578 



CRUSADES. 



Crusade?, of the Bake of Austria and the King of Hungary, made 

 ■■* a descent on Egypt with 100,01)0 men, from a hope 

 that, by destroying the power of its sultan (brother to 

 Saladin) at the seat of government, the distant depen- 

 dency of Jerusalem would fall of course. He was at 

 first successful, and after a long siege took Damietta. 

 But a papal legate insisted on superseding him in the 

 command ; and during the delays created by this dis- 

 pute, his army- was surrounded by the inundation of 

 ihe Nile, and he was forced to purchase a retreat by 

 the cession of his conquests, and the surrender of his 

 person as a hostage. Another of the western emperors 

 now became the leader, and renewed the hopes of the 

 Crusaders ; but this prince, who engaged in the enterprise 

 entirely from policy, avoided the hazards of war, and 

 got possession of Jerusalem by a treaty with the sultan. 

 It did not, however, remain long in possession of the 

 Christians, for Judea (1244) was overrun by the barba- 

 rous Tartars, who fled before the irruption of Jengis, and 

 jts maritime towns were all that the crusaders retained. 



From this uniform round of enterprise and disaster, 

 which renders the narrative of one crusade almost a 

 transcript from that of another, the zeal for renewing 

 them had begun to languish, when a monarch appear- 

 ed on the throne of France, in whom the superstition 

 of the age was superadded to every amiable and heroic 

 virtue. This was Louis IX. who, after contenting 

 himself for some time with the proper duties of his 

 office, and labouring for the external security and in- 

 ternal improvement of his kingdom, was at length per- 

 suaded that he had been warned by heaven, in a dream, 

 to assume the cross. Resisting, therefore, the entrea- 

 ties of his family and ministers, and embarking with 

 an immense force in the ports of the Mediterranean, 

 he first touched at Cyprus, and afterwards land- 

 ed in Egypt. The sultan proposed a treaty, which 

 Louis rejected ; and after losing one half of his army 

 by sickness, attacked the Saracens with the remainder, 

 but was defeated and taken, near Massoura, in 1250. 

 During his captivity he was treated with the most ge- 

 nerous respect ; and having rmsomed himself and his 

 followers, he removed from Egypt to Palestine, where 

 he remained for some years, and then returned to his 

 own dominions with the sanguine hope of equipping 

 a new expedition. After his arrival, he again devoted 

 himself to the duties of government, and, by the insti- 

 tution of courts of justice, the encouragement of let- 

 ters, and a general attention to the happiness and im- 

 provement of his subjects, performed a service, and 

 earned a glory, far superior to those which he had re- 

 linquished, but which he still unfortunately preferred. 

 His piety was ardent and sincere ; but being misled 

 by directors who were either deceitful, or themselves 

 deceived by the prevailing absurdities of opinion, he 

 never ceased to pant after a new crusade. 



At length, unable to resist his impatience, he once 

 more sacrificed a real to an imaginary duty, and (1270) 

 embarked with an armament from the south ports of 

 the kingdom. His brother, at that time king of Sicily, 

 whose crafty ambition was equal to the unsuspecting 

 sincerity of Louis, seized the opportunity of turning 

 the spiritual zeal of the crusaders to his own temporal 

 advantage. He pretended to have some pecuniary 

 claims against the king of Tunis, whose dominions he 

 had a secret wish to acquire, and by persuading Loui3 

 that he had a fair chance of converting, or compelling 

 that prince to the profession of Christianity, the pious 

 warrior was seduced to make the attempt. Having ac- 

 cordingly landed his army, it encamped near the ruins 



of Carthage, but was immediately surrounded and be- Crusades. 

 sieged by the Moors. A contagious distemper attacked """" ~Y* m ~' 

 his troops : he caught it himself, and died in the 55th 

 year of his age. This prince was among the last, and 

 was certainly the most to be regretted, of all the vic- 

 tims to crusading fanaticism. Had he lived m a more 

 enlightened age, his personal virtues would have been 

 a blessing to the world, whose misery was augment- 

 ed by their misdirection. After his death, his brother 

 made peace with the Tunisians, and the skeleton of his 

 army returned to France. Long before the age of St 

 Louis, the appetite for holy wars had declined through- 

 out Europe, and the small number of recruits, who 

 arrived in Palestine, had induced the Christian settlers 

 to intermarry with their Moslem neighbours. The 

 descendants of the crusaders had consequently degene- 

 rated into a mixed race, and had almost forgot their 

 slight pretensions to an European origin. They re- 

 tained only Tyre, and Acre or Ptolemais ; the latter of 

 which being taken by Melecseraph, Sultan of Egypt, 

 in 1291, the former also surrendered. Their surviving 

 inhabitants were blended with the Mohammedan popu- 

 lation of Syria, and not a vestige of the Cliristian con- 

 quest remained. 



Such is a hasty sketch of these famous expeditions, 

 which, although to us rendered more.interesting by our 

 descent from their authors, exhibit all the disgusting 

 features of the other religious wars, which deform the 

 history of mankind, and depress our triumph in the ex- 

 cellence of human reason. In each, we find the same 

 ignorance in the popular mind ; the same direction of 

 it to a trifling object ; the same exaggeration of some 

 imaginary evil ; the same devotion of every comfort for 

 its redress ; and the same domination of a crafty priest- 

 hood, seeking to augment its consequence and authori- 

 ty, by engaging the people in measures of which it was 

 the sole projector and guide. In the crusades, there- 

 fore, the historian sees little that is new, and while re- 

 lating them, only traces afresh a part of the circle which 

 human folly is destined to describe ; but to the philo- 

 sopher, who follows out their consequences, no subject 

 can be richer in materials for speculation. The evils 

 which they created were immediate and obvious ; the 

 advantages were more remote, and require demon- 

 stration to claim our assent. The crusades caused a 

 waste of life and labour beyond example, without the 

 temptation of any prospective return : they, for two 

 centuries, afflicted almost every family in Europe with 

 the most painful privations ,• and they alienated the at- 

 tention of its inhabitants from the improvement or en- 

 joyment of their natural blessings. Agriculture and 

 commerce, arts and education, were neglected by every 

 rank, under a general distemper of the imagination, 

 which represented happiness to consist in the possession 

 of a distant land : and to the attainment of this object, 

 which was to give their value to all the rest, they sacri- 

 ficed the flower of successive generations, and the 

 strength and ornament of their respective countries. 

 Yet with all these pernicious effects, the philosopher 

 will find in the crusades, if not the origin, at least the 

 chief auxiliary cause of a total change in the aspect of 

 society ; for though the tide of civilization, in which a 

 return from its lowest depression was scarcely percep- 

 tible, might of itself have continued to rise, its motion 

 would have been slow and feeble, but for an impulse 

 undesignedly communicated by these extraordinary ex- 

 peditions. We shall therefore subjoin a few remarks 

 on the measure in which they affected, 1st, the politi- 



