emigrants in search of a new home.

Thanks to the teaching of the Church, a large proportion of the border
wars were converted into Crusades for the propagation of the faith or
the extermination of the unbeliever or the defence of holy places. Often
enough the religious motive was introduced as an afterthought, and gave
a thin veil of respectability to operations which it would otherwise
have been difficult to excuse. In some cases, however, those who
enlisted as the soldiers of the Church were sacrificing their material
interests for the good, as they supposed, of their own souls and the
Christian commonwealth. There was nothing essentially Christian in this
spirit of self-devotion; it had long been epidemic in the Mohammedan
world, and accounts for the most successful encroachments of Islam upon
Europe and the Eastern Empire. The impulse affected Western Christendom
for a relatively short period of time, only once or twice producing
movements at all commensurable with those which had emanated from
Arabia, Asia Minor, and Africa, and leading to no conquests that can
rank in magnitude with the caliphates of Bagdad, Cordova, and Cairo. But
the Christian Crusade is in one sense more remarkable than the
Mohammedan Jehad. Western Europe had long ago emerged from the nomadic
stage, and even the ruling classes of Western Christendom, cosmopolitan
as they may seem to us, were attached to their native soil by many ties.
If the upheaval was smaller in the West than in the East, the material
to be set in motion was more stubborn and inert, the prizes to be held
before the eyes of the believer were more impalpable and dubious. There
were ventures near at hand for which the Church could find volunteers
without the slightest difficulty. But those which she was more
particularly bent on forwarding were distant, hazardous, and irksome;
the majority of the men who went on her great Crusades had no prospect
of any temporal advantage. In the end those enterprises to which she