the result was the formation of a new ideal which for a long period
mainly governed the imagination of Christendom.

It for a time absorbed, eclipsed, and transformed all purely national
ideals. No poet was ever more intensely English in his character and
sympathies than Chaucer, and he wrote when the dazzling glories of
Crecy and Poitiers were still very recent. Yet it is not on these
fields, but in the long wars with the Moslems, that his pattern knight
had won his renown. The military expeditions of Charlemagne were
directed almost exclusively against the Saxons and against Slavonic
tribes. With the Spanish Mohammedans he came but very slightly in
contact. He made in person but one expedition against them, and that
expedition was both insignificant and unsuccessful. But in the
Karlovingian romances, which were written when the crusading
enthusiasm was at its height, the figure of the great emperor
underwent a strange and most significant transformation. The German
wars were scarcely noticed. Charlemagne is surrounded with the special
glory that ought to have belonged to Charles Martel. He is represented
as having passed his entire life in a victorious struggle with the
Mohammedans of Europe, and is even gravely credited with a triumphant
expedition to Jerusalem. The three romances of the Crusades which are
believed to be the oldest were all written by monks, and they all make
Charlemagne their hero. Even geography was transformed by the new
enthusiasm, and old maps sometimes represent Jerusalem as the centre
of the world.

In few periods has there been so great a difference between the ideals
created by the popular imagination and the realities that are
recognised by history. Few wars have been accompanied by more cruelty,
more outrage, and more licentiousness than the Crusades or have
brought a blacker cloud of disasters in their train. Yet the idea that
inspired them was a lofty one, and they were so speedily transfigured
by the imaginations of men that in combination with the other
influences I have mentioned they created an ideal which is one of the
most beautiful in the history of the world. We may trace it clearly in
the romances of Arthur and Charlemagne and of the "Cid;" in the
"Red-Cross Knight" of Tasso and Spenser; in the old ballads which
paint so vividly the hero of chivalry, ever ready to draw his sword
for his faith and his lady-love and in the cause of the feeble and the
oppressed. The glorificati