“ For Boniface the jubilee was a real victory. The crowds that streamed to Rome showed him that men still retained their belief in the city as the sacred temple of the united world. The monster festival of reconciliation seemed to flow like a river of grace over its own past, and to wipe away the hated recollection of Celestine V, of his war with the Colonnas, and all the accusations of his enemies. In these days he could revel in a feeling of almost divine power, as scarcely any pope had been able to do before him. ”

“ The people displayed their strength and conquered. The struggle was brief, and great the slaughter of the Sicilians; but of the French there were two hundred—and two hundred fell!
Breathless, covered with blood, brandishing the plundered weapons, and proclaiming the insult and its vengeance, the insurgents rushed toward the tranquil city, "Death to the French!" they shouted, and as many as they found were put to the sword. The example, the words, the contagion of passion, in an instant aroused the whole people. ”

“ Alexander disdained to play the hero at the expense of his people, like his brother Andrew of Suzdal, who was immediately obliged to fly, abandoning his country to the vengeance of the Tartars. The Prince of Novgorod was the only prince in Russia who had kept his independence, but he knew Batu's hands could extend as far as the Ilmen. "God has subjected many peoples to me," wrote the barbarian to him: "will you alone refuse to recognize my power? If you wish to keep your land, come to me; you will see the splendor and the glory of my sway." ”

“ The King of Castile, who had taken the cross, had pretensions to the imperial crown, nor could he forget the death of his brother Frederick, immolated by Charles of Anjou. It was not only that the affairs of the empire detained the German princes and nobles; the death of young Conradin had so shocked and disgusted men's minds in Germany that no one from that country would have consented to fight under the same banners as the King of Sicily. So black a crime, committed amid the preparations for a holy war, appeared to presage great calamities. ”

“ In fact it has been not inaptly said that the rule of mediæval Europe was divided amid three powers—the emperor, the pope, and the University of Paris. Books, from which we can trace the history of the time, become as numerous as before they had been scant and vague and misleading. Thought reveals itself struggling everywhere for expression, displayed at times in the sunshine of song and rhyme and merry laughter, at times in the storms of philosophic dispute and religious persecution. ”

“ The Pope was no mere successor of Peter, the vicegerent of man. "The Roman pontiff," he wrote, "is the vicar, not of man, but of God himself." "The Lord gave Peter the rule not only of the Universal Church, but also the rule of the whole world." "The Lord Jesus Christ has set up one ruler over all things as his universal vicar, and as all things in heaven, earth, and hell bow the knee to Christ, so should all obey Christ's vicar, that there be one flock and one shepherd." "No king can reign rightly unless he devoutly serve Christ's vicar." ”

“ Never, perhaps, in history has a monopoly been so rigidly and relentlessly enforced—a monopoly which not only rested upon the nation at home, but which made bold incursions into the sovereignty of foreign states in order to smother their independent trade, or, as in Norway, utterly to stamp it out.
Of the two great avenues of trade, that indicated by the termini Bruges and Novgorod is first deserving of mention. For centuries it was practically used exclusively by merchants of the Hansa, who, moreover, were forbidden to form copartnerships with foreigners, such as Russians and Englishmen. ”

“ Nobles, old men, women, and children ran to and fro trying to save their wealth, their honor, and their lives. Knights, foot soldiers, and Venetian sailors jostled each other in a mad scramble for plunder. Threats of ill-treatment, promises of safety if wealth were disgorged, mingled with the cries of many sufferers. These "pious brigands," as Gunther aptly calls them, acted as if they had received a license to commit every crime. Sword in hand, houses and churches were pillaged. Every insult was offered to the religion of the conquered citizens. ”

“ For the moment Innocent's iron policy crushed opposition, but in adding the new hostility of the national kings and the rising nations of Europe to the old hostility of the declining empire, Innocent was entering into a perilous course of conduct, which, within a century, was to prove fatal to one of the strongest of his successors. The more political the papal authority became, the more difficult it was to uphold its prestige as the source of law, of morality, of religion. Innocent himself did not lose sight of the higher ideal because he strove so firmly after more earthly aims. ”

“ Not only was he a conqueror, a general whose consummate ability made him overthrow every barrier that must intervene between the chief of a small barbarous tribe of an obscure race and the throne of Asia, and this with a rapidity and uniform success that can only be compared to the triumphant march of Alexander, but he was far more than a conqueror. Alexander, Napoleon, and Timur were all more or less his equals in the art of war. But the colossal powers they created were merely hills of sand, that crumbled to pieces as soon as they were dead. ”

“ The imperial treasury and the arsenal were placed under guard; but with these exceptions the right to plunder was given indiscriminately to the troops and sailors. Never in Europe was a work of pillage more systematically and shamelessly carried out. Never by the army of a Christian state was there a more barbarous sack of a city than that perpetrated by these soldiers of Christ, sworn to chastity, pledged before God not to shed Christian blood, and bearing upon them the emblem of the Prince of Peace. ”

