commerce, were among the first to revive the genuine spirit of trade in the south of Europe after it had been almost annihilated by the repeated inundations of the barbarians.
Spread of the Scythians, Huns, or Turks, A.D. 997-1028. A.D. 1074-1084.
A.D. 1076-1096.
The Crusades, A.D. 1095-1099.
The nomad Tatar, or so-called Scythian populations,
have been already slightly noticed; the
rapidity with which they spread their arms over Asia
having been a matter of surprise to every historian
who has written on the subject. About the time of
Mahmud of Ghazna, after having overrun the West of
India, an important section of them settled in great
force in Asia Minor. Opposed to the Greeks and their
religion, they became the most powerful enemies the
eastern Roman empire had yet encountered; and
their occupation of the Holy Land, with their conquest
of Jerusalem, led to conflicts with the Greeks only
less terrible than had been the earlier wars between
the Saracens and the nations of the West. Their
ignorance of navigation alone deferred for a time the
fall of the eastern empire, though internally weak
and decrepid, chiefly owing to the blow it received
during the Crusades, and from which it had never recovered.[1]
The first Crusade, made about twenty years
after the conquest of Jerusalem, had for its object the
recovery of the Holy City from the infidel. To replace
the Cross in Palestine, where the Crescent had
been impiously raised, was a duty the whole of
Christendom considered itself bound to accomplish.
But the Christians in their enthusiasm undertook a
task as wild as it was disastrous, and one, too, so
miserably planned, that three hundred thousand of the
- ↑ Speaking of Timúr, Gibbon observes, "the lord of so many myriads of horse was not master of a single galley," c. lxv.
