entieths of the population.
Forsaking their homes, kindred, and occupation, they crowded to
Jerusalem to await the coming of the Lord, lightened, as they imagined,
of a load of sin by their weary pilgrimage. To increase the panic, the
stars were observed to fall from heaven, earthquakes to shake the land,
and violent hurricanes to blow down the forests. All these, and more
especially the meteoric phenomena, were looked upon as the forerunners
of the approaching judgments. Not a meteor shot athwart the horizon
that did not fill a district with alarm, and send away to Jerusalem a
score of pilgrims, with staff in hand and wallet on their back, praying
as they went for the remission of their sins. Men, women, and even
children, trudged in droves to the holy city, in expectation of the day
when the heavens would open, and the Son of God descend in his glory.
This extraordinary delusion, while it augmented the numbers, increased
also the hardships of the pilgrims. Beggars became so numerous on all
the highways between the west of Europe and Constantinople that the
monks, the great alms-givers upon these occasions, would have brought
starvation within sight of their own doors, if they had not economized
their resources, and left the devotees to shift for themselves as they
could. Hundreds of them were glad to subsist upon the berries that
ripened by the road, who, before this great flux, might have shared the
bread and flesh of the monasteries.

But this was not the greatest of their difficulties. On their arrival
in Jerusalem they found that a sterner race had obtained possession of
the Holy Land. The caliphs of Bagdad had been succeeded by the harsh
Turks of the race of Seljook, who looked upon the pilgrims with
contempt and aversion. The Turks of the eleventh century were more
ferocious and less scrupulous than the Saracens of the tenth. They were
annoyed at the immense number of pilgrims who overran the country, and
still more so because they showed no intention of quitting it. The
hourly expectation of the last judgment kept them waiting; and the
Turks, apprehensive of being at last driven from the soil by the swarms
that were still arriving, heaped up difficulties in their way.
Persecution of every kind awaited them. They were plundered, and beaten
with stripes, and kept in suspense for months at the gates of
Jerusalem, unable to pay the golden bezant that was to facilitate their
entrance.

When the first epidemic ter