Edward The

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III EDWARD AS A CRUSADER 1268-1272 The great age of crusading had long passed away. It was no longer possible, as it had been two hundred years before, for a crusading prince to win with his sword a fair Eastern province. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem had never recovered the deadly blows inflicted...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III EDWARD AS A CRUSADER 1268-1272 The great age of crusading had long passed away. It was no longer possible, as it had been two hundred years before, for a crusading prince to win with his sword a fair Eastern province. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem had never recovered the deadly blows inflicted upon it by Saladin. The hosts of Islam had been long united, and opposed to the pious fury of the Christians as ardent a zeal, as devoted a bravery, and a far greater knowledge of the country and of the means of warfare appropriate to it. Yet the crusading impulse had by no means died away. All through the thirteenth century it remained the highest ideal of Christian knighthood to renounce all conflict with fellow-Christians and fight the good fight of the Holy Cross against the blasphemous infidels who profaned the sepulchre of the Lord. The great Military Orders, whose establishments were scattered throughout Christendom, provided a constant stream of ardent and devoted recruits, and kept up a very necessary permanent element in the crusading forces. The greatest of the popes, the holiest of the saints, themightiest of the kings of the greatest ago of mediaeval Christendom were unwearied in their efforts to keep alive the holy war. But the growing complications of Western politics kept princes at home, though the constant degeneracy of the Eastern Christians necessitated a continual stream of new pilgrims if any effectual resistance were to be made to the ever - increasing aggressions of Islam. The result was that the thirteenth- century Crusades assume a character of their own. They are no longer, as they once had been, the united effort of Western Europe. They are rather the results of individual piety and enterprise, a constant stream of petty expeditions rather than...