Emperor
Frederick Barbarossa perished in it before he had trodden the soil of
Palestine. King Philip Augustus retired from it voluntarily, so soon as
experience had foreshadowed to him the impossibility of success. King
Richard abandoned it perforce, after having exhausted upon it his heroism
and his knightly pride. The three armies, at the moment of departure
from Europe, amounted, according to the historians of the time, to five
or six hundred thousand men, of whom scarcely one hundred thousand
returned; and the only result of the third crusade was to leave as head
over all the most beautiful provinces of Mussulman Asia and Africa,
Saladin, the most illustrious and most able chieftain, in war and in
politics, that Islamry had produced since Mahomet.

From the end of the twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth century,
between the crusade of Philip Augustus and that of St. Louis, it is usual
to count three crusades, over which we will not linger. Two of these
crusades--one, from 1195 to 1198, under Henry VI., Emperor of Germany,
and the other, from 1216 to 1240, under the Emperor Frederick II. and
Andrew II., King of Hungary--are unconnected with France, and almost
exclusively German, or, in origin and range, confined to Eastern Europe.
They led, in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, to wars, negotiations, and
manifold complications; Jerusalem fell once more, for a while, into the
hands of the Christians; and there, on the 18th of March, 1229, in the
church of the Resurrection, the Emperor Frederick II., at that time
excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX., placed with his own hands the royal
crown upon his head. But these events, confused, disconnected, and
short-lived as they were, did not produce in the West, and especially in
France, any considerable reverberation, and did not exercise upon the
relative situations of Europe and Asia, of Christendom and Islamry, any
really historical influence. In people's lives, and in the affairs of
the world, there are many movements of no significance, and more cry than
wool; and those facts only which have had some weight and some duration
are here to be noted for study and comprehension. The event which has
been called the fifth crusade was not wanting, so far, in real
importance, and it would have to be described here, if it had been really
a crusade; but it does not deserve the name. The crusades were a very
different thing from wars and conquests; their real and peculiar
char