news of the momentous victory of the Christians at Navas de Tolosa. He
saw the beginnings of a fresh crusade against the obstinate heathen on
the eastern shores of the Baltic.

But all these crusades were against pagans and infidels. Innocent made
a much greater new departure when he proclaimed the first crusade
directed against a Christian land. The Albigensian crusade succeeded
in destroying the most dangerous and widespread popular heresy that
Christianity had witnessed since the fall of the Roman Empire, and
Innocent rejoiced that his times saw the Church purged of its worst
blemish. But in extending the benefits of a crusade to Christians
fighting against Christians, he handed on a precedent which was soon
fatally abused by his successors. In crushing out the young national
life of Southern France the papacy again set a people against itself.
The denunciations of the German Minnesinger were reechoed in the
complaints of the last of the Troubadours. Rome had ceased to do harm
to Turks and Saracens, but had stirred up Christians to war against
fellow-Christians. God and his saints abandon the greedy, the
strife-loving, the unjust worldly Church. The picture is darkly
colored by a partisan, but in every triumph of Innocent there lay the
shadow of future trouble.

Crusades, even against heretics and infidels, are the work of earthly
force rather than of spiritual influence. It was to build up the great
outward corporation of the Church that all these labors of Innocent
mainly tended. Even his additions to the canon law, his reforms of
ecclesiastical jurisdiction, dealt with the external rather than the
internal life of the Church. The criticism of James of Vitry, that the
Roman curia was so busy in secular affairs that it hardly turned a
thought to spiritual things, is clearly applicable to much of