Amid all the distractions of western politics, Innocent III ardently strove to revive the crusading spirit.  He never succeeded in raising all Europe, as several of his predecessors had done.  But after great efforts, and the eloquent preaching of Fulk of Neuilly he stirred up a fair amount of enthusiasm for the crusading cause, and, in 1204, a considerable crusading army, mainly French, mustered at Venice.  It was the bitterest disappointment of Innocent’s life that the Fourth Crusade never reached Palestine, but was diverted to the conquest of the Greek empire.  Yet the establishment of a Catholic Latin empire at Constantinople, at the expense of the Greek schismatics, was no small triumph.  Not disheartened by his first failure, Innocent still urged upon Europe the need of the holy war.  If no expedition against the Saracens of Syria marked the result of his efforts, his pontificate saw the extension of the crusading movement to other lands.  Innocent preached the crusade against the Moors of Spain, and rejoiced in the news of the momentous victory of the Christians at Navas de Tolosa.  He saw the beginnings of a fresh crusade against the obstinate heathen on the eastern shores of the Baltic.

But all these crusades were against pagans and infidels.  Innocent made a much greater new departure when he proclaimed the first crusade directed against a Christian land.  The Albigensian crusade succeeded in destroying the most dangerous and widespread popular heresy that Christianity had witnessed since the fall of the Roman Empire, and Innocent rejoiced that his times saw the Church purged of its worst blemish.  But in extending the benefits of a crusade to Christians fighting against Christians, he handed on a precedent which was soon fatally abused by his successors.  In crushing out the young national life of Southern France the papacy again set a people against itself.  The denunciations of the German Minnesinger were reechoed in the complaints of the last of the Troubadours.  Rome had ceased to do harm to Turks and Saracens, but had stirred up Christians to war against fellow-Christians.  God and his saints abandon the greedy, the strife-loving, the unjust worldly Church.  The picture is darkly colored by a partisan, but in every triumph of Innocent there lay the shadow of future trouble.

Crusades, even against heretics and infidels, are the work of earthly force rather than of spiritual influence.  It was to build up the great outward corporation of the Church that all these labors of Innocent mainly tended.  Even his additions to the canon law, his reforms of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, dealt with the external rather than the internal life of the Church.  The criticism of James of Vitry, that the Roman curia was so busy in secular affairs that it hardly turned a thought to spiritual things, is clearly applicable to much of Innocent’s activity.  But the many-sided Pope did not ignore the religious wants of the Church.  His crusade