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their God-'cursed be he who does not stain his sword 'with blood.'

The response was electric. Already towards the end of the previous century, some 200,000 pilgrims had set out for Jerusalem. But few reached their destination.' * In the twelfth century more than 100,000 pilgrims were slain, a 'far greater number were lost by disease or shipwreck.'† No more pathetic record exists than that of the Children's Crusade' [1212]:

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'Cinquante mille enfants s'attroupèrent et parcoururent les villes et les campagnes. Lorsqu'on leur demandait où ils allaient et ce qu'ils voulaient faire, ils répondaient: "Nous allons à Jérusalem pour délivrer le sépulcre du Sauveur." . . . Plusieurs de ces jeunes croisés s'égarèrent dans les forêts, périrent de chaleur, de faim, de soif et de fatigue plusieurs recueillirent les palmes du martyre.' +

...

Five shiploads were sold as slaves, M. Jourdain gives the further detail,§ by two merchants of Marseilles.

In such brief sentences historians again and again epitomise the tragic episodes of those centuries when love, worship, and war, le paradis, la gloire et l'amour de sa mie,' bore undisputed lordship over the souls, the hearts, and the bodies of men; of those days when the pilgrim tide streamed eastward, fighters to redeem the Holy City, penitents to efface their sins and find an antidote to those remorses the conscience of later generations bears with the fortitude of indifference. Soldiers went to conquer and saints to pray, porce que cil pardon fut issi gran, si s'en esmeurent mult li cuers des gens et mult s'en croisierent porce que li 'pardon ete si gran.' And, moreover, they went gladly. As Thibault, the troubadour king, sang, as the spokesman of Christ, death was no foe to flee but a friend to welcomean open door into that other Jerusalem which, being above, was free.

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'Vos en irez là où li angele sont,
Là me verrez, et ma mère Marie.
Et vos, par qui je n'oi onques aie,
Descendez tuit en enfer le parfont.'

It is nevertheless recorded, even by contemporary chroniclers, that for the most part the men, women, and children found

*Russell's Modern Europe.'

+ Gibbon, vol. xi. ch. lix. P. 144.
Michaud, 'Hist. des Croisades.

§ See Michaud, 'Eclaircissemens,' No. iv., vol. iii.

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*

the road of paradise a downward track. More Christians 'became Mussulman than Mussulmans Christian.' So Michaud sums up the accounts of international apostasies 'when all the vices of Europe and Asia met. . . . And significant enough is the statement of the chronicler of the twelfth century. Scarcely one good woman is to be 'found,' wrote the soldier bishop, in all Jerusalem;' where beautiful Pasque de Riveri, the avowed mistress of Heraclius the Patriarch †-'qui beau clerc estoit et por sa beauté l'ama la mère du Roi et le fist arcevesque '-displayed in the sanctuary the gifts of her lover purchased with the alms of the faithful. A lamentable case,' exclaims old Fuller, that the devil's black guard should be God's 'soldiers !'

No land has, perhaps, witnessed a stranger aspect, moral and material, than that presented by the little stretch of sea-washed, desert-bounded, Syrian shore, with its fruitgardens, its olive-yards and vineyards, when Jerusalem was alike the goal of the warrior and the devotee of two of the greatest religions of the world, when the children of Islam and the Sons of Baptism' alternately conquered and worshipped, with rival veneration, in the vast buildings which bore successively the titles of the Temple of the Lord' and the Mosque of Omar.'

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Amid this clash of contending faiths the tragedy of the Knights Templars-the tragedy that was to close in Paristook its rise in Jerusalem. In the year 1118 the New Chivalry' was inaugurated. Nine knights, followers of Godefroi de Bouillon, banded themselves together for the defence of pilgrims. Their names-with one omissionare supplied in the Acts of the Council of Troyes :Hugues de Paganis, Geoffroi de St. Omer, Fr. Roral, Fr. Gaufridus Bisol, Fr. Paganus de Monte-Desiderii, Fr. Archimbald de Santo Aniano, Fr. André, and Fr. Gundemar, make up the roll-call of the new order. For nine years the brotherhood remained in obscurity. No single recruit joined himself to their ranks, their penury was such that Hugues and Geoffroi, the founders of the society, shared one war-horse, as the legend of the first seal of the order records. The fair dream of a great confraternity of succour

William of Tyre.

By whom the round' of the Temple Church in London was consecrated, 1185.

See Du Puy.

§ The riders of the first seal may be represented by the wings of modern times. The second seal was the Agnus Dei.

seemed destined to fade unrealised in a world which so far had scarcely so much as recognised its existence. But the difficulties of attainment lie, more often than we think, in the weakness of the desire. To want long enough, and to want strenuously enough, the aims we strive for, are the initial difficulties of success in days when a doubt is twin to each purpose, and a question is born with every enterprise. But in those elder days the hearts of simpler men knew less of the ebb-tide of their desires, and Hugues de Paganis, undaunted by failure, set sail for Europe, and with five of his companions sought in the all-powerful abbot Bernard the Cistercian an auxiliary for the cause to which their Order was dedicated.

Bernard was swift to appreciate the immense possibilities presented in the novel ideal of a monastic soldiery. The Blood-Royal of God within the convent walls may still have claimed old human affinity with the soldier-blood of twelfthcentury France, and the call to arms may long have echoed in ears whose office was to listen only to the bells of the sanctuary. Be this, however, as it may, Bernard became forthwith a zealous advocate of the Templars. Upon the basis of the Rule submitted to him for reconstruction or revision, he appears to have developed the final statutes of the Order, and at the Council of Troyes, with the sanction of Honorius II., it was solemnly confirmed, with added ecclesiastical privileges. From that moment recruits poured in, chosen from the noblest blood of France, Italy, Germany, and England, and while the chief house of the Order remained at Jerusalem and its Grand-Masters were domiciled in the precincts of the Temple of Solomon-of which the Virgin's Church, with its round tower (erected by Justinian), became the pattern of many later edificesthe Templars acquired lordship over not less than 9,000 manors in the various kingdoms of Europe, and drew from these estates an income of some six millions.

Yet, if the splendour of the Order eclipsed the glories of the kings and potentates of Western Europe, the Rule in its austerity embodied what Michelet has called la 'dernière rêverie du moyen âge.' Obedience, silence, mortification, the abnegation of all earthly joy, the annihilation of self, were sacrifices already demanded from the members of countless monastic communities. The Templar must tread a yet untried path. La règle, c'était l'exil et la guerre sainte, jusqu'à la mort. Les Templiers 'devaient toujours accepter le combat, fût-ce d'un contre

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'trois, ne jamais demander quartier, ne point donner de rançon. Le soldat a la gloire, le moine le repos; 'le Templier abjurait l'un et l'autre. Il réunissait ce que 'les deux vies ont de plus dur.' Secular knights might strive upon the dusty battlefield with lance and sword, but the knights of religion had a double task: they truly, as their seal symbolised, bore a double burden. The creed of their day recognised a dual world of antagonists, the natural was the twin of the supernatural. To the host of the infidel, to be overcome with strength of arm, there was a spiritual counterpart of unsubstantial agencies, of immaterial influences, spirits of evil who strove with keener weapons than Islam's scimitars against the Christian armies. With these, in the dark silence of the Virgin's Church, reared upon its gigantic blocks of granite to the honour of the Christians' God, the Templar must wage a warfare fiercer than any that raged upon the plains below. In that place of combat he must lay aside the futile accoutrements of knightly prowess. In that strife the hands that gain the mastery are empty and weaponless. There the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Other men must combat with their bodily powers, the Templar must give battle with his soul. In that dim, indefinite contest no banners wave and no battlecry is heard. The flesh must faint under the scourge, the limbs must fail with fasting, the eyes that would confront death unflinchingly must learn their fearlessness in the slumberless vigil of eastern nights. The morrow's call to arms must be born of the muteness of dumb lips. So ran the Rule. And howsoever we view the matter, whether we hold it for true or false that there do actually exist adverse forces of which the defeat can only be secured by the voluntary privations of the ascetic life, it is at least true that no other community of Christendom exemplified the application of that doctrine of a dual strife with more rigorous completeness, or evinced a more undaunted courage, a more invincible valour, alike as martyrs, combatants, and fanatics. That the Templars, as combatants, achieved the ideal of intrepid soldiery even Gibbon allows. 'The knights ever maintained their fearless and fanatical 'character; if they neglected to live, they were prepared to 'die in the service of Christ.' That they attempted no less gallantly, if less effectually, to conform to their standard of monastic asceticism few readers of history can doubt. As soldiers their story is a story of nearly two centuries of

chequered warfare, followed by final and irremediable defeat. As monks, it is the common record of the gradual declension of aspiration, of the gradual demoralisation of practice consequent on the enforcement, as a formal discipline, of those austerities which, with the first pioneers of spiritual adventure, were a personal instinct, and both as soldiers and as monks their story is simple and complete.

It threads itself through every page of crusading narrative from the epoch of the second crusade onwards. For 170 years under the rule of some seven-and-twenty Grand-Masters the swords of the Order were never sheathed, while upon the Syrian plains and hills fortress after fortress arose, the convent keeps of the new chivalry. North of Galilee 850 workmen with 400 slaves toiled in the building of the famous seven towers of Saphet with their massive walls and their mystic number of which the significance is still a matter of conjecture, and when in the Virgin's Church at Jerusalem the Christian bells were once more silenced and the innumerable lamps of the Moslem faith re-illuminated the 'Mosque al Acsa,' the Templar's stronghold at Acre, with its ten-sided church, its double row of arches, its strange carvings of man and beast, was well qualified to supply the place of the parent house, and Acre became at once the chief seat of the Order and the last outpost of defeated Christendom.

Graal legends, in which some critics have detected an emblematic history of the Temple Order, tell of the exploits of the Signourie,' of the good knight Joseph of Arimathie, and of the high adventure of the Roche of Blood, where King Evelach witnessed the superhuman prowess of that 'semely Knyht'—

'Abowte whose necke hung a white scheld
Which that was seyn over all that Feeld,
In which scheld was a Crois so Red
In sign of Him that suffred did.' †

But his valour in no wise surpasses the courage of those other white-clad combatants, the Frieri del Tempio, in the feats of arms related by old chroniclers, prodigies of heroism, Michaud admits, with more candour than satis

* The number is variously recorded. Du Puy gives twenty-seven names, Addison twenty-four, and Fuller (Holy War') gives two names found in neither list-Fr. Oliver between 1220 and 1230, and Peter Belvise, 1280-90.

† Lonelich's Sanct Graal,' E.E. Text Society.

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