Peter the Hermit | Page 5

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 Byzantine power was wisely used for the development of pontifical authority and the spread of the Latin Church. And, again, the Eternal City through its popes, and particularly through Gregory, became the ruler of the world. Gregory summoned all monarchs to derive their authority and their enthronement from him, and endeavored to make laws for every country in which his Church had place. Resisted by some monarchs, his influence widened nevertheless, and while he forgot his pledge to deliver Jerusalem, he prepared the way for a final unity of action which he could not secure in his own lifetime.
In the pontificate of his successor, mingled religious and commercial