feeling which the
crusades evoked--a feeling which became the origin of the great orders
of chivalry, and somewhat later of the two great orders of mendicant
friars--turned wholly against the opponents of ecclesiastical claims,
and was made to work the will of the Holy See, which had blessed and
organised the project."[182] The expedition against King John by Philip
of France was undertaken at the behest of the Pope, and was called a
crusade. The attempt of Spain to crush the Netherlands was called a
crusade. So was the Armada that was fitted out against England.

More than all, a stamp of permanency was given to popular superstition.
For two centuries people had seen expedition after expedition fitted out
to accomplish an avowedly religious purpose. They had been taught that
to die in defence of religion, or in the attempt to achieve a religious
object, was the noblest of deaths. They had seen the greatest in Europe
setting forth at the command of the Church. Signs and wonders had
abounded to prove the heaven-blessed character of the crusades. They had
seen the Church growing steadily in power, and every possible means had
been utilised to increase the flame of religious fanaticism. Expeditions
might fail, but failure did not cure fanaticism. It fed it; the
crusaders returned, chastened in some respects, but still sufficiently
full of religious zeal to be ready to battle against the unbeliever and
the heretic at the behest of the Church. And it was not the policy of
the Church to allow this fanaticism to remain unemployed. Even though it
might ultimately lose, the Church and superstition profited enormously
by the crusading spirit. It strengthened the general sense of the
supernatural, even while creating tendencies that were destined to limit
its sway. Above all, it prepared the way for other religious epidemics.
These were more circumscribed in area, and less lengthy in their
duration; but their existence was made possible and easy by the
centuries during which, first monasticism, and later the crusading
mania, had dominated the public mind.

The crusades had hardly been brought to a close before continental
Europe witnessed an outbreak, in epidemic form, of a practice that had
been long associated with monastic discipline. The use of the whip as a
form of religious discipline had always played a part in conventual and
monastic life. On the one hand, it formed part of that insensate desire
to torture the body which