ilures of life--returning to God. The Crusades
offered an opportunity for combining one's heart's desire with this
spiritual need. Of all good works there were none more pleasing to God,
and every participator was promised forgiveness of his sins. In the
troubadours' songs of the crusaders there is a strong yearning for
penance and sanctification, quite independent of the idea of the
delivery of the Holy Sepulchre from the rule of the infidels.

All I held dear I now abhor,
My pride, my knightly rank and fame,
And seek the spot which all adore,
The pilgrim's goal--Jerusalem.

sang Guillem of Poitiers, one of the gayest of the troubadours.

Only very few of the more thoughtful minds realised that divine thoughts
have their source in the soul of man, and that these Crusades were
obviously a senseless undertaking (not to mention the fact that God does
not need human assistance). "It is a greater thing to worship God always
in humility and poverty," said the abbot, Peter of Cluny, "than to
journey to Jerusalem in great pomp and circumstance. If, therefore, it
is a good thing to visit Jerusalem and stand on the soil which our
Lord's feet have trod, it is a far better thing still to strive after
heaven where our Lord can be seen face to face." Both the great
scholastic, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux, were of the
same opinion. "They shall aspire not to the earthly, but to the heavenly
Jerusalem, and travel there not with their feet, but with the desire of
their hearts." And "They seek God in external objects, neglecting to
look into their hearts, in whose innermost depths dwells the divine."
And yet those same men, who even then seemed to have outgrown biblical
religiosity, were under the spell of the all-absorbing idea of the age.
Bernard solved the contradiction in the following way: "It is not
because His power has grown less that the Lord calls us feeble worms to
protect His own; His word is deed, and He could send more than twelve
legions of angels to do His bidding; but because it is the will of the
Lord your God to save you from perdition, He gives you an opportunity to
serve Him." In these words a significant change of the fundamental idea
can already be traced. Peter of Cluny worked for the Crusades, and
Bernard, one of the most influential and venerable personalities of the
Middle Ages, a man before whose word the popes bowed down, journeyed
through the whole of France, incitin