“ The citizens of Vienna caught the contagion and began to be alarmed for their safety. Seeing him almost abandoned by his German allies, and without a sufficient army to oppose his adversaries, they requested his permission to capitulate and choose a new sovereign, that they might not be involved in his ruin. Roused from his despondency by this address, Rudolph prevailed on the citizens not to desert their sovereign; he confirmed their privileges, declared Vienna an imperial city, animated them with new spirit, and obtained from them a promise to defend the ramparts to the last extremity. ”

“ The Knights Templars might begin as the humble guardians of the holy places: the Knights Hospitalers may have been the poor brothers of St. John bound to the service of the sick and helpless among the pilgrims of the cross. But in the land where they might at any time encounter a merciless or at the least a detested enemy, they were justified in bearing arms; the necessity of bearing arms involved the need of discipline; and the discipline of an enthusiastic fraternity cut off from the world and centred upon itself cannot fail to become formidable. ”

“ It is hard to see what they feared, unless it were John's possible vengeance, at some future time, for their universal readiness to welcome his rival. Not one town manned its walls, not one baron mustered his tenants and garrisoned his castles, to withstand the invader. Some, as soon as John was out of the country, openly made a truce with Philip for a year, on the understanding that if not succored by John within that time they would receive the French King as their lord; the rest stood passively looking on at the one real struggle of the war, the struggle for Château Gaillard. ”

“ The people without responded with loud acclamations and shouts of "The Republic and Liberty!" All encouraged each other to venture everything, when Roger Mastrangelo, bent on urging them on so far that all retreat should be cut off and that they might be able to control the course of events, rose and boldly thus addressed the assembly:
"Citizens! I hear daring words and solemn oaths, but I see no symptoms of action, as if the blood that has been shed were the seal of victory rather than the provocation to a long and deadly struggle. ”

“ In a country so circumstanced a wise ruler would strain every nerve to conciliate the conquered people, to strengthen himself by alliances which should be firmly maintained and by treaties which should be scrupulously kept, to weaken such states as he might fail to win over to his friendship by anticipating combinations which might bring with them fatal dangers for his power. That the history of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem presents a mournful and even ludicrous contrast to this picture it must surely be unnecessary to say. ”

“ With strict discipline, the imperial leader drove all disorderly and useless persons out of his camp; he was always the first to face every obstacle or danger, and showed himself equal to all the political or military difficulties of the expedition. The Greek empire had to be traversed first, whose Emperor, Isaac, had allied himself with Saladin; but at the sight of these formidable masses he shrank in terror from any hostile attempt, and hastened to transport the German army across into Asia Minor. ”

“ At length the Mussulman army, now emboldened by the inaction of the Christians, presented itself several times on the plain. Nothing would have been more easy than to attack and conquer it; but Louis had resolved to act upon the defensive, and to await the arrival of the King of Sicily, before beginning the war—a fatal resolution, which ruined everything. The Sicilian monarch, who had advised this ill-starred expedition, was destined to complete, by his delays, the evil he had begun by his counsels. ”

“ This first nucleus of the representatives of the nation being thus assembled in Palermo, they became imbued with the same valor which in one short night had raised a popular tumult to the dignity of a revolution. They were further encouraged by the manly energy of the people, who, mingled with insurgents from the surrounding towns, traversed the city to and fro, eagerly relating to one another the outrages they had suffered, and crying aloud, "Death rather than the yoke of the French!" ”

“ The affair of the crusade was, as we shall see, ever his most pressing care, and it was his bitterest grief that all his efforts to rouse the Christian world for the recovery of Jerusalem fell on deaf ears. He was strenuous in upholding orthodoxy against the daring heretics of Southern France. He was sympathetic and considerate to great religious teachers, like Francis and Dominic, from whose work he had the wisdom to anticipate the revival of the inner life of the Church. As many-sided as strong, and successful as he was strong, Innocent III represents it worthily and adequately. ”

“ It seemed as if a stern fate had resolved to give the Christian world a distant view of the possibility of victory; the great Emperor might have secured it, but the generation which had not understood him was doomed to misery and defeat. A second winter, with the same fearful additions of hunger and sickness, came upon the camp before Ptolemais, and the measure of misfortune was filled by renewed and bitter quarrels among the Frankish princes. King Guy was as incompetent as ever, and so utterly mismanaged the Christian cause that the marquis Conrad of Montferrat indignantly opposed him. ”

“ A wise man would have handed over the empire to any who dared defend it. Baldwin was not a wise man. He proceeded to sell the remaining lands of Courtenay and the marquisate of Namur, and by this and other expedients managed to return with an army of thirty thousand men. What would not Baldwin I, or Henry his uncle, or John de Brienne his father-in-law have been able to effect with an army of thirty thousand soldiers of the West? But Baldwin the Incapable did next to nothing.
By this time the strip of country remaining to the Emperor was only that immediately surrounding the city. ”