rought from northwestern China
by caravan to the Oxus, and forwarded thence by the Caspian sea, the
rivers Cyrus and Phasis, and the Euxine sea.[319] When it was visited by
Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century, Constantinople was
undoubtedly the richest and most magnificent city, and the seat of the
highest civilization, to be found anywhere upon the globe.

[Footnote 319: Robertson, _Historical Disquisition_, p. 93;
Pears, _The Fall of Constantinople_, p. 177,--a book of great
merit.]

[Sidenote: The Crusades.]

[Sidenote: Barbarizing character of Turkish conquest.]

[Sidenote: General effects of the Crusades.]

In the days of its strength the Eastern Empire was the staunch bulwark
of Christendom against the dangerous assaults of Persian, Saracen, and
Turk; alike in prosperity and in calamity, it proved to be the teacher
and civilizer of the western world. The events which, at the close of
the eleventh century, brought thousands upon thousands of adventurous,
keen-witted people from western Europe into this home of wealth and
refinement, were the occasion of the most remarkable intellectual
awakening that the world had ever witnessed up to that time. The
Crusades, in their beginning, were a symptom of the growing energy of
western Europe under the ecclesiastical reformation effected by the
mighty Hildebrand. They were the military response of Europe to the most
threatening, and, as time has proved, the most deadly of all the blows
that have ever been aimed at her from Asia. Down to this time the
Mahometanism with which Christendom had so long been in conflict was a
Mahometanism of civilized peoples. The Arabs and Moors were industrious
merchants, agriculturists, and craftsmen; in their society one might
meet with learned scholars, refined poets, and profound philosophers.
But at the end of the tenth century, Islam happened to make converts of
the Turks, a nomad race in the upper status of barbarism, with flocks
and herds and patriarchal families. Inspired with the sudden zeal for
conquest which has always characterized new converts to Islam, the Turks
began to pour down from the plains of central Asia like a deluge upon
the Eastern Empire. In 1016 they overwhelmed Armenia, and presently
advanced into Asia Minor. Their mode of conquest was peculiarly baleful,
for at first they deliberately annihilated the works of civilization in
order to prepare the country for their nomadic life; t