the bottom as Rolmulus and Numa had done a thousand years before.

"The world had adjusted itself to Moslem control of the Near East. The Fatimids of Egypt had ruled mildly in Palestine. Barring some exceptions, the Christian sects there had enjoyed a wide liberty of worship.

"Al-Hakim, the mad caliph of Cairo, had destroyed the church of the Holy Sepulcher (1010), but the Mohammedans themselves had contributed substantially to its restoration. In 1047 the Moslem traveler Nasir-i-Khosru described it as 'a most spacious building, capable of holding 8000 persons and built with the utmost skill. Inside, the church is everywhere adorned with Byzantine brocade, worked in gold and they have portrayed Jesus-peace by upon Him - riding upon an ass.'

"This was but one of many Christian churches in Jerusalem. Christian pilgrims had free access to the holy places. A pilgrimage to Palestine had long been a form of devotion or penance.

"Everywhere in Europe one met 'palmers' who, as a sign of pilgrimage accomplished, wore crossed palm leaves from Palentine. such men, said Piers Plowman, 'had leave to lie all their lives thereafter.'

"For seven centuries it had stood at the crossroads of Europe and Asia holding back the armies of Asia and the hordes of the steppes. Now its internal discords, its disruptive heresies, its isolation from the West by the schism of 1054, left it too feeble to fulfill its historic task.

"While the Bulgars, Parzinaks, Cumans, and Russians assaulted its European gates, the Turks were dismembering its Asiatic provinces.

"In 1071 the Byzantine army was almost annihilated at Manzikert. The Seljuqs captured Edessa, Antioch (1085), Tarsus, even Nicaea and gazed across the Bosporus at Constantinople itself.

"The Emperor Alexius I (1081-1118) saved a part of Asia Minor by signing a humiliating peace but he had no military means of resisting further attack. If Constantinople should fall, all Eastern Europe would lie open to the Turks and the victory of Tours (732) would be undone.

"Forgetting theological pride, Alexius sent delegates to Urban II and the Council of Pizcenza, urging Latin Europe to help him drive back the Turks.

"When the Normans captured Sicily from the Moslems (1060-91) and Christian arms reduced Moslem rule in Spain (1085f), the western Mediterranean was freed for Christian trade. The Italian cities, as ports of exit for domestic and transalpine products, grew rich and strong and planned to end Moslem ascendancy in the eastern Mediterranean and open the markets of the Near East to West European goods.

"Other popes had entertained the idea. Gerbert, as Sylvester II, had appealed to Christendom to rescue Jerusalem and an abortive expedition had landed in Syria (c.1001).

"Gregory VII, amid his consuming strife with Henry IV, had exclaimed:-'I would rather expose my life in delivering the holy places than reign over the universe.'

"That quarrel was still hot when Urban presided over the Council of Piacenza in March of 1095. He supported the plea of Alexius' legates there but counseled delay until a more widely representative assembly might consider a war against Islam.

"He was too well informed to picture victory as certain in so distant an enterprise. He doubtless foresaw that failure would seriously damage the prestige of Christianity and the Church. Probably he longed to channel the disorderly pugnacity of feudal barons and Norman buccaneers into a holy war to save Europe and Byzantium from Islam. He dreamed of bringing the Eastern Church again under papal rule and visioned a mighty Christendom united under the theocracy of the popes with Rome once more the capital of the world.

"It was a conception of the highest order of statsmanship.

"From March to October of 1095 he toured northern Italy and southern France sounding out leaders and ensuring support.

"At Clermont in Auvergne the historic council met and although it was a cold November, thousands of people came from a hundred communities, pitched their tents in the open fields, gathered in a vast assemblage that no hall could hold and throbbed with emotion as their fellow Frenchman Urban, raised on a platform in their midst, addressed to them in French the most influential speech in medieval history."

The power of the spoken word!

"Urban took it up and called upon them to make it their battle cry. He bade those who undertook the crusade to wear a cross upon brow or breast.

"Says William of Malmesbury:-'At once some of the nobility, falling down at the knees of the Pope, consecreated themselves and their property to the service of God.' Thousands of the commonalty pledged themselves likewise. Monks and hermits left their retreats to become in no metaphysical sense soldiers of Christ.

"The energetic Pope passed to other cities -- Tours, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Nimes -- and for nine months preached the crusade. When he reached Rome after two years' absence, he was enthusiastically acclaimed by the least pious city in Christendom.

"He assumed, with no serious opposition, the authority to release Crusaders from commitments hindering the crusade. He freed the serf and the vassal for the duration of the war, from fealty to their lord. He conferred upon all Crusaders the privilege of being tried by ecclesiastical instead of manorial courts and guaranteed them, during their absence, the episcopal protection of their property.

"He commanded -- although he could not quite enforce -- a truce to all wars of Christians against Christians. He established a new principle of obedience above the code of feudal loyalty. Now, more than ever, Europe ws made one. Urban found himself the accepted master, at least in theory, of Europe's kings.

"A plenary indulgence remitting all punishments due to sin was offered to those who should fall in the war.

"Serfs were allowed to leave the soil to which they had been bound.

"Citizens were exempted from taxes, debtors enjoyed a moratorium on interest.

"Prisoners freed and sentences of death were commuted, by a bold extension of papal authority, to life service in Palestine.

"Thousands of vagrants joined in the sacred tramp. Men tired of hopeless poverty -- adventurers ready for brave enterprise -- younger ones hoping to carve out fiefs for themselves in the East -- merchants seeking new markets for their goods -- knights whose enlisting serfs had left them laborless.

"Timid spirits shunning taunts of cowardice joined with sincerely religious souls to rescue the land of Christ's birth and death.

"Propaganda of the kind customary in war stressed the disabilities of Christians in Palestine, the atrocities of Moslems, the blasphemies of the Mohammedan creed. Moslems were desdribed as worshiping a statue of Mohammed and pious gossip related how the Prophet, fallen in an epileptic fit, had been eaten alive by hogs.

"In many cases women and children insisted upon accompanying their husbands or parents perhaps with reason for prostitutes soon enlisted to serve the warriors.

"Urban had appointed the month of August, 1096, as the time of departure but the impatient peasants who were the first recruits could not wait.

"One such host, numbering some 12,000 persons (of whom only eight were knights) set out from France in March under Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless (Gautier sans-Avoir).

"Another, perhaps 5000 strong, started from Germany under the priest Gottschalk.

"A third advanced from the Rhineland under Count Emico of Leiningen. It was chiefly these disorderly bands that attacked the Jews of Germany and Bohemia, rejected the appeals of the local clergy and citizenry and degenerated for a time into brutes phrasing their blood lust in piety.

"The recruits had brought modest funds and little food and their inexperienced leaders had made scant provision for feeding them. Many of the marchers had underestimated the distance and as they advanced along the Rhine and the Danube the children asked impatiently, at each turn, was not this Jerusalem? When their funds ran out and they began to starve, they were forced to pillage the fields and homes on their route. Soon they added rape to rapine.

"The population resisted violently. Some towns closed their gates against them and others bade them Godspeed with no delay.

"Arriving at last before Constantinople quite penniless and decimated by famine, plague, leprosy, fever and battles on the way, they were welcomed by Alexius but not satisfactorily fed. They broke into the suburbs and plundered churches, houses, and palaces. To deliver his capital from these praying locusts, Alexius provided them with vessels to cross the Bosporus, sent them supplies, and bade them wait until better armed detchments could arrive.

"Whether through hunger or restlessness, the Crusaders ignored these instructions and advanced upon Nicaea. A disciplined force of Turks, all skilled bowmen, marched out from the city and almost annihilated this first division of the First Crusade.

"Bohemund proposed to Godfrey that they seize the city. Godfrey refused, saying that he had come only to fight infidels.

"But the idea did not die. The masculine half-barbarous knights of the West despised these subtle and cultured gentlemen of the East as heretics lost in effeminate luxury. They looked with astonishment and envy up;on the riches laid up in the churches, palaces, and markets of the Byzantine capital and thought that fortune should belong to the brave.

"Alexius may have gotten wind of these notions among his saviors. His experience with the peasant horde (for whose defeat the West had censured him) inclined him to caution, perhaps to duplicity. He had asked for assistance against the Turks but he not bargained upon the united strength of Europe gathering at his gates. He could never be sure whether these warriors aspired to Jerusalem so mcuch as to Constantinople nor whether they would restore to his Empire any formerly Byzantine territory that they might take from the Turks.

"He offered the Crusaders provisions, subsidies, transport, military aid and, for the leaders, handsome bribes. In return he asked that the nobles should swear allegiance to him as their feudal sovereign. Any lands taken by them were to be held in fealty to him.

"The nobles, softened with silver, swore.

"Early in 1097 the armies, totaling some 30,000 men, still under divided leadership, crossed the straits.

"Luckily, the Moslems were even more divided than the Christians. Not only was Moslem power in Spain spent and in northern Africa rent with religious faction, but in the East the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt held southern Syria, while their foes, the Seljuq Turks, held northern Syria and most of Asia Minor.

"Armenia rebelled agains its Seljuq conquerors and allied itself with the 'Franks". So helped, the arms of Europe advanced to the siege of Nicaea.

"On Alexius' pledge that their lives should be spared, the Turkish garrison surrendered (June 19, 1097). The Greek Emperor raised the Imperial flag over the citadel, protected the city from indiscriminate pillage and appeased the feudal leaders with substantial gifts.

"But the Christian soldiery complained that Alexius was in league with the Turks. After a week's rest, the Crusaders set out for Antioch. They met a Turkish army under Qilij Arslan near Dorylacum, won a bloody battle (July 1, 1097) and marched through Asia Minor with no other enemies than a shortage of water and food and a degree of heat for which the Western blood was unprepared. Men, women, horses and dogs died of thirst on that bitter march of 500 miles.

"Crossing the Taurus, some nobles separated their forces from the main army to make private conquests -- Raymond, Bohemund, and Godfrey in Armenia -- Tancred and Baldwin (brother of Godfrey) in Edessa.

"There Baldwin, by strategy and treachery, founded the first Latin principality in the East (1098). The mass of the Crusaders complained ominously at these dalays.

"By the humor of history, the Turks whom they had come to fight had been expelled from the city by the Fatimids a year before. The caliph offered peace on terms of guaranteed safety for Christian pilgrims and worshipers in Jerusalem but Bohemund and Godfrey demanded unconditional surrender.

"The Fatimid garrison of 1000 men resisted for forty days. On July 15 Godfrey and Tancred led their followers over the walls and the Crusaders knew the ecstasy of a high purpose accomplished after heroic suffering. Then, reports the priestly eyewitness Raymond of Agiles: -'wonderful things were to be seen. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded. Others were shot with arrows, or forced to jump from the towers. Others were tortured for seveal days and then burned in flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet. One rode about everywhere amid the corpses of men and horses.'

"Other contemporaries contribute details:-women were stabbed to death, suckling babes were snatched by the leg from their mothers' breasts and flung over the walls or had their necks broken by being dashed against posts. And 70,000 Moslems remaining in the city were slaughtered. The surviving Jews were herded into a synagogue and burned alive. The victors flocked to the church of the Holy Sepulcher, whose grotto, they believed, had once held the crucified Christ.

"Here, where Byzantine rule had ceased 465 years before, no pretense was made of subordination to Alexius. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem became at once a sovereign state.

"The Greek Church was disestablished. Its patriarch fled to Cyprus and the parishes of the new kingdom accepted the Latin liturgy, an Italian primate and papal rule.

"The price of sovereignty is the capacity for self-defense.

"Two weeks after the great liberation, an Egyptian army came up to Ascalon to reliberate a city holy for too many faiths. Godfrey defeated it but a year later he died (1100).

"His less able brother, Baldwin I (1100-18) took the loftier title of king. Under King Fulk, Count of Anjou (1131-41), the new state included most of Palestine and Syria. But the Moslems still held Aleppo, Damascus and Emesa.

"The kingdom was divided into four feudal principalities, centering respectively at Jerusalem, Antioch, Edessa and Tripolis. Each of the four was parceled into practically independent fiefs whose jealous lords made war, coined money, and otherwise aped sovereignty.

"The king was elected by the barons and was checked by an ecclesiastical hierarchy subject only to the pope. He was further weakened by ceding the control of several ports -- Jaffa, Tyre, Acre, Beirut, Ascalon -- to Venice, Pisa, or Genoa as the price of naval aid and seabornee supplies.

"The structure and law of the kingdom were formulated in the Assizes of Jerusalem -- one of the most logical and ruthless codifications of feudal government. The barons assumed all ownership of land, reduced the former owners -- Christian or Moslem -- to the condition of serfs and laid upon them feudal obligations severer than any in contemporary Europe.

"As far back as 1048 the merchants of Amalfi had obtained Moslem permission to build a hospital at Jerusalem for poor or ailing pilgrims. About 1120 the staff of this institution was reorganized by Raymond du Puy as a religious order vowed to chastity, poverty, obedience, and the military protection of Christians in Palestine. And these Hospitalers, or Knights of the Hospital of St. John, beame one of the noblest charitable bodies in the Christian world.

"About the same time (1119) Hugh de Payens and eight other crusader knights solemnly dedicated themselves to monastic discipline and the martial service of Christianity. They obtained from Baldwin II a residence near the site of Solomon's temple and were soon called Knights Templar.

"St. Bernard drew up a stern rule for them which was not long obeyed. He praised them for being 'most learned in the art of war' and bade them 'wash seldom' and closely crop their hair. 'The Christian who slays the unbeliever in the Holy War' wrote Bernard to the Templars, in a passage worthy of Mohammed, 'is sure of his reward. More sure if he himself is slain. The Christian glories in the death of the pagan, because Christ is thereby glorified. Men \must learn to kill with a good conscience if they are to fight successful wars.'

"A Hospitaler wore a black robe with a white cross on the left sleeve. A Templar a white robe with a red cross on the mantle. Each hated the other religiously. From protecting and nursing pilgrims the Hospitalers and Templars passed to active attacks upon Saracen strongholds.

"Though the Templars numbered but 300, and the Hospitalers some 600, in 1180 they played a prominent part in the battles of the Crusades and earned great repute as warriors. Both orders campaigned for financial support and received it from Church and state, from rich and poor.

"In the thirteenth century each owned great estates in Europe, including abbeys, villages, and towns. Both astonished Christians and Saracens by building vast fortresses in Syria where, dedicated individually to poverty, they enjoyed collective luxury amid the toils of war.

"Eugenius, enmeshed in conflict with the infidels of Rome, begged Bernard to undertake the task himself. It was a wise suggestion for the saint was a greter man than he whom he had made Pope.

"When he left his cell at Clairvaux to preach the crusade to the French, the skepticism that hides in the heart of faith was silenced and the fears spread by narratives of the First Crusade were stilled.

"Bernard went directly to King Louis VII and persuaded him to take the cross. With the King at his side he spoke to a multitude at Vezelay (1146). When he had finished, the crowd enlisted en masse.

"The crosses prepared proved too few and Bernard tore his robe to pieces to provide additional emblems. He wrote to the Pope:-'Cities and castles are emptied. There is not left one man to seven women and everywhere there are widows to still living husbands.'

"Having won France he passed to Germany where his fervent eloquence induced the Emperor Conrad III to accept the crusade as the one cause that could unify the Guelf and Hohenstanfon factions then rending the realm.

"At Pentecost Louis and the French followed at a cautious distance, uncertain whether the Germans or the Turks were their most hated foes. The Germans felt a like hisitation between Turks and Greeks.

"And so many Byzantine towns were pillaged on the way that many closed their gates and dispensed a scanty ration by baskets let down from the walls.

"Manuel Commenus, now Eastern Emperor, gently suggested that the noble hosts should cross the Hellespont at Sestos instead of going through Constantinople. But Conrad and Louis refused. A party in Louis' council urged him to take Constantinople for France. He refrained.

"But again the Greeks may have learned of his temptation. They were frightened by the stature and armor of the Western knights and amused by their feminine entourage. His troublesome Eleanor accompanied Louis and troubadours accompanied the Queen. The counts of Flanders and Toulouse were escorted by their countesses and the baggage train of the French was heavy with trunks and boxes of apparel and cosmetics designed to ensure the beauty of these ldies against all the vicissitudes of climate, war, and time.

"Manuel hastened to transport the two armies across the Bosporus and supplied the Greeks with debased coinage for dealings with the Crusaders. In Asia a dearth of provisions and the high prices demanded by the Greeks led to many conflicts between saviors and saved.

"Frederick of the Red Beard mourned that his sword had to shed Christian blood for the privilege of encountering infidels.

"Conrad insisted, against Manuel's advice, on taking the route followed by the First Crusade.

"Despite or because of their Greek guides, the Germans fell into a succession of foodless wastes and Moslem snares. Their loss of life was dishartening.

"At Dorylacum, where the First Crusade had defeated Qilij Arslan, Conrad's army met the main Moslem force and was so badly beaten that hardly one Christian in ten survived.

"The French army, far behind, was deceived by false news of a German victory. It advanced recklessly and was decimated by starvation and Moslem raids. Reaching Attalia, Louis bargained with Greek ship captains to transport his army by sea to Christian Tarus or Antioch. The captains demanded an impossible fee per passenger. Louis and several nobles, Eleanor and several ladies, took passage to Antioch, leaving the French army in Attalia.

"From these survivors, and soldiers already in the capital, an army was improvised and marched against Damascus under the divided command of Conrad, Louis, and Baldwin III (1143-62). During the siege disputes arose among the nobles as to which should rule Damascus when it fell.

"Moslem agents found their way into the Christian army and bribed certain leaders to a policy of inaction or retreat. When word came that the emirs of Aleppo and Mosul were advancing with a large force to relieve Damascus, the advocates of retreat prevailed. The Christian army broke into frgments and fled to Antioch, Acre, or Jerusalem.

"Conrad, defeated and diseased, returned in disgrace to Germany. Eleanor and most of the French knights returned to France. Louis remained another year in Palestine, making pilgrimages to sacred shrines.

"Europe was stunned by the collapse of the Second Crusade.

"Men began to ask how it was that the Almighty allowed His defenders to be so humiliated. Critics assailed St. Bernard as a reckless visionary who had sent men to their death. Here and there emboldened skeptics called in question the most basic tenets of the Christian faith. Bernard replied that the ways of the Almighty are beyond human understanding and that the disaster must have been a punishment for Christian sins. But from this time the philosophic doubts that Abelard (d.1142) had scattered found expression even among the people.

"The Europeans who had settled there since 1099 gradually adopted the Near Eastern garb of wound headdress and flowing robe as suited to a climate of sun and sand. As they became more familiar with the Moslems living in the kingdom, mutual unfamiliarity and hostility decreased.

"Moslem merchants freely entered Christian settlements and sold their wares. Moslem and Jewish physicians were preferred by Christian patients.

"Moslem worship in mosques was permitted by the Christian clergy. The Koran was taught in Moslem schools in Christian Antioch and Tripolis. Safe conducsts for travelers and traders were exchanged between Christian and Moslem states.

"As only a few Christian wives had come with the Crusaders, many Christian settlers married Syrian women. Soon their mixed offspring constituted a large element of the population. Arabic became the daily speech of all commoners. Christian princes made alliances with Moslem emirs against Christian rivals and Moslem emirs sometimes asked the aid of the 'polytheists' in diplomacy or war.

"Personal friendships developed between Christians and Mohammedans. Ibn Jubair, who toured Christian Sria in 1183, described his fellow Moslems there as prosperous and as well trated by the Franks.

"Nur-ud-din spread his power from Aleppo to Damascus (1164). When he died, Saladin brought Egypt and Moslem Syria under one rule (1175).

"Genoese, Venetian, and Pisan merchants disorderd the Eastern ports with the mortal rivalary. Knights quarreled for the royal power in Jerusalem. When Guy de Lusignan maneuvered his way to the throne (1186), disaffection spread among the aristocracy. Said his brother Geoffrey:-'If this Guy is a king, I am worthy to be a god.'

"Reginald of Chatillon made himself sovereign in the great castle of Karak beyond the Jordan near the Arabian frontier and repeatedly violated the truce arranged between the Latin king and Saladin. He announced his invention to invade Arabia, destroy the tomb of 'the accursed came driver' at Medina, and smash the Kaaba at Mecca in fragments to the ground. His small force of knightly adventurers sailed down the Red Sea, landed at el-Haura, and marched to Medina.

"They were surprised by an Egyptian detachment and all were cut down except a few who escaped with Reginald and some prisoners who were taken to Mecca and slaughtered instead of goats at the annual pilgrimage sacrifice (1183).

"Saladin had heretofore contented himself with minor forays against Palestine.

"Now, offended to the depths of his piety, he re-formed the army that had won him Damascus and met the forces of the Latin kingdom in an indecisive battle on the historic plain of Esdraelon (1183). A few months later he attacked Reginald at Karak but failed to enter the citadel. In 1185 he signed a four-year truce with the Latin kingdom.

"But in 1186 Reginald, bored with peace, waylaid a Moslem caravan and took rich booty and several prisoners, including Saladin's sister. Said Reginald:-'Since they trusted in Mohammed, let Mohammed come and save them.'

"Saladin, familiar with the terrain, took up positions controlling all the wells. The heavily armored Christians, having marched across the plain in midsummer heat, entered battle gasping with thirst.

"Taking advantage of the wind, the Saracens started a brush fire whose smoke further harassed the Crusaders. In the blind confusion the Frank footmen were separated from the cavalry and were cut down. The knights, fighting with desperation against weapons, smoke, and thirst, at last fell exhausted to the ground and were captured or slain.

"Apparently by Saladin's orders, no mercy was shown to Templars or Hospitalers. He directed that King Guy and Duke Reginald be brought before him. To the King he gave drink as a pledge of pardon. To Reginald he gave the choice of death or aknowledging Mohammed as a prophet of God. When Reginald refused, Saladin slew him.

"Part of the booty taken by the victors was the True Cross which had been borne as a battle standard by a priest. Saladin sent it to the caliph at Baghdad.

"Seeing that no army remained to challenge him, he proceeded to capture Acre where he freed 4000 Moslem prisoners and paid his troops with the wealth of the busy port.

"For a few months nearly all Palestine was in his hands.

"As he approached Jerusalem the leading citizens came out to bid for peace.

"He told them:-'I believe that Jerusalem is the home of God, as you also believe. And I will not willingly lay siege to it, or put it to assault.' He offered it freedom to fortify itself and to cultivate unhindered the land for fifteen miles around and promised to supply all deficiences of money and food until Pentecost. If, when that day came, they saw hope of being rescued, they might keep the city and honorably resist him. If no such prospect appeared, they were to yield peaceably and he would spare the lives and property of the Christian inhabitants.

"The delegates refused the offer, saying that they would never surrender the city where the Saviour had died for mankind. The siege lssted only twelve days. When the city capitulated, Saladin required a ransom of ten gold pieces for each man, five for each woman, one for each child.

"The poorest 7000 were to be freed on the surrender of the 30,000 gold bezants which had been sent to the Hospitalers by Henry II of England. These terms were accepted says a Christian chronicler 'with gratitude and lamentation.' Perhaps some learned Christians compared these events of 1187 with those of 1099.

"Apparently some 15,000 of the 60,000 captured Christians remained unransomed and became slaves. Among the ransomed were the wives and daughters of the nobles who had been killed or captured at Hittin. Softened by their tears, Saladin released to them such husbands and fathers (including King Guy) as could be found in Moslem capitivity.

"The freed King and nobles took an oath never to bear arms against him again.

"Safe in Christian Tripolis and Antioch, they were 'released by the sentence of the clergy from the enormity of their promise' and laid plans of vengeance against Saladin. The Sultan allowed the Jews to dwell again in Jerusalem and gave Christians the right to enter, but unarmed. He assisted their pilgrimage and protected their security.

"The Dome of the Rock which had been converted into a church was purified from Christian taint by sprinkling with rose water and the golden cross that had surmounted the cupola was cast down amid Moslem cheers and Christian groans.

"Italian fleets still controlled the Mediterranean, and stood ready to carry fresh Crusaders for a price. William, Archbishop of Tyre, returned to Europe and recounted to assemblies in Italy, France and Germany the fall of Jerusalem.

"At Mainz his appeal so moved Frederick Barbarosa that the great Emperor, sixty-seven years old, set out almost at once with his army (1189) and all Christendom applauded him as the second Moses who would open a way to the Promised Land. Crossing the Hellespont at Gallipoli, the new hosts, on a new route, repeated the errors and tragedies of the First Crusade.

"Turkish bands harassed its march and cut off its supplies. Hundreds starved to death. Frederick was drowned ignominiously in the little river of Salef in Cilicia (1190). Only a fraction of his army survived to join in the siege of Acre.

"Richard I of the Lion Heart, recently crowned King of England at the age of thirty one, resolved to try his hand on the Moslems.

"Fearing French encroachment, in his absence, upon English possession in France, he insisted that Philip Augustus should accompany him. The French king -- a lad of twenty three -- agreed. The two youthful monarchs received the cross from William of Tyre in a moving ceremony at Vezelay.

"Richard's army of Normans (for few Englishmen took part in the Crusades) sailed from Marseille, Philip's army from Genoa, for a rendezvous in Sicily (1190). There the kings quarreled and otherwise amused themselves for half a year.

"Now began a confused and unique campaign in which blows and battles alternated with compliments and courtesies while the English King and the Kurd Sultan illustrated some of the finest qualities of their civilizations and creeds.

"Neither was a saint. Saladin could dispense death with vigor when military purposes seemed to him to require it. The romantic Richard permitted some interruptions in his career as a gentleman. When the leaders of besieged Acre delayed in carrying out the agreed terms of surrender, Richard had 2500 Moslem prisoners beheaded before the walls as a hint to hurry. When Saladin learned of this he ordered the execution of all prisoners thereafter taken in battle with the English King. Changing his tune, Richard proposed to end the Crusades by marrying his sister Joan to Saladin's brother al-Adil.

"Saladin offered to renew battle but Richard withdrew his men within Jaffa's walls. Saladin sent him an offer of peace. During the negotiations Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat, who held Tyre, entered into separate correspondence with Saladin, proposing to become his ally and retake Acre for the Moslems if Saladin would agree to his approppriating Sidon and Beirut.

"Despite this offer, Saladin authorized his brother to sign with Richard a peace yielding to the Christians all the coastal cities that they then held and half of Jerusalem. Richard was so pleased that he ceremoniously conferred knighthood upon the son of the Moslem ambassador.

"A while later, hearing tht Saladin was faced with revolt in the East, he rejected Saladin's terms, besieged and took Darum and advanced to within twelve miles of Jerusalem. Saladin, who had dismissed his troops for the winter, called them back to arms.

"Meanwhile dissension broke out in the Christian camp. Scouts reported that the wells on the road to Jerusalem had been poisoned and the army would have nothing to drink. A council was held to decide strategy. It voted to abandon Jerusalem and march upon Cairo, 250 miles away.

"Richard, sick, disgusted and despondent, retird to Acre and thought of returning to England.

"But when he heard that Saladin had again attcked Jaffa and had taken it in two days, Richard's pride revived him. With such troops as he could muster he sailed at once for Jaffa. Arrived in the harbor, he leaped to his waist into the sea. Swinging his famous Danish ax, he beat down all who resisted him, led his men into the city and cleared it of Moslem soldiery almost before Saladin could learn what had occurred.

