brought home, and sold at extravagant prices
to churches and monasteries. More apocryphical relics, such as the wood
of the true cross, the tears of the Virgin Mary, the hems of her
garments, the toe-nails and hair of the Apostles--even the tents that
Paul had helped to manufacture--were exhibited for sale by the knavish
in Palestine, and brought back to Europe "with wondrous cost and care."
A grove of a hundred oaks would not have furnished all the wood sold in
little morsels as remnants of the true cross; and the tears of Mary, if
collected together, would have filled a cistern.

For upwards of two hundred years the pilgrims met with no impediment in
Palestine. The enlightened Haroun Al Reschid, and his more immediate
successors, encouraged the stream which brought so much wealth into
Syria, and treated the wayfarers with the utmost courtesy. The race of
Fatemite caliphs,--who, although in other respects as tolerant, were
more distressed for money, or more unscrupulous in obtaining it, than
their predecessors of the house of Abbas,--imposed a tax of a bezant
for each pilgrim that entered Jerusalem. This was a serious hardship
upon the poorer sort, who had begged their weary way across Europe, and
arrived at the bourne of all their hopes without a coin. A great outcry
was immediately raised, but still the tax was rigorously levied. The
pilgrims unable to pay were compelled to remain at the gate of the holy
city until some rich devotee arriving with his train, paid the tax and
let them in. Robert of Normandy, father of William the Conqueror, who,
in common with many other nobles of the highest rank, undertook the
pilgrimage, found on his arrival scores of pilgrims at the gate,
anxiously expecting his coming to pay the tax for them. Upon no
occasion was such a boon refused.

The sums drawn from this source were a mine of wealth to the Moslem
governors of Palestine, imposed as the tax had been at a time when
pilgrimages had become more numerous than ever. A strange idea had
taken possession of the popular mind at the close of the tenth and
commencement of the eleventh century. It was universally believed that
the end of the world was at hand; that the thousand years of the
Apocalypse were near completion, and that Jesus Christ would descend
upon Jerusalem to judge mankind. All Christendom was in commotion. A
panic terror seized upon the weak, the credulous, and the guilty, who
in those days formed more than nineteen tw