heir
virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honour they acquired for
themselves, and the great services they rendered to Christianity. In
the following pages we shall ransack the stores of both, to discover
the true spirit that animated the motley multitude who took up arms in
the service of the Cross, leaving history to vouch for facts, but not
disdaining the aid of contemporary poetry and romance to throw light
upon feelings, motives, and opinions.

In order to understand thoroughly the state of public feeling in Europe
at the time when Peter the Hermit preached the holy war, it will be
necessary to go back for many years anterior to that event. We must
make acquaintance with the pilgrims of the eighth, ninth, and tenth
centuries, and learn the tales they told of the dangers they had
passed, and the wonders they had seen. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land
seem at first to have been undertaken by converted Jews, and by
Christian devotees of lively imagination, pining with a natural
curiosity to visit the scenes which of all others were most interesting
in their eyes. The pious and the impious alike flocked to
Jerusalem,--the one class to feast their sight on the scenes hallowed
by the life and sufferings of their Lord, and the other, because it
soon became a generally received opinion, that such a pilgrimage was
sufficient to rub off the long score of sins, however atrocious.
Another and very numerous class of pilgrims were the idle and roving,
who visited Palestine then as the moderns visit Italy or Switzerland
now, because it was the fashion, and because they might please their
vanity by retailing, on their return, the adventures they had met with.
But the really pious formed the great majority. Every year their
numbers increased, until at last they became so numerous as to be
called the "armies of the Lord." Full of enthusiasm, they set the
danger and difficulty of the way at defiance, and lingered with holy
rapture on every scene described in the Evangelists. To them it was
bliss indeed to drink the clear waters of the Jordan, or be baptized in
the same stream where John had baptized the Saviour. They wandered with
awe and pleasure in the purlieus of the Temple, on the solemn Mount of
Olives, or the awful Calvary, where a God had bled for sinful men. To
these pilgrims every object was precious. Relics were eagerly sought
after; flagons of water from Jordan, or paniers of mould from the hill
of the Crucifixion, were