"The sultan summoned his main army to his rescue. It far outnumbered Richard's 3000 but the reckless courage of the King carried the day. Seeing Richard unmounted, Saladin sent him a charger, calling it a shame that so gallant a warrior should have to fight on foot. Saladin's sokdiers soon had enough. They reproached him for having spared the Jaffa garrison which was now fighting again.

"The relative unity and fidelity of the Moslem leaders had triumphed over the divisions and disloyalties of the feudal chiefs. A short line of supplies behind the Saracens proved of greater advantage than Christian control of the seas.

"The Christian virtues and faults were better exemplified in the Moslem sultan than in the Christian king. Saladin was religious to the point of persecution and allowed himself to be unreasonably bitter against the Templars and Hospitalers.

"Usually, however, he was gentle to the weak, merciful to the vanquished and so superior to his enemies in faithfulness to his word that Christian chroniclers wondered how so wrong a theology could produce so fine a man.

"He treated his servants with gentleness and himself heard all petitions. He 'esteemed money as little as dust' and left only one dinar in his personal treasury. Not long before his death he gave his son ez-Zahir instruction that no Christian philosopher could surpass.

"It was a discouragingly small result from the participation of Europe's greatest kings. The drowning of Barbarosa, the flight of Philip Augustus, the brilliant failure of Richard, the unscrupulous intrigues of Christian knights in the Holy Land, the conflicts between Templars and Hospitalers, and the renewal of war between England and France broke the pride of Europe and further weakened the theological assurance of Christendom.

"But the early death of Saladin and the breakup of his empire released new hopes. Innocent III, at the very outset of his pontificate, demanded another effort. Fulle de Neuilly, a simple priest, preached the Fourth Crusade to commoners and Kings.

"The results were disheartening. The Emperor Frederick II was a boy of four. Philip Augustus thought one crusade enogh for a life time. Richard I, forgetting his last word to Saladin, laughed at Fulle's exhortations.

"Innocent persisted. He suggested that a campaign agaianst Egypt could succeed through Italian control of the Mediterranean and would offer a means of approaching Jerusalem from rich and fertile Egypt as a base.

"After much haggling Venice agreed, in return for 85,000 marks of silver, to furnish shipping for 4500 knights and horses, 9000 squires, 20,000 infantry and supplies for nine months. It would also provide fifty war galleys but on condition that half the spoils of conquest should go to the Venetian Republic.

The Venetians, however, had no intention of attacking Egypt. They made millions annually by exporting timber, iron, and arms to Egypt and importing slaves. They did not propose to jeopardize this trade with war or to share it with Pisa and Genoa. While negotiating with the Crusaders' committee, they made a secret treaty with the sultan of Egypt guaranteeing that country against invasion.

"It gave little help and derived much profit. It regained most of Asia Minor and looked with equanimity upon the mutual weakening of Islam and the West in the struggle for Palestine.

"The Emperor Manuel had arrested thousands of Venetians in Constantinople and had for a time ended Venetian commercial privileges there. Isaac II Angelus had not scrupled to ally himself with the Saracens.

"In 1195 Isaac was deposed, imprisoned, and blinded by his brother Alexius III. Isaac's son, another Alexius, fled to Germany. In 1202 he went to Venice, asked the Venetian Senate and the Crusaders to rescue and restore his father and promised in return all that Byzantium could supply for their attack upon Islam.

"Dandolo and the French barons drove a hard bargain with the youth. He was persuaded to pledge the Crusaders 200,000 marks of silver, equip an army of 10,000 men for service in Palestine and submit the Greek Orthodox Church to the Roman Pope.

"Despite this subtle sop, Innocent III forbade the Crusaders, on pain of excommunication, to attack Byzantium. Some nobles refused to share in the expedition. A part of the army considered itself absolved from the Crusade and went home. But the prospect of capturing the richest city in Europe proved irresistible.

"He must restore the Empire to his blinded brother or to the young Alexius who accompanied the fleet. When he refused, the Crusaders landed against weak opposition before the walls of the city. The aged Dandolo was the first to touch the shore. Alexius III fled to Thrace.

"The Greek nobles escorted Isaac Angelus from his dungeon to the throne and in his name a message was sent to the Latin chieftains that he was waiting to welcome his sons.

"Alexius IV was crowned coemperor. But when the Greeks learned of the price at which he had bought his victory they turned against him in anger and scorn.

"Meanwhile some Latin soldiers, horrified to find Moslems worshipping in a mosque in a Christian city, set fire to the mosque and slew the worshipers. The fire raged for eight days, spread through three miles, and laid a considerable section of Constantinople in ashes.

"A prince of royal blood led a popular revolt, killed Alexius IV, reimprisoned Isaac Angelus, took the throne as Alexius V Ducas, and began to organize an army to drive the Latins from their camp at Galata. After a month of siege Alexius V fled and the victorious Latins passed the consuming locusts through the capital.

"When the riot of rapine had subsided, the Latin nobles chose Baldwin of Flanders to head the Latin kingdom of Constantinople and made French its official language. The Byzantine Empire was divided into feudal dominions, each ruled by a Latin noble.

"Venice, eager to control the routes of trade, secured Hadrianople, Epirus, Acarnania, the Ionian Isles, part of the Peloponnesus, Euboea, the Aegean Isles, Gallipoli, and three eighths of Constantinople. The Genoese were dispossessed of their Byzantine 'factories' and outposts. Dandolo, now limping in imperial buskins, took the title of 'Doge of Venice, Lord of One Fourth and One Eighth of the Roman Empire.' Soon afterward he died in the fullness of his unscrupulous success.

"The Greek clergy were mostly replaced by Latins, in some cases precipitated into holy orders for the occasion. Innocent III, still protesting against the attack, accepted with grace the formal reunion of the Greek with the Latin Church.

"Most of the Crusaders returned home with their spoils. Some settled in the new dominion. Only a handful reached Palestine and without effect.

"Perhaps the Crusaders thought that Constantinople, in their hands would be a stronger base against the Turks than Byzantium had been. But generations of strife between the Latins and the Greeks now absorbed the vitality of the Greek world.

"Thinkers were much exercised to explain why God had allowed the defeat of His defenders in so holy a cause and had granted success only to Venetian villainy. Amid these doubts it occurred to simple souls that only innocence could regain the citadel of Christ.

"In 1212 a German youth vaguely known to history as Nicholas announced that God had commissioned him to lead a crusade of children to the Holy Land. Priests as well as laity condemned him but the idea spread readily in an age even more subject than most to waves of emotional enthusiasm.

"Parents struggled to deter their children but thousands of boys (and some girls in boys' clothing), averaging twelve years, slipped away and followed Nicholas, perhaps glad to escape from the monarchy of the home to the freedom of the road.

"The swarm of 30,000 children, leaving mostly from Cologne, passed down the Rhine and over the Alps. Many died of hunger. Some strgglers were eaten by wolves. Thieves mingled with the marchers and stole their clothing and food.

"The survivors reached Genoa where the earthy Italians laughed them into doubt. No ships would carry them to Palestine.

"In 1217 the Fifth Crusade left Germany, Austria, and Hungary under the Hungarian King Andrew and safely reached Damietta, at the easternmnost mouth of the Nile.

"The city fell after a year's siege. Malik al-Kamil, the new Sultan of Egypt and Syria, offered terms of peace -- the surrender of most of Jerusalem, the liberation of Christian prisoners, the return of the True Cross. The Crusaders demanded an indemnity as well which al-Kamil refused. The war was resumed but went badly. Expected reinforcements did not come.

"Finally an eight-ytear truce was signed that gave the Crusaders the True Cross but restored Damietta to the Moslems and required the evacuation of all Christian troops from Egyptian soil.

"The Crusaders blamed their tragedy upon Frederick II, the young Emperor of Germany and Italy.

"He had taken the crusader's vow in 1215 and had promised to join the besiegers at Damietta. Political complications in Italy and perhaps an inadequate faith detained him.

"In 1228 while excommunicate for his delays, Frederick set out on the Sixth Crusade. Arrived in Palestine, he received no help from the good Christians there who shunned an outlaw from the Church. He sent emissaries to al-Kamil who was now leading the Saracen army at Nablus. Al-Kamil replied courteously.

"The Sultan's ambassador, Fakhru'd Din, was imprssed by Frederick's knowledge of the Arabic language, literature, science, and philosophy. The two rulers entered into a friendly exchange of compliments and ideas. To the astonishment of both Christendom and Islam they signed a treaty (1229) by which al-Kamil ceded to Frederick Acre, Jaffa, Sidon, Nazareth, Bethlehim and all of Jerusalem except the enclosure -- sacred to Islam -- containing the Dome of the Rock. Christian pilgrims were to be admitted to this enclosure to perform their prayers on the site of Solomon's temple. Similar rights were to be enjoyed by Mohammedans in Bethlehem. All prisoners on either side were to be released.

"For ten years and ten months each side pledged itself to peace. The excommunicate Emperor had succeeded where for a century Christendom had failed. The two cultures, brought together for a moment in mutual understanding and respect, had found it possible to be friends.

"The Christians of the Holy Land rejoiced but Pope Gregory IX demounced the pact as an insult to Christendom and refused to ratify it. After Frederick's departure the Christian nobility of Palestine took control of Jerusalem and allied the Christian power in Asia with the Moslem ruler of Damascus against the Egyptian Sultan (1244). The latter called to his aid the Khwarazmian Turks who captured Jerusalem, plundered it, and massacred a large number of is inhabitants.

"After two centuries of war, Jerusalem was in the hands of the ferocious Mamluks and Christian pilgrims came fewer and more fearful than before.

"The Moslem powers, once tolerant of religious diversity, had been made intolerant by attack. The Palestinian and Syrian ports that had been captured for Italian trade were without exception lost. Moslem civilization had proved itself superior to the Christian in refinement, comfort, education, and war.

"The magnificent effort of the popes to give Europe peace through a common purpose had been shattered by nationalistic ambitions and the 'crusades' of popes against emperors.

"Feudalism recovered with difficulty from its failure in the Crusades.

"Suited to individualistic adventure and heroism within a narrow range, it had not known how to adjust its methods to Oriental climates and distant campaigns. It had bungled inexcusably the problem of supplies along a lengthening line of communications. It had exhausted its equipment and blunted its spirit by conquering not Moslem Jerusalem but Christian Byzantium.

"To finance their expeditions to the East, many knights had sold or mortgaged their properties to lord, moneylender, Church, or king. For a price they had resigned their rights over many towns in their domains. To many peasants they had sold remission of future feudal dues. Serfs by the thousands had used the crusader's privilege to leave the land and thousands had never returned to their manors.

"While feudal wealth and arms were diverted to the East, the power and wealth of the French monarchy rose as one of the major results of the Crusades. At the same time both the Roman Empires were weakened.

"The Western emperors lost prestige by their failures in the Holy Land and by their conflicts with a papacy exalted by the Crusades. The Eastern Empire, though reborn in 1261, never regained its former power or repute.

