Various

“ For a thousand years, from the Hegira in 622 to the siege of Vienna in 1683, the peril of a Mahommedan conquest of Europe was almost continually present. From this point of view, the Crusades appear as a reaction of the West against the pressure of the East—a reaction which carried the West into the East, and founded a Latin and Christian kingdom on the shores of Asia. They protected Europe from the new revival of Mahommedanism under the Turks; they gave it a time of rest in which the Western civilization of the middle ages developed. ”

“ But it would be a mistake to regard the Crusades (as it would be a mistake to regard the Carolingian empire) as a pure creation of the Church, or as merely due to the policy of a theocracy directing men to the holy war which is the only war possible for a theocracy. It would be almost truer, though only half the truth, to say that the clergy gave the name of Crusade to sanctify interests and ambitions which, while set on other ends than those of the Church, happened to coincide in their choice of means. ”

“ But the visions of the scryer often endure for a considerable time. He or she may put the glass down and converse, and may find the picture still there when the ball is taken up again. New figures may join the figure first seen, as when one enters a room. In these respects, and in the awakeness of the scryer, crystal pictures differ from hypnagogic illusions. In other ways the experiences coincide, the pictures are either fanciful, like illustrations of some unread history or romance, or are revivals of remembered places and faces. ”

“ The special form of government was not the important point, but its possibility and its acceptability. The great problem was to found a stable government, an authority to keep order. If every man should fight for the best form of government the state would come to desolation. He reproached the soldiers for their insubordination against their officers, and the army for its rebellion against the parliament. He would lay hold of anything “if it had but the force of authority,” rather than have none. Cromwell’s influence prevailed and these extreme proposals were laid aside. ”

“ But the strength of the kingdom lay less perhaps in the army than in the magnificent fortresses which the nobility, and especially the two orders, had built; and the most visible relic of the crusades to-day is the towering ruins of a fortress like Krak (Kerak) des Chevaliers, the fortress of the Knights of St John in the principality of Tripoli. These fortresses, garrisoned not by the king, as in Norman England, but by their possessors, would only strengthen the power of the feudatories, and help to dissipate the kingdom into a number of local units. ”

“ It is not so much that the West came into contact with a particular civilization in the East, or borrowed from that civilization; it is simply that the West came into contact with something unlike itself, yet in many ways as high as, if not higher than, itself. The spirit of Nathan der Weise may not have been exactly the spirit engendered by the Crusades; and yet it is not without reason that Lessing stages the fable which teaches toleration in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. ”

“ If we seek the peculiar and definite results of the Crusades, we must turn to narrower issues. In the first place, the Crusades represent the attempt of a feudal system, bound under the law of primogeniture to dispose of its younger sons. They are attempts at feudal colonization; and as such they resulted in a number of colonies—the kingdom of Jerusalem, the kingdom of Cyprus, the Latin empire of Constantinople. ”

“ The Crusade was now at last answered by the counter-Crusade—the jihad; for though for many years past Saladin had, in his attempt to acquire all the inheritance of Nureddin, left Palestine unmenaced and intact, his ultimate aim was always the holy war and the recovery of Jerusalem. The acquisition of Aleppo could only make that supreme object more readily attainable; and so Saladin had spent his time in acquiring Aleppo, but only in order that he might ultimately “attain the goal of his desires, and set the mosque of Asha free, to which Allah once led in the night his servant Mahomet.” ”

“ He had appealed for reinforcements to recover Asia Minor; he received hundreds of thousands of troops, independent of him, and intending to conquer Jerusalem for themselves, though they might incidentally recover Asia Minor for the Eastern empire on their way. Alexius may almost be compared to a magician, who has uttered a charm to summon a ministering spirit, and is surrounded on the instant by legions of demons. In truth the appeal of Alexius had set free forces in the West which were independent of, and even ultimately hostile to, the interests of the Eastern empire. ”

“ In the 13th century it became necessary for the legists to codify, as it were, the unwritten law, because the upheavals of the times necessitated the fixing of some rules in writing, and especially because it was necessary to oppose a definite custom of the kingdom to Frederick II., who sought, as king of Jerusalem, to take advantage of the want of a written law, to substitute his own conceptions of law in the teeth of the high court. ”

“ Their sideboards were covered with the copper and silver work of Eastern smiths and the confectioneries of Damascus. They dressed in flowing robes of silk, and their women wore oriental gauzes covered with sequins. Into these divans where figures of this kind moved to the music of Saracen instruments, there entered an inevitable voluptuousness and corruption of manners. The hardships of war and the excesses of peace shortened the lives of the men; the kingdom of Jerusalem had eleven kings within a century. While the men died, the women, living in comparative indolence, lived longer lives. ”

“ The ultimate aim of crystallographic research is to determine the internal structure of crystals from both physical and chemical data. The problem is essentially twofold: in the first place it is necessary to formulate a theory as to the disposition of the molecules, which conforms with the observed types of symmetry—this is really a mathematical problem; in the second place, it is necessary to determine the orientation of the atoms (or groups of atoms) composing the molecules with regard to the crystal axes—this involves a knowledge of the atomic structure of the molecule. ”

“ In particular that conception which regarded “ambition” as the guiding motive in his career has been dispelled by a more intimate and accurate knowledge of his life; this shows him to have been very little the creator of his own career, which was largely the result of circumstances outside his control, the influence of past events and of the actions of others, the pressure of the national will, the natural superiority of his own genius. “A man never mounts so high,” Cromwell said to the French ambassador in 1647, “as when he does not know where he is going.” ”

