onquered the country
of the Saxons to put an end to their inroads upon the Franks. And this
prudent plan availed not only to give the Christians of the West a hope
of security, it afforded them the pleasure of vengeance. They were about
to pay back alarm for alarm, and evil for evil, to the enemy from whom
they had suffered in the same way; hatred and pride, as well as piety,
obtained satisfaction.

There is moreover great motive power in a spirit of enterprise and a
taste for adventure. Care-for-nothingness is one of man-kind's chief
diseases, and if it plays so conspicuous a part in comparatively
enlightened and favored communities, amidst the labors and the enjoyments
of an advanced civilization, its influence was certainly not less in
times of intellectual sloth and harshly monotonous existence. To escape
therefrom, to satisfy in some sort the energy and curiosity inherent in
man, the people of the eleventh century had scarcely any resource but
war, with its excitement and distant excursions into unknown regions.
Thither rushed the masses of the people, whilst the minds which were
eager, above everything, for intellectual movement and for knowledge,
thronged, on the mountain of St. Genevieve, to the lectures of Abelard.
Need of variety and novelty, and an instinctive desire to extend their
views and enliven their existence, probably made as many crusaders as the
feeling against the Mussulmans and the promptings of piety.

[Illustration: Crusaders on the March----386]

The Council of Clermont, at its closing on the 28th of November, 1095,
had fixed the month of August in the following year, and the feast of the
Assumption, for the departure of the crusaders for the Holy Land; but the
people's impatience did not brook this waiting, short as it was in view
of the greatness and difficulties of the enterprise. As early as the 8th
of March, 1096, and in the course of the spring three mobs rather than
armies set out on the crusade, with a strength, it is said, of eighty or
one hundred thousand persons in one case, and of fifteen or twenty
thousand in the other two. Persons, not men, for there were amongst them
many women and children, whole families, in fact, who had left their
villages, without organization and without provisions, calculating that
they would be competent to find their own way, and that He who feeds the
young ravens would not suffer to die of want pilgrims wearing His cross.
Whenever, on their road