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the instruments of the greatest triumphs vouchsafed to the Church of
Rome. The hosts, driven across the sea by inner restlessness and
ill-defined longing, in reality fought for the aggrandisement of the
Church. The great Hildebrand resolved to lead all Christendom to
Jerusalem, to found on the site of the Holy Sepulchre the divine
kingdom preached by St. Augustine, and invest--a risen Christ--the
emperor and all the kings of the earth with their kingdoms.

The crusader and the knight in quest of the Holy Grail present together
a paradoxical combination of the Christian-ecclesiastical and the
mundane-chivalric spirit, which is quite in harmony with the spirit of
the age. These two worlds, inward strangers, formed--in the Order of the
Knight-Templars, for instance--a union which, while possessing all the
external symbols of chivalry, attributed to it heterogeneous,
ecclesiastical motives; the glory of battle and victory, the caprice of
a beautiful damsel, were no longer to become the mainsprings of doughty
exploits; henceforth the knight fought solely for the glory of God and
the victory of Christianity. In addition to King Arthur's knights, the
classical Middle Ages worshipped the ideal of these priestly warriors
who waded through streams of blood to kneel humbly at the grave of the
Saviour, of those seekers of the Holy Grail who dedicated themselves to
a metaphysical task. King Arthur's Round Table served the actual orders
of knighthood as a model. Not only the Franciscans of Italy, but also
slow, German mystics, such as Suso and the profound Johannes Tauler,
delighted in borrowing their similes and metaphors from knighthood.
Tauler speaks of the "scarlet knightly robes" which Christ received for
His "knightly devotion": "And by His chivalric exploits he won those
knightly weapons which he wears before the Father and the angelic
knighthood. Therefore Christ exults when His knights elect also to put
on such knightly garments ...," etc.

Not infrequently the Saracens behaved far more generously than the
Christian armies. A German chronicler, Albert von Stade, tells us that
A.D. 1221 "the Sultan of Egypt of his own free will restored the Lord's
Cross, permitted the Christians to leave Egypt with all their
belongings, and commanded all prisoners to be set free, so that at that
time 30,000 captives were released. He also commanded his subjects to
sell food to the rich and give alms to the poor and the sick."
Occasionally