"The Crusades, however, had this measure of success, that without them, the Turks would have taken Constantinople long before 1453.

"This, and the reintroduction of public baths and private latrines in the West may be included among the results of the Crusades. Probably through contact with the Moslem East, the Europeans returned to the old Roman custom of shaving the beard. A thousand Arabic words now came into the European languages. Oriental romances flowed into Europe and found new dress in the nascent vernaculars.

"Crusaders impressed by the enameled glass of the Saracens may have brought from the East the technical secrets that led to the improved stained glass of the developed Gothic cathedrals. The compass, gunpowder, and printing were known in the East before the Crusades ended and may have come to Europe in the backwash of that tidal wave.

"Apparently the Crusaders were too unlettered to care for 'Ababic' poetry, science or philosophy. Moslem influences in such fields came rather through Spain and Sicily than through the contacts of these wars. Greek cultural influences were felt by the West after the capture of Constantinople.

"The sight of diverse peoples, of lordly barons and proud knights, sometimes of emperors and kings, uniting in a religious cause led by the Church raised the status of the papacy.

"Papal legates entered every country and diocese to stir recruiting and gather funds for the Crusades. Their authority encroached upon, often superseded, that of the hierarchy. Through them the faithful became almost directly tributory to the pope.

"The collections so made became customary and were soon applied to many purposes besides the Crusades. The pope acquired, to the active dissatisfction of the kings, the power to tax their subjects and divert to Rome great sums that might have gone to royal coffers or local needs.

"The distribution of indulgences for forty days' service in Palestine was a legitimate application of military service. The granting of similar indulgences to those who paid the expenses of a Crusader seemed forgivable. The extension of like indulgences to those who contributed to funds managed by the popes, or who fought papal wars in Europe aginst Frederick, Manfred, or Conrad, became an added source of irritation to the kings and of humor to the satirists.

"In 1241 Gregory IX directed his legate in Hungary to commute for a money payment the vows of persons pledged to a crusade and used the proceeds to help finance his life-and-death struggle with Frederick II. Provencal troubadours criticized the Church for diverting aid from Palestine by offering equal indulgences for a crusade against the Albigensian heretics in France.

"Says Matthew Paris:-'The faithful wondered that the same plenary remission of sins was promised for shedding Christian as for shedding infidel blood.' Many landowners, to finance their crusade, sold or mortgaged their property to churches or monasteries to raise liquid funds. Some monasteries in this way acquired vast estates.

"When the failure of the Crusades lowered the prestige of the Church, her wealth became a ready target of royal envy, popular resentment, and critical rebuke. Some attributed the disasters of Louis IX in 1250 to the simultaneous campaign of Innocent IV against Frederick II. Emboldened skeptics argued that the failure of the Crusades refuted the claims of the pope to be God's vicar or representative on earth.

"The knights lost Palestine but the Italian merchant fleets won control of the Mediterranean not only from Islam but from Byzantium as well. Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi, Marseille, Barcelona had already traded with the Moslem East, the Bosporus, and the Black Sea but this traffic was immensely enlarged by the Crusades.

"The Venetian conquest of Constantinople -- the transport of pilgrims and warriors to Palestine -- the purveyance of supplies to Christians and others in the East -- the importation of Oriental products into Europe -- all these supported a degree of commerce and maritime transport unknown since the most flourishing days of Imperial Rome.

"Silks, sugar, spices -- pepper, ginger, cloves, cinnamon -- rare luxuries in eleventh-century Europe -- came to it now in delightful abundance. Plants, crops, and trees already known to Europe from Moslem Spain were now more widely transplanted from Orient to Occident -- maize, rice, sesame, carob, lemons, melons, peaches, apricots, cherries, dates, shallot and scallion were named from the port, Ascalon, that shipped them from the East to the West. Apricots were long known as 'Damascus plums.'

"Damasks, muslins, satins, velvets, tapestries, rugs, dyes, powders, scents, and gems came from Islam to adorn or sweeten feudal and bourgeous homes and flesh. Mirrors of glass plated with metallic film now replaced those of polished bronze and steel. Europe learned fromn the East to refine sugar and made 'Venetian' glass.

"New markets in the East developed Italian and Flemish industry and promoted the growth of towns and the middle class.

"Better techniques of banking were introduced from Byzantium and Islam. New forms and instruments of credit appeared. More money circulated. More ideas, more men.

"Pedlars, of course, carried small wares from door to door, artisans sold their products in their shops, market days gathered sellers and buyers in the towns. Barons sheltered markets near their castles, churches allowed them in their yards, kings housed them in halles or stores in the capitals.

"But wholesale and international trade centered in the regional fairs periodically held at London and Stourbridge in England -- at Paris, Lyons, Reims, and the Champagne in France -- at Lille, Ypres, Douai, and Bruges in Flanders -- at Cologne, Frankfort, Leipzig, and Lubeck in Germany -- at Geneva in Switzerland -- at Novgorod in Russia.

"The most famous and popular of these fairs took place in the county of Champagne at Lagny in January, at Bar-sur-Aube in Lent, at Provins in May and September, at Troyes in September and November. Each of these six fairs lasted six or seven weeks so that in sequence they provided an international market through most of the year.

"They were conveniently located to bring the products and merchants of France, the Lowlands, and the Rhine Valley into contact with those of Provence, Spain, Italy, Africa, and the East. Altogether they constituted a major source of French wealth and power in the twelfth century.

"Originating as early as the fifth century in Troyes, they declined when Philip IV (1285-1314), having taken Champagne from its enlightened counts, taxed and regulated the fairs into penury.