“ But still worse for the Latins was the capture of Jerusalem by the Seljukian Turks in 1071. Without being intolerant, the Turks were a rougher and ruder race than the Arabs of Egypt whom they displaced; while the wars between the Fatimites of Egypt and the Abbasids of Bagdad, whose cause was represented by the Seljuks, made Syria (one of the natural battle-grounds of history) into a troubled and unquiet region. The native Christians suffered; the pilgrims of the West found their way made still more difficult, and that at a time when greater numbers than ever were thronging to the East. ”

“ No wonder that Bohemund flung himself in revenge on the Eastern empire in 1108—only, however, to meet with a humiliating defeat at Durazzo.
Thus it was that Baldwin waxed while Bohemund waned. The growth of Baldwin’s kingdom, as it was suggested above, owed more to the interests of Italian traders than it did to crusading zeal. In 1100, indeed, it might appear that a new Crusade from the West, which the capture of Antioch in 1098 had begun, and the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 had finally set in motion, was destined to achieve great things for the nascent kingdom. ”

“ There were medieval Baedekers in abundance for the use of the annual flow of tourists, who were carried every Easter by the vessels of the Italian towns or of the Orders to visit the Holy Land and to bathe in Jordan, to gather palms, and to see the miracle of fire at the Sepulchre.
Colonization, trade, geography—these then are three things closely connected with the history of the Crusades. The development of the art of war, and the growth of a systematic taxation, are two debts which medieval Europe also owed to the Crusades. ”

“ Many of the larger species of Crustacea are used as food by man, the most valuable being the lobster, which is caught in large quantities on both sides of the North Atlantic. Perhaps the most important of all Crustacea, however, with respect to the part which they play in the economy of nature, are the minute pelagic Copepoda, of which incalculable myriads form an important constituent of the “plankton” in all the seas of the globe. It is on the plankton that a great part of the higher animal life of the sea ultimately depends for food. ”

“ It is indeed true that to thousands the hope of acquiring spiritual merit must have been a great motive; it is also true, as the records of crusading sermons show, that there was a strong element of “revivalism” in the Crusades, and that thousands were hurried into taking the cross by a gust of that uncontrollable enthusiasm which is excited by revivalist meetings to-day. But it must also be admitted that there were motives of this world to attract the masses to the Crusades. Famine and pestilence at home drove men to emigrate hopefully to the golden East. ”

“ An important consequence of the law of rational intercepts is the arrangement of the faces of a crystal in zones. All faces, whether they belong to one or more simple forms, which intersect in parallel edges are said to lie in the same zone. A line drawn through the centre O of the crystal parallel to these edges is called a zone-axis, and a plane perpendicular to this axis is called a zone-plane. On a cube, for example, there are three zones each containing four faces, the zone-axes being coincident with the three tetrad axes of symmetry. ”

“ Yet the principality of Godfrey was destined to higher things than that of Bohemund. Jerusalem, like Rome, had the shadow of a mighty name to lend prestige to its ruler; and as residence in Rome was one great reason of the strength of the medieval papacy, so was 530 residence in Jerusalem a reason for the ultimate supremacy of the Lotharingian kings. Jerusalem attracted the flow of pilgrims from the West as Antioch never could; and though the great majority of the pilgrims were only birds of passage, there were always many who stayed in the East. ”

“ In Germany a child from Cologne, named Nicolas, gathered some 20,000 young crusaders by the like promises, and led them into Italy. Stephen’s army was kidnapped by slave-dealers and sold into Egypt; while Nicolas’s expedition left nothing behind it but an after-echo in the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. But for Innocent these outbursts of the revivalist element, which always accompanied the Crusades, had their moral: “the very children put us to shame,” he wrote; “while we sleep they go forth gladly to conquer the Holy Land.” ”

“ In a simpler and more immediate sense, the capture of Constantinople was detrimental to the movement from which it sprang. The precarious empire which had been founded in 1204 drained away all the vigorous adventurers of the West for its support for many years to come, and the Holy Land was starved to feed a land less holy, but equally greedy of men.45 No basis for the Crusades was ever to be found in the Latin empire of the East ”

“ The creative thought of the middle ages is clerical thought. It is the Church which creates the Carolingian empire, because the clergy thinks in terms of empire. It is the Church which creates the First Crusade, because the clergy believes in penitentiary pilgrimages, and the war against the Seljuks can be turned into a pilgrimage to the Sepulchre; because, again, it wishes to direct the fighting instinct of the laity, and the consecrating name of Jerusalem provides an unimpeachable channel ”

“ By considering the atoms instead of the centres of gravity of the molecules, Sohncke (Zeits. Kryst. Min., 1888, 14, p. 431) has generalized his theory, and propounded the structure of a crystal in the following terms: “A crystal consists of a finite number of interpenetrating regular point-systems, which all possess like and like-directed coincidence movements. Each separate point-system is occupied by similar material particles, but these may be different for the different interpenetrating partial systems which form the complex system.” ”

“ Even Prutz, in his Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzzüge, over-estimates the influence of the Crusades as a chapter in the history of civilization. He depreciates unduly the Western civilization of the early middle ages, and exalts the civilization of the Arabs; and starting from these two premises, he concludes that modern civilization is the offspring of the Crusades, which first brought East and West together. ”