swords for some noble purpose, for the cause of right and justice. That
the motives prompting the vast display of arms witnessed during the
Crusades, that the wanderings of those crowds to the East during two
centuries, and the cruelties committed by the saintly warriors on their
way to the Holy Sepulchre, should be attributed exclusively to ideal
and religious sources is therefore quite natural. It is not to be
denied that there was a religious factor in the Crusades; but that the
religious motive was not the sole incentive has now been agreed upon
by impartial historians; and in so far as the motives animating the
Crusaders were religious motives, we are to look to powerful influences
which gradually made themselves felt from without the ecclesiastical
organisations. It was by no means a movement which the Church alone had
called into being. On the contrary, only when the movement had grown
ripe did Gregory VII. hasten to take steps to enable the Church to
control it. The idea of a Crusade for the glory of religion had not
sprung from the tenets of Christianity; it was given to mediaeval Europe
by the Muhammedans.

History can hardly boast of another example of so gigantic a conquest
during so short a period as that gained by the first adherents of Islam.
Like the fiery wind of the desert, they had broken from their retreats,
animated by the promises of the Prophet, and spread the new doctrine far
and wide. In 653 the scimitar of the Saracens enclosed an area as large
as the Roman Empire under the Cæsars. Barely forty years elapsed after
the death of the Prophet when the armies of Islam reached the Atlantic.
Okba, the wild and gallant leader, rode into the sea on the western
shore of Africa, and, whilst the seething waves reached to the saddle
of his camel, he exclaimed: "Allah, I call thee as witness that I should
have carried the knowledge of Thy name still farther, if these waves
threatening to swallow me would not have prevented me from doing so."