e called, added a wholly new character of human enterprise to the
world's history.

At the time--in the middle of the eleventh century--when the Seljuks, a
Turkish tribe of Western Asia, had overrun Syria and Asia Minor,
throwing the East into a state of anarchy, Europe was beginning to adopt
modes of settled order. Through the Byzantine empire great numbers of
pilgrims for centuries had passed to visit Palestine. With the improved
condition of the western nations, which led to an extension of commerce
in the East, the pilgrimage to that part of the world acquired a new
importance. As early as 1064 a caravan of seven thousand pilgrims made
their way to the neighborhood of Jerusalem, where they narrowly escaped
destruction by the Bedouins, their rescue being effected by a Saracen
emir.

In 1070 the Seljuks took possession of Jerusalem, inflicting hardships
on the pilgrims by intolerable exactions, insult, and plunder. Besides
outraging Christian sentiment, they ruined the commerce of the western
nations. Throughout Europe arose the cry for vengeance, and men's minds
were fully prepared for an attempt to conquer Palestine when their
leaders began to preach the sacred duty of delivering the Holy Sepulchre
from the hands of the infidels.

At the Council of Clermont, in 1094, Pope Urban II depicted the miseries
of Christians in Palestine, and, with a power of eloquence unsurpassed
in his day, called upon those who heard him to wipe off from the face of
the earth the impurities which caused them, and to lift their oppressed
fellow-Christians from the depths into which they had been trampled. He
urged them to take up arms in the service of the Cross, at the same time
setting before them the temporal, no less than the spiritual, advantages
that would accrue from the conquest of a land "flowing with milk and
honey," and which, he said, should be divided among them. He likewise
offered them full pardon for all their sins.

The enthusiasm of his hearers burst all bounds, and with one voice they
cried: "God wills it! God wills it!" To all parts of Europe the fervor
spread. The Pope was powerfully aided by an earnest and eloquent--if
ignorant--monk, Peter the Hermit, of Amiens, who declared that he would
rouse the martial spirit of Europe in the cause, and he himself was the
first--with whatsoever of misguided zeal--to lead the way to the Holy
Land.

The crusades are so called from the simple circumstance that the badge
chosen