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are enjoyed without any grateful remembrance, history has condescended to notice the more apparent luxuries of silk and sugar, which were transported into Italy from Greece and Egypt. But the intellectual wants of the Latins were more slowly felt and supplied; the ardour of studious curiosity was awakened in Europe by different causes and more recent events; and, in the age of the crusades, they viewed with careless indifference the literature of the Greeks and Arabians. Some rudiments of mathematical and medicinal knowledge might be imparted in practice and in figures; necessity might produce some interpreters for the grosser business of merchants and soldiers; but the commerce of the Orientals had not diffused the study and knowledge of their languages in the schools of Europe.* If a similar principle of religion repulsed the idiom of the Koran, it should have excited their patience and curiosity to understand the original text of the gospel; and the same grammar would have unfolded the sense of Plato and the beauties of Homer. Yet in a reign of sixty years, the Latins of Constantinople disdained the speech and learning of their subjects; and the manuscripts were the only treasures which the natives might enjoy without rapine or envy. Aristotle was indeed the oracle of the Western universities, but it was a barbarous Aristotle; and, instead of ascending to the fountain head, his Latin votaries humbly accepted a corrupt and remote version from the Jews and Moors of Andalusia. The principle of the crusades was a savage fanaticism; and the most important effects were analogous to the cause. Each pilgrim was ambitious to return with his sacred spoils, the relics of Greece and Palestine ;† and each relic was preceded and followed by a train of miracles

rude machinery. Such a people hearing of the service rendered to other lands by water-mills, which their want of running streams denied to them, are the most likely to have learned how to avail themselves of the power which currents of air afforded. The forests of windmills that surround Dutch towns, and the various purposes to which they are auxiliary, are even now the wonder of travellers.—ED.]

* See the complaints of Roger Bacon. (Biographia Britannica, vol. i. p. 418, Kippis's edition.) If Bacon himself, or Gerbert, understood some Greeks, they were prodigies, and owed nothing to the commerce of the East. + Such was the opinion of the great Leibnitz (Œuvres de Fontenelle, tom. v. p. 458), a master of the history of the middle ages. I shall only instance the pedigree of the

and visions. The belief of the Catholics was corrupted by new legends, their practice by new superstitions; and the establishment of the inquisition, the mendicant orders of monks and friars, the last abuse of indulgences, and the final progress of idolatry, flowed from the baleful fountain of the holy war. The active spirit of the Latins preyed on the vitals of their reason and religion; and if the ninth and tenth centuries were the times of darkness, the thirteenth and fourteenth were the age of absurdity and fable.

In the profession of Christianity, in the cultivation of a fertile land, the Northern conquerors of the Roman empire insensibly mingled with the provincials, and rekindled the embers of the arts of antiquity. Their settlements about the age of Charlemagne had acquired some degree of order and stability, when they were overwhelmed by new swarms of invaders, the Normans, Saracens,* and Hungarians, who replunged the Western countries of Europe into their former state of anarchy and barbarism. About the eleventh century, the second tempest had subsided by the expulsion or conversion of the enemies of Christendom; the tide of civilization, which had so long ebbed, began to flow with a steady and accelerated course; and a fairer prospect was opened to the hopes and efforts of the rising generations. Great was the increase, and rapid the progress, during the two hundred years of the crusades; and some philosophers have applauded the propitious influence of these holy wars, which appear to me to have checked rather than forwarded the maturity of Europe.† The lives and labours of millions,

Carmelites, and the flight of the house of Loretto, which were both derived from Palestine. * If I rank the Saracