purchase
the favor of God, or to realize the attainment of pious curiosity! The
heart almost bleeds to think that our ancestors could ever have been so
visionary and misguided; that such a gloomy view of divine forgiveness
should have permeated the Middle Ages.

But the sorrows of the pious pilgrims did not end when they reached the
Holy Land. Jerusalem was then in the hands of the Turks and Saracens (or
Orientals, a general name given to the Arabian Mohammedans), who exacted
two pieces of gold from every pilgrim as the price of entering
Jerusalem, and moreover reviled and maltreated him. The Holy Sepulchre
could be approached only on the condition of defiling it.

The reports of these atrocities and cruelties at last reached the
Europeans, filling them with sympathy for the sufferers and indignation
for the persecutors. An intense hatred of Mohammedans was generated and
became universal,--a desire for vengeance, unparalleled in history.
Popes and bishops weep; barons and princes swear. Every convent and
every castle in Europe is animated with deadly resentment. Rage,
indignation, and vengeance are the passions of the hour,--all
concentrated on "the infidels," which term was the bitterest reproach
that each party could inflict on the other. An infidel was accursed of
God, and was consigned to human wrath. And the Mohammedans had the same
hatred of Christians that Christians had of Mohammedans. In the eyes of
each their enemies were infidels; and they were enemies because they
were regarded as infidels.

Such a state of feeling in both Europe and Asia could not but produce an
outbreak,--a spark only was needed to kindle a conflagration. That spark
was kindled when Peter of Amiens, a returned hermit, aroused the martial
nations to a bloody war on these enemies of God and man. He was a
mean-looking man, with neglected beard and disordered dress. He had no
genius, nor learning, nor political position. He was a mere fanatic,
fierce, furious with ungovernable rage. But he impersonated the leading
idea of the age,--hatred of "the infidels," as the Mohammedans were
called. And therefore his voice was heard. The Pope used him as a tool.
Two centuries later he could not have made himself a passing wonder. But
he is the means of stirring up the indignation of Europe into a blazing
flame. He itinerates France and Italy, exposing the wrongs of the
Christians and the cruelties of the Saracens,--the obstruction placed in
the way o