THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES

As the English gradually became a nation, they left the numberless Saxon saints in a sense behind them, passed over by comparison not only the sanctity of Edward but the solid fame of Alfred, and invoked a half mythical hero, striving in an eastern desert against an impossible monster.

That transition and that symbol stand for the Crusades. Christendom was nearly one nation, and the Front was the Holy Land. The Crusades were, for all thoughtful Europeans, things of the highest statesmanship and the purest public spirit.

Some six hundred years after Christianity sprang up in the East and swept westwards, another great faith arose in almost the same eastern. We call it Islam, or the creed of the Moslems.

Its highest motive[Pg 62] was a hatred of idols, and in its view Incarnation was itself an idolatry. The two things it persecuted were the idea of God being made flesh and of His being afterwards made wood or stone.

It was an element in this sublime and yet sinister simplicity of Islam that it knew no boundaries. Its very home was homeless. For it was born in a sandy waste among nomads, and it went everywhere because it came from nowhere.

The mystery of locality, with all its hold on the human heart, was as much present in the most ethereal things of Christendom as it was absent from the most practical things of Islam. England would derive a thing from France, France from Italy, Italy from Greece, Greece from Palestine, Palestine from Paradise.

Now, the effect of this adventure against a[Pg 66] mighty and mysterious enemy was simply enormous in the transformation of England, as of all the nations that were developing side by side with England.

Chivalry might be called the baptism of Feudalism. To the comparative grace of the new period belongs, of course, that considerable cultus of the dignity of woman.

But it is a huge historical error to suppose that the Crusades concerned only that crust of society for which heraldry was an art and chivalry an etiquette. The First Crusade especially was much more an unanimous popular rising than most that are called riots and revolutions. The Guilds, the great democratic systems of the time, often owed their increasing power to corporate fighting for the Cross

It is impossible to state verbally this very vivid atmosphere; but it was an atmosphere as well as an adventure. The Holy Land was much nearer to a plain man's house than Westminster.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 755