The sums drawn from this source were a mine of wealth to the
Moslem governors of Palestine, imposed as the tax had been at a time
when pilgrimages had become more numerous than ever. A strange idea
had taken possession of the popular mind at the close of the tenth and
commencement of the eleventh century. It was universally believed that
the end of the world was at hand; that the thousand years of the
Apocalypse were near completion, and that Jesus Christ would descend
upon Jerusalem to judge mankind. All Christendom was in commotion. A
panic terror seized upon the weak, the credulous, and the guilty, who
in those days formed more than nineteen twentieths of the population.
Forsaking their homes, kindred, and occupation, they crowded to
Jerusalem to await the coming of the Lord, lightened, as they
imagined, of a load of sin by their weary pilgrimage. To increase the
panic, the stars were observed to fall from heaven, earthquakes to
shake the land, and violent hurricanes to blow down the forests. All
these, and more especially the meteoric phenomena, were looked upon as
the forerunners of the approaching judgments. Not a meteor shot
athwart the horizon that did not fill a district with alarm, and send
away to Jerusalem a score of pilgrims, with staff in hand and wallet
on their back, praying as they went for the remission of their sins.
Men, women, and even children, trudged in droves to the holy city, in
expectation of the day when the heavens would open, and the Son of God
descend in his glory. This extraordinary delusion, while it augmented
the numbers, increased also the hardships of the pilgrims. Beggars
became so numerous on all the highways between the west of Europe and
Constantinople that the monks, the great alms-givers upon these
occasions, would have brought starvation within sight of their own
doors, if they had not economized their resources, and left the
devotees to shift for themselves as they could. Hundreds of them were