Maimbourg, notwithstanding his immoderate zeal for the holy war, and
that fabulous turn which enables him to represent it in the most
favourable points of view, acknowledges frankly that the first division
of this prodigious army committed the most abominable enormities in the
countries through which they passed, and that there was no kind of
insolence, in justice, impurity, barbarity, and violence, of which they
were not guilty. Nothing, perhaps, in the annals of history can equal
the flagitious deeds of this infernal rabble" (Ibid, note). Few of these
unhappy wretches reached the Holy Land. "To engage in the crusade and to
perish in it, were almost synonymous" (Hallam, p. 30), even for those
who entered Palestine. The loss of life was something terrible. "We
should be warranted by contemporary writers in stating the loss of the
Christians alone during this period at nearly a million; but at the
least computation, it must have exceeded half that number" (Ibid). The
real army, under Godfrey de Bouillon, consisted of some 80,000
well-appointed horse and foot. But at Nice the crowd of crusaders
numbered 700,000, after the great slaughter in Hungary. Jerusalem was
taken, A.D. 1099, and it was there "where their triumph was consummated,
that it was stained with the most atrocious massacre; not limited to the
hour of resistance, but renewed deliberately even after that famous
penitential procession to the holy sepulchre, which might have calmed
their ferocious dispositions if, through the misguided enthusiasm of the
enterprise, it had not been rather calculated to excite them" (Ibid, p.
31). The last crusade occurred A.D. 1270, and between the first in 1096
and the last in 1270, human lives were extinguished in numbers it is
impossible to reckon, increasing ever the awful sum total of the misery
lying at the foot of the blood-red cross of Christendom.

A collateral advantage accrued to the clergy through the crusades;
"their wealth, continually accumulated, enabled them to become the
regular purchasers of landed estates, especially in the time of the
crusades, when the fiefs of the nobility were constantly in the market
for sale or mortgage" (Ibid, p. 333).

The last vestiges of nominal paganism were erased in this century, and
it remained only under Christian names. Capital punishment was
proclaimed against all who worshipped the old deities under their old
titles, and "this dreadful severity contributed much more towards