had been accomplished. Nevertheless, in the year 1202, Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was able to raise another considerable army for the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre; but having reached Constantinople at a time when there was a dispute in the succession to the throne, he readily laid aside the project of the Crusade, took part in the quarrel, and in the course of five months he was himself the emperor. The citizens of Venice in Italy, who had lent their vessels for this enterprise, shared in the triumphs of the piratical Crusaders: they obtained the Isle of Candia, or Crete. Baldwin, however, was soon driven from the throne, and murdered; though the Latins, as his successors from the West were called, kept possession of Constantinople for fifty-seven years.
At this period (1227) a great revolution took place in Asia. Ghenghis Khan, at the head of a body of Tartars, broke down from the north upon Persia and Syria, and massacred indiscriminately Turks, Jews, and Christians, who opposed them. The European settlements in Palestine must soon have yielded to these invaders, had not their fate been for a while retarded by the last attempt at a Crusade under Louis IX of France. This prince, summoned, as he believed, by Heaven, after four years' preparation set out for the Holy Land with his queen, his three brothers, and all the knights of France (1248). His army began their enterprise, and we may say ended it also, by an unsuccessful attack on Egypt. The king went home, and reigned prosperously and wisely for thirteen years; but the same frenzy again taking possession of him, he embarked on a Crusade against the Moors in Africa, where his army was destroyed by a pestilence, and he himself became its victim (1270).
Before the end of the thirteenth century (1291) the Christians were driven out of all their Asiatic possessions. 'The only common enterprise,' says Robertson, 'in which the European nations were engaged, and which they all undertook with equal ardor, remains a singular monument of human folly.'
INSTITUTION OF CHIVALRY, ETC.
Among the most remarkable institutions of the middle ages was that of Chivalry. The institution was certainly not the result of caprice, nor a source of unmixed extravagance, as it has been represented, but an effort of human nature to express its feelings of love, honor and benevolence, at a time when the spirit of liberty was extinguished, and religion had become debased. The feudal state was a state of perpetual war, rapine, and anarchy, during which the weak and unarmed were often exposed to injuries. Public protective law scarcely had an existence; and in these circumstances assistance came oftenest and most effectually from the arms of private friends. It was the same feeling of courage, united to a strong sense of duty, which both gave rise to chivalry, and led such multitudes to join the Crusades. Chivalry existed before them, and it survived them. Those whose devoted themselves to a life of chivalry were called knights, and sometimes knight-errants, in allusion to their habits of wandering from one country to another in search of helpless objects, which their generosity might find a pleasure in relieving and defending. Admission to the order of knighthood was long reckoned an honor of the highest sort: and to fulfill the vows which entrants took upon them might well be considered so. They were bound, 'by God, by St. Michael, and St. George,' to be loyal,
