thp: crusaders. 81 



in error — " yet, though tlie opportunities of improving the Eng- 

 lish breed of horses were great, from the facilities with which 

 the finest oriental horses might have been obtained, no advan- 

 tage seems to have been taken of them. A gloomy and super- 

 stitious fanaticism solely occupied the minds of the warriors, 

 and to this all useful purposes were sacrificed ; the English 

 horses were none the better for their experience, though they 

 must frequently have felt the superiority of the oriental breed 

 in actual warfare." 



It would not be easy to find, in one so short passage, so 

 many palpable mistakes. In the first place, it is not true that 

 the crusades led, in no respect, to the amelioration of the Eng- 

 lish breed of horses, much less that no fine oriental horses were 

 imported — though, probably, it is quite true, that they were 

 not imported for the 'purpose of improving the hreed ; the sys- 

 tem of interbreeding animals being a matter, then, entirely 

 uncomprehended ; as indeed it has continued to be until a very 

 recent date. Secondly, it is not true, that " a gloomy and su- 

 perstitious fanaticism solely occupied the minds of the war- 

 riors " — such warriors, be it remembered, as Richard Coeur de 

 Lion, Philip Augustus, and, at a later date, Edward I. of Eng- 

 land — when it is patent, and distinctly so stated by "William of 

 Malmesbury, that the sciences of astronomy, arithmetic, music 

 and geometry, and the rudiments of clock-making, were im- 

 ported from the Saracens, either of Spain or of the Holy Land, 

 by the crusaders. Lastly, it is most untrue, that the crusaders 

 ever felt " the superiority of the oriental breed in actual war- 

 fare ; " for not only is it clear that the Arab horse of that, or 

 any other day, is utterly incompetent to supj)ort tlie weight of 

 the steel-sheathed men-at-arms, who, during all the feudal ages 

 constituted the real force of European armies, but it is on actual 

 record that the light cavalry of Asia and Arabia never once 

 stood the shock of the barbed chivalry of the West, while on 

 one occasion, before the walls of Jafi'a, the English Eichard, 

 with seventeen knights, " as we learn from the evidence of his 

 enemies," says Gibbon, "grasping his lance, rode furiously 

 along the front" — of sixty thousand Turkish horse — "from the 

 right to the left wing, without meeting an adversary who dared 

 to encounter his career." 

 Vol. I.— 6 



