The CRUSADES - PREFACE - 1923 - The Signficance of the Crusades. -
THE Crusades may be regarded partly as the decumanus fEuctus in the
tide of religious revival, which had begun in western Europe during
the tenth century, and had mounted high during the eleventh partly
as a chapter, and a most important chapter, in the history of the
interaction of East and West. Contemporaries regarded them in the
former of these two aspects, as holy wars and pilgrims progresses
towards Christs Sepulchre the reflective eye of the historian must
perhaps regard them no less from the latter point of view.
Considered as holy wars the Crusades must be interpreted by the
ideas of an age which was dominated by the spirit of
otherworldliness, and accordingly ruled by the clerical power which
represented the other world. They are a novum salutis genus, a new
path to Heaven, to tread which counted for full and complete
satisfaction pro omni poenitentia and gave forgiveness of sins
peccaminum remissio l they are, again, the foreign policy of the
papacy, directing its faithful subjects to the great war of
Christianity against the infidel. As a new way of salvation, the
Crusades connect themselves with the history of the penitentiary
system as the foreign policy of the Church, they belong to that
clerical purification and direction of feudal society and its
instincts, which appears in the institution of Gods Truce and in
chivalry itself. The penitentiary system, according to which the
priest enforced a code of moral law in the confessional by the
sanction 1 Fulcher of Chartres, I, i. For what follows, with regard
to the Churchs conversion of guerra into the Holy War, cf.
especially the passage- Procedant contrainfideles ad pugnam iam
incipi dignam . . . qui abusive privatum cerramen contra fideles
consuescebant distendere quondam. 4 The Sig ificautce of the
Crusades of penancepenance which must be performed as a condition
of admission to the sacrament of the Eucharist-had been from early
times a great instrument in the civilization of the raw Germanic
races. Penance might consist in fasting it might consist in
flagellation it might consist in pilgrimage. The penitentiary
pilgrimage, which seems to have been practised as early as A. D.
700, was twice blessed not only was it an act of atonement in
itself, like fasting and flagellation it aIso gained for the
pilgrim the merit of having stood on holy ground. Under the
influence of the Cluniac revival, which began in the tenth century,
pilgrimages became increasingly frequent and the goal of pilgrimage
was often Jerusalem. Pilgrims who were travelling to Jerusalem
joined themselves in companies for security, and marched under arms
the pilgrims of 1064, who were headed by the archbishop of Mainz,
numbered some 7,000 men...
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