Читать книгу The Choctaw Freedmen and the Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy - Robert Elliott Flickinger - Страница 73

These invasions were followed by the period of the Crusaders, 1096 to 1271, when as many as seven great armies or multitudes of people were assembled at the call of the popes, and wearing crosses on their shoulders, marched through the intervening countries to Palestine. Their object was to rescue the city of Jerusalem and the holy sepulchre from the infidels. The first crusade was organized in France, and it enlisted an army of 800,000. Godfrey, duke of Lorraine, was placed in command, and the multitude was arranged for the march in three divisions. Peter, the hermit, a wrong-headed monk, was appointed leader of the first division and experienced an inglorious and irreparable defeat on the way. Godfrey, after the siege and conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, was chosen King to rule over Palestine and the holy city, as his kingdom. At the time of his coronation he made the noble remark, that,

"He could not bear the thought of wearing a crown of gold in that city, where the King of Kings had been crowned with thorns."

The brave soldier and manly man, who gave expression to this noble sentiment, died the next year.

Under weak and unskilful chiefs the crusaders while on the way wandered about like undisciplined bands of robbers, plundering cities, committing the most abominable enormities, and spreading misery and desolation where-ever they passed. There was no kind of insolence, injustice and barbarity of which they were not guilty. The seven successive crusades drained the wealth of the fairest provinces and caused the loss of a prodigious number of people.

Those of the first crusade, that remained in Palestine, were divided by sordid ambition and avarice, and in 1187 Saladin, sultan of Egypt and Syria, the most valiant chief of the Mohammedan warriors, recaptured Jerusalem and subsequent crusaders were not able to regain it.