The student of human nature, also, will find here his most subtle and perplexing, but at the same time his most suggestive, subjects. Never before or since was there such exalted faith combined with such grotesque superstition, such splendid self-sacrifice mingled with cruel and unrestrained selfishness, such holy purpose with its wings entangled, torn, and besmeared in vicious environments.
To the historical scholar this period is unsurpassed in importance by any, if we except the days of the birth of Christianity. The age of the crusades covers the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For two hundred years, to use the vigorous language of the Greek princess Anna Comnena, who witnessed the first crusade, "Europe was loosened from its foundations and hurled against Asia." As an Alpine glacier presses down into the valley, only to melt away at the summer line, yet with renewed snows repeals the fatal experiment from year to year, so seven times Western Christendom replenished its mighty armaments, to see them destroyed at the border-land of Oriental conquest.