Peter the Hermit | Page 5

not away from home with bad
intent, but to keep their law."
[Sidenote: Confusion of Moral Sense]
Confusing to the moral sense as we possess it, and destructive of true
morality as we must hold it to be, we must further admit with
astonishment that pilgrimage was held to be a cure for the most
dreadful sin.
A Brittany lord who murdered his brother and his uncle was ordered to
make the journey twice with humiliating conditions, and returned, after
three years on Mount Sinai, to be received as a saint and to dignify a
monastery by his narrations and his residence.
[Sidenote: A Journey Condones Murder]
One journey was enough to free from further penalty a Roman prefect
who had dragged a pope from his altar. Foulque-Nerra, Count of Anjou,
pursued by the ghosts of those he had murdered, sought to quiet them
through three unavailing journeys.
For such reasons and for many others, some of which can hardly be
brought within religious motives, thousands made the journey. Three
thousand, beginning with the Bishop of Cambrai, were nearly all
starved or murdered in Bulgaria, and the few who went on as far as

Laodicea turned back or died there, while their leader went back to his
diocese.
[Sidenote: Bloody Welcome in Bulgaria]
[Sidenote: Three Thousand Killed]
One more band, or army rather, of ten thousand started ten years later
with the Archbishop of Mayence and the Bishops of Spires, Cologne,
Bamberg, and Utrecht. They were almost in sight of Jerusalem when
the Bedouins besieged and captured them. Saved from death by a
neighboring Emir, they followed the news of their tribulations to
Jerusalem, where they were received with joy. They lost during the
whole journey three thousand of their number, and went back to fire
Europe with accounts of their impressions, their perils, and their
undeserved dangers.
[Sidenote: Rejoicing in Martyrdom]
[Sidenote: Fanaticism of Turks]
[Sidenote: Degenerate Greeks]
As the tolerance of the earlier caliphs was succeeded by the fanaticism
of the Turks, the Christians of Jerusalem ceased to be treated with any
other consideration than that accorded to despised slaves. Pilgrims were
no longer guests, but intruders. No persecution, however, stopped the
flow of pilgrims. The harder the way, the greater the cost, the greater
the merit. The pilgrim might, under these later conditions, easily
become a martyr. The martyr's crown was sure, by the faith of the times,
to become a heavenly crown. Few now survived the journey. These
often came back starved, cut, and mutilated. Their appearance and the
great gaps in the ranks of those who returned, kindled a smoldering fire
under all Europe. Such had been the pre-eminence of Constantinople
and the Greek Empire that if the Greeks had retained their former
quality, the Turks might have been driven back by those who sat on
that famous throne. But when the corruption of decay was attacked by
the vigor of an almost savage state, there could be but one result.

[Sidenote: Greeks Truculent]
Among the Greeks the lowest qualities and the basest acts found
justification under the name of policy. Courage in battle was
supplanted by the shield and mechanism of bodily safety. They killed
the men who tried to rouse them. They had wasted all their inheritance
but great memories, and had acquired a truculent and factious spirit.
While they were nearing the utter decay of their influence the infant
West was found to have grown until all that was noble in character and
all that was true in Christianity, all which could respond in courage and
self-sacrifice to the call of Jerusalem for deliverance, was to be found
among those whom the Greeks had held to be Barbarians.
[Sidenote: Papal Ambition]
[Sidenote: Greatness of Gregory]
The Roman Curia, from its first date of political influence, had never
ceased to enhance its authority by the use of the secular arm when it
had none of its own, or by its own secular arm when it could command
one. The disturbed conditions in the East, together with the decay of
Greek influence and the cowardice and helplessness of the Byzantine
emperors, had led Michael Ducas to appeal to Pope Gregory for help.
The prize offered Gregory was the submission of the Greek to the
Roman Church and the removal of all barriers. From the standpoint of
ability, Gregory well deserves the title "Great." He seems as great in
statecraft as in executive ability. The hope of being a universal pope led
him to promise aid. He urged the faithful to take up arms against the
Mussulmans, and promised to lead them himself. His letters were full
of the loftiest ideas. Fifty thousand agreed to follow his lead. But he
found the management of Europe more to his taste and perhaps to his
need.
The decay of