ships brought from Asia to Europe were not only introduced, but they were cultivated.  New fruits and vegetables were raised by European husbandmen.  Plum-trees were brought from Damascus and sugar-cane from Tripoli.  Silk fabrics, formerly confined to Constantinople and the East, were woven in Italian and French villages.  The Venetians obtained from Tyrians the art of making glass.  The Greek fire suggested gunpowder.  Architecture received an immense impulse:  the churches became less sombre and heavy, and more graceful and beautiful.  Even the idea of the arch, some think, came from the East.  The domes and minarets of Venice were borrowed from Constantinople.  The ornaments of Byzantine churches and palaces were brought to Europe.  The horses of Lysippus, carried from Greece to Rome, and from Rome to Constantinople, at last surmounted the palace of the Doges.  Houses became more comfortable, churches more beautiful, and palaces more splendid.  Even manners improved, and intercourse became more polished.  Chivalry borrowed many of its courtesies from the East.  There were new refinements in the arts of cookery as well as of society.  Literature itself received a new impulse, as well as science.  It was from Constantinople that Europe received the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, in the language in which it was written, instead of translations through the Arabic.  Greek scholars came to Italy to introduce their unrivalled literature; and after Grecian literature came Grecian art.  The study of Greek philosophy gave a new stimulus to human inquiry, and students flocked to the universities.  They went to Bologna to study Roman law, as well as to Paris to study the Scholastic philosophy.

Thus the germs of a new civilization were scattered over Europe.  It so happened that at the close of the Crusades civilization had increased in every country of Europe, in spite of the losses they had sustained.  Delusions were dispelled, and greater liberality of mind was manifest.  The world opened up towards the East, and was larger than was before supposed.  “Europe and Asia had been brought together and recognized each other.”  Inventions and discoveries succeeded the new scope for energies which the Crusades opened.  The ships which had carried the crusaders to Asia were now used to explore new coasts and harbors.  Navigators learned to be bolder.  A navigator of Genoa—­a city made by the commerce which the Crusades necessitated—­crosses the Atlantic Ocean.  As the magnetic needle, which a Venetian traveller brought from Asia, gave a new direction to commerce, so the new stimulus to learning which the Grecian philosophy effected led to the necessity of an easier form of writing; and printing appeared.  With the shock which feudalism received from the Crusades, central power was once more wielded by kings, and standing armies supplanted the feudal.  The crusaders must have learned something from their mistakes; and military science was revived.  There is scarcely an element