The Crusades 461 Natural temptation to overrate the impor- tance of the Our sources of information in regard to the Crusades are so abundant and so rich in picturesque incidents that writers have often yielded to the temptation to give more space to these expeditions than their consequences really justify. They Crusades were, after all, only one of the great foreign enterprises which have been undertaken from time to time by the European peoples. While their influence upon the European countries was doubtless very important, — like that of the later conquest of India by the English and the colonization of America, — the details of the campaigns in the East scarcely belong to the history of western Europe. / Syria had been overrun by the Arabs in the seventh century, The Holy 1 1 1 TT 1 r^-^ ( Land con- shortly after the death of Mohammed, and the Holy City ot quered first Jerusalem had fallen into the hands of the infidels. The Arab, ^^d^the^'by' however, shared the veneration of the Christian for the places the Turks associated with the life of Christ and, in general, permitted the Christian pilgrims who found their way thither to worship un- molested. But with the coming of a new and ruder people, the Seljuk Turks, in the eleventh century, the pilgrims began to bring home news of great hardships. Moreover, the eastern Emperor was defeated by the Turks in 107 1 and lost Asia Minor. The presence of the Turks, who had taken possession of the fortress of Nicaea, just across from Constantinople, was of course a standing menace to the Eastern Empire. When the energetic Emperor Alexius (1081-1118) ascended the throne he endeavored to expel the infidel. Finding himself unequal to Eastern the task, he appealed for assistance to the head of Christendom, appeals to Pope Urban II. The first great impetus to the Crusades was ^^da^gXst"' the call issued by Urban at the celebrated church council which ^^^j^'^g^'^^^ met in 1095 at Clermont in France. In an address which produced more remarkable immediate results than any other which history records, the Pope exhorted knights and soldiers of all ranks to give up their usual wicked business of destroying their Christian brethren in private warfare (see above, section 67) and turn, instead, to the succor
