It was a pope-- Gregory VII., and not, as is often said,
Sylvester II.--who first had the idea of the crusades. Indeed,
Gregory was himself on the point of leading fifty thousand
men "against the enemies of God, even to the tomb of Jesus
Christ" ( 1074), but his difficulties with Henry IV. prevented
him from executing this idea. ¹ It was a pope, Urban II., who
in 1095 realized the project of Gregory VII. and caused the
departure of the first crusade. It was the popes who took
the initiative in all the crusades, who entreated, who at times
even commanded the princes to march against the Mussul-
mans. Thus the crusades were the work of the papacy, and,
as will be seen, it was in spite of the papacy that in 1270,
exhausted Europe gave up the plan of destroying the Mussul-
man power. Let us only add that it was the cries of alarm
coming from Constantinople which inspired Gregory VII. with
the plan, and Urban II. with its execution.

Thus inspired by the papacy, the crusades had a religious
object; they were intended to drive the Mussulmans from
the Holy Land, and to recover the tomb of Christ which had
fallen into their hands. Nevertheless, certain qualifications
are necessary here. Jerusalem, which had been taken by the
Persians and given over to pillage (614), and reconquered
by the emperor Heraclius (629), fell into the power of the
Caliph Omar (637), and escaped Arab domination only to pass
under the yoke of the Seljuk Turks, who four centuries later
( 1070) made the conquest of Syria. It was then that the
Greek emperors Michael VII. and Alexis Comnenius called on
the papacy for help, not for the tomb of Christ, which had
only changed masters, and with which they were not pre-
occupied, but for themselves. They prayed Rome to aid
them to arrest the invading advance of the Turks; and to
cause their request to be granted they promised to bring to
an end the schism which had been effected by Michael
Cærularius in 1054. Gregory VII., whose dream was to
make the papacy a universal empire, eagerly accepted this
proposal. ² If political circumstances had afforded another
theatre for his immense political activity, he would have

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