former
chapters that the Arabs had spread their empire from the Euphrates to
the Strait of Gibraltar, and that the Christian and Mohammedan
religions had compassed and absorbed the entire religious life over
this whole territory. As Christianity had become the great reforming
religion of the western part of Europe, so Mohammedanism had become the
reforming religion of Asia. The latter was more exacting in its
demands and more absolute in its sway than the former, spreading its
doctrines mainly by force, while the former sought more to extend its
doctrine by a leavening process. Nevertheless, when the two came in
contact, a fierce struggle for supremacy ensued. The meteorlike rise
of Mohammedanism had created consternation and alarm in the Christian
world as early as the eighth century. There sprang up not only fear of
Islamism, but a hatred of its followers.

After the Arabian Empire had become fully established, there arose to
the northeast of Bagdad, the Moslem capital, a number of Turkish tribes
that were among the more recent converts to Mohammedanism. Apparently
they took the Mohammedan religion as embodied in the Koran literally
and fanatically, and, considering nothing beyond these, sought to
propagate the doctrine through conquest by sword. They are frequently
known as Seljuks. It is to the credit of the Arabs, whether in
Mesopotamia, Africa, or Spain, that their minds reached beyond the
Koran into the wider ranges of knowledge, a fact which tempered their
fanatical zeal, but the Seljuk Turks swept forward with their armies
until they conquered the Byzantine Empire of the East, the last branch
of the great Roman Empire. They had also conquered Jerusalem and {320}
taken possession of the holy sepulchre, to which pilgrimages of
Christians were made annually, and aroused the righteous indignation of
the Christians of the Western world. The ostensible purpose of the
crusades was to free Palestine, the oppressed Christians, and the holy
sepulchre from the domination of the Turks.

It must be remembered that the period of the Middle Ages was
represented by fancies and theories and an evanescent idealism which
controlled the movements of the people to a large extent. Born of
religious sentiment, there dwelt in the minds of Christian people a
reverence for the land of the birth of Christ, to which pilgrims passed
every year to show their adoration for the Saviour and patriotism for
the land of his birth. T