Jerusalem to celebrate Easter, the priests of the church rubbed balsam-oil upon the iron chain which held up the lamp over the tomb of Christ, and afterwards set fire, from the roof, to the end of the chain; the fire stole down to the wick of the lamp and lighted it; then they shouted with admiration, as if fire from heaven had come down upon the tomb, and they glorified their faith.  Hakem ordered the instant demolition of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and it was accordingly demolished.  Another time a dead dog had been laid at the door of a mosque; and the multitude accused the Christians of this insult.  Hakem ordered them all to be put to death.  The soldiers were preparing to execute the order when a young Christian said to his friends, “It were too grievous that the whole Church should perish; it were better that one should die for all; only promise to bless my memory year by year.”  He proclaimed himself alone to blame for the insult, and was accordingly alone put to death.  It is from this story of the historian William of Tyre, that Tasso, in his Jerusalem Delivered, has drawn the admirable episode of Olindo and Sophronia; a fine example, and not the only one, of an act of tyranny and an act of virtue inspiring a great poet with the idea of a masterpiece.  “All the deeds of Hakem were without motive,” says the Arab historian Makrisi, “and the dreams suggested to him by his frenzy are incapable of reasonable interpretation.”

These and many other similar stories reached the West, spread amongst the Christian people and roused them to pity for their brethren in the East and to wrath against the oppressors.  And it was at a critical period, in the midst of the pious alarms and desires of atonement excited by the expectation of the end of the world a thousand years after the coming of the Lord, that the Christian population saw this way opened for purchasing remission of their sins by delivering other Christians from suffering, and by avenging the wrongs of their creed.  On all sides arose challenges and appeals to the warlike ardor of the faithful.  The greatest mind of the age, Gerbert, who had become Pope Sylvester II., constituted himself interpreter of the popular feeling.  He wrote, in the name of the Church of Jerusalem, a letter addressed to the universal Church:  “To work, then, soldier of Christ!  Be our standard-bearer and our champion!  And if with arms thou canst not do so, aid us with thy words, thy wealth.  What is it, pray, that thou givest, and to whom, pray, dost thou give?  Of thine abundance thou givest a small matter, and thou givest to Him who hath freely given thee all thou possessest; but He will not accept freely that which thou shalt give; for he will multiply thine offering and will pay it back to thee hereafter.”  Some years after Gerbert, another great mind, the greatest among the popes of the middle ages, Gregory VII., proclaimed an expedition, at the head of which he would place himself, to go and deliver Jerusalem and the Christians of the East from the insults and the tyranny of the infidels.