TIic Year looo 439 dom, summons them to a common expedition for the delivery of the holy places. This document, which exists in but a single manu- script, and that a transcript, though of the eleventh century, they deem a clumsy forgery, produced in the days of the First Crusade. As to its motive they are not at one. With it must pass from cre- dence the expedition said by it to be preparing by Venice and Genoa, — as there had already fallen the legend (based on more misunderstanding) of Pisan exploits of this period in the Levant. As the earliest summons to the Holy War against Islam, then, there remain the famous letters of Pope Gregory VII., in 1074. Of these (excepting that to the Countess Matilda) the genuineness is not questioned ; but later historians, following Von Sybel, see in them less than did the earlier. What they mainly urge is the rescue not of the Holy Land, but of Asia Minor ; their motive, politic not less than pious, is the salvation of the Greek church and the restoration of Armenian orthodoxy ; their means, not an armed pilgrimage of Latin Christendom, but an invading army. And such as it was, the enterprise was with Gregory but a passing im- pulse. For the conception, then, as well as for the initiation, of the Crusades proper we are brought to their very eve. To discuss the sources and the legends of the First Crusade is the task of another. Yet from this hasty survey of the havoc wrought by modern criti- cism among their antecedents, it must not be gathered that to pres- ent-day scholars the Crusades had no remoter causes. They are to be sought still in the ascetic spirit and the theocratic ideals of the age, in the love of travel and of venture, begotten in it by pil- grimage, in the over-population of the West, in the rise of chivalry and in the intolerable havoc wrought by its private wars, in the Church's assumption by the Truce of God to check and even to direct its energies, above all in those brilliant enterprises of the eleventh century, suggested or sanctioned by the Church, which appealed alike to the piety, the valor, and the ambition of every knightly soul — the deeds of the Normans in England, in Italy, in the Greek Empire, the beating back of the Moors in Spain, the African raids of the Italian sea-powers. Let, then, the century's last word on the deeper causes of the Crusades be that of Bishop Stubbs : "They were the first great effort of medieval life to go beyond the pursuit of selfish and isolated ambitions ; they were the trial-feat of the young world, essaying to use, to the glory of God and the benefit of man, the arms of its new knighthood." George Lincoln Burr.
