CHAMBERS'S

SUPPLEMENTARY READER

No. 6.

THE CRUSADES.

LIFE OF COLUMBUS.

CASES OF CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE.

POEMS ON BIRDS.

(Selected from Miscellany of Instructive and Entertaining Tracts)

FTER the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70 of the Christian era, Palestine continued for upwards of two centuries in the condition of a miserable Roman province, inhabited by a mixed population of pagans, Jews, and Christians. In Jerusalem, temples of Venus and Jupiter were erected on the most sacred spots of Christian history; and heathenism triumphed in the possession of the Holy City of two religions. On the establishment of Christianity in the Roman empire by Constantine in the year 321, this state of things was changed. Palestine and Jerusalem became objects of interest to all Christians, and crowds of pilgrims went to visit the localities celebrated by the Evangelists. Splendid churches were erected on the ruins of the pagan temples, and every spot ascertained by historical evidence, or pointed out by vague tradition, as the scene of any of the memorable events in the life of Christ and his apostles, was marked by a chapel or a house of prayer. Jerusalem and the Holy Land became the resort of numerous bodies of clergy, who, residing in the churches and monasteries which the piety of the wealthy had founded for them, made it their occupation to point out to pilgrims the various localities which they had come to see, and to exhibit holy relics connected with the Saviour's life and sufferings, into the authenticity of which the eager and craving superstition of the pilgrims did not permit them to inquire.

In the end of the fourth century, the gigantic Roman empire,

No. 123.

I

already near its final dissolution, was broken up into two-the Western Empire, the capital of which was Rome; and the Eastern, the capital of which was Constantinople. It was to the latter of these that Syria and Palestine were attached. Before the end of the fifth century, the Western Empire had been completely destroyed by the irruption of the German races, and the beginnings of a new European civilisation were rising from its ruins. Meanwhile the Eastern, called also the Greek or Byzantine Empire, remained entire. Its dissolution, however, was near at hand. About the year 630, the Arabs, burning with the spirit of conquest infused into them by the religion of Mohammed, poured into its provinces, as the Huns and Vandals had formerly poured into the provinces of its sister empire of the west. Egypt, Syria, and Palestine were detached from the Byzantine empire, and annexed as dependencies to the great Arabic empire of the califs. Thus the religion of Mohammed became dominant in the Holy Land of the Christians, and the temples and chapels of Jerusalem were converted into mosques.

PILGRIMAGES TO THE HOLY LAND-CRUELTIES OF THE TURKSPETER THE HERMIT.

Scarcely were the foundations of a new civilisation laid in the west of Europe-scarcely had the German races been absorbed into the bosom of the old Roman population-when, under the influence of the Latin Church, then rearing itself above the universal wreck, the spirit of religious pilgrimages began to revive.

Annually, numbers of pilgrims from Italy or the remote west wended their way through Asia Minor, and southwards along the shores of the Levant; or, as was very common, conjoining the spirit of piety with that of commerce, they were carried in trading-vessels along either shore of the Mediterranean, extending a voyage undertaken originally for trading purposes, so as to embrace also the great object of a visit to the Holy Land. The treatment of these pilgrims, as well as of the Christian residents, the relics of the old population of Palestine, by the Mohammedan masters of the soil, varied according to the general aspect of the times, and the disposition of the reigning calif. In return for a certain tribute, the earlier califs permitted the Christians of Jerusalem to have a patriarch and an ecclesiastical establishment according to their own forms. Of all the califs, the celebrated Haroun al Raschid was the most tolerant, and under him the Christians enjoyed perfect peace.

Under the Fatimite califs of Egypt, who conquered Syria about the year 980, a different policy was pursued, and the Christian inhabitants of Palestine, as well as the pilgrims to the Holy Shrine, were treated with the utmost cruelty. The pilgrims were robbed, beaten, and sometimes slain on their journey; the Christian residents oppressed by heavy impositions, and their feelings outraged by

insults against their religion, and by the violation of their domestic ties. Rumours of these cruelties of the Fatimite califs towards their Christian subjects and the Latin pilgrims reached the west of Europe, and excited a strong feeling of indignation in the breasts of the pious.

The sufferings of the Christians of Palestine under the Fatimite califs were insignificant compared with those which they endured after the invasion and conquest of Palestine by the Turkish hordes in 1065. But recently converted to Moslemism, and therefore more rude and fanatical than the other Mohammedans, these Turks wreaked their vengeance on all alike-Christians, Jews, and even the native Mohammedans. No description,' says the Abbé Vertot, in his History of the Knights of Malta, can give a conception of all the cruelties which they committed. Numbers of the Christians were butchered; the hospital of St John, founded for the relief of pilgrims, about seventeen years before, by some pious Italian merchants, who had obtained a piece of ground for the purpose, was plundered; and these barbarians would have destroyed the Holy Sepulchre, had not their avarice restrained them. The fear of losing the revenues raised upon the pilgrims of the west preserved the tomb of our Saviour. But, to gratify at once their avarice and their hatred to all who bore the name of Christians, they loaded them with heavier tributes; so that the pilgrims, after having spent all their money in the course of so long a voyage, or having been stripped by robbers, and worn out with hunger and miseries of all sorts, at last, for want of money to discharge such excessive tributes, perished at the gates of Jerusalem, without being able to obtain the consolation of seeing, before they died, the Holy Sepulchre-the only object of their vows, and the end of so tedious a pilgrimage.'

The news of the atrocities perpetrated by the Turks in Jerusalem produced a deep sensation over the whole of Christendom, as well among the Latin Christians-as the Roman Catholic nations of the west of Europe were called-as among the Greek Christians-the name given to the population of what still remained of the old Byzantine empire. The latter, however, were more deeply and immediately interested; for they had reason to dread, from their geographical situation, that if the Turks were not checked, Constantinople, the capital of their own empire, would soon share the same fate as Jerusalem. Accordingly, about the year 1073, the Greek emperor, Manuel VII., sent to supplicate the assistance of the great Pope Gregory VII. against the Turks, accompanying his petition with many expressions of profound respect for His Holiness in particular, and the Latin Church in general. Till now, there had prevailed a spirit of antagonism between the Latin and Greek Churches; the Roman Catholics regarding the Greek Christians as heretics and schismatics; and the latter yielding spiritual obedience to their own patriarch, and refusing to acknowledge the pope of the west as the