and that fabulous turn which enables him to represent it in the most favourable points of view, acknowledges frankly that the first division of this prodigious army committed the most abominable enormities in the countries through which they passed, and that there was no kind of insolence, in justice, impurity, barbarity, and violence, of which they were not guilty.  Nothing, perhaps, in the annals of history can equal the flagitious deeds of this infernal rabble” (Ibid, note).  Few of these unhappy wretches reached the Holy Land.  “To engage in the crusade and to perish in it, were almost synonymous” (Hallam, p. 30), even for those who entered Palestine.  The loss of life was something terrible.  “We should be warranted by contemporary writers in stating the loss of the Christians alone during this period at nearly a million; but at the least computation, it must have exceeded half that number” (Ibid).  The real army, under Godfrey de Bouillon, consisted of some 80,000 well-appointed horse and foot.  But at Nice the crowd of crusaders numbered 700,000, after the great slaughter in Hungary.  Jerusalem was taken, A.D. 1099, and it was there “where their triumph was consummated, that it was stained with the most atrocious massacre; not limited to the hour of resistance, but renewed deliberately even after that famous penitential procession to the holy sepulchre, which might have calmed their ferocious dispositions if, through the misguided enthusiasm of the enterprise, it had not been rather calculated to excite them” (Ibid, p. 31).  The last crusade occurred A.D. 1270, and between the first in 1096 and the last in 1270, human lives were extinguished in numbers it is impossible to reckon, increasing ever the awful sum total of the misery lying at the foot of the blood-red cross of Christendom.

A collateral advantage accrued to the clergy through the crusades; “their wealth, continually accumulated, enabled them to become the regular purchasers of landed estates, especially in the time of the crusades, when the fiefs of the nobility were constantly in the market for sale or mortgage” (Ibid, p. 333).

The last vestiges of nominal paganism were erased in this century, and it remained only under Christian names.  Capital punishment was proclaimed against all who worshipped the old deities under their old titles, and “this dreadful severity contributed much more towards the extirpation of paganism, than the exhortations and instructions of ignorant missionaries, who were unacquainted with the true nature of the gospel, and dishonoured its pure and holy doctrines by their licentious lives and their superstitious practices” (p. 236).  Learning began to revive, as men, educated in the Arabian schools, gradually spread over Europe; thus:  “the school of Salernum, in the kingdom of Naples, was renowned above all others for the study of physic in this century, and vast numbers crowded thither from all the provinces of Europe to receive instruction in the art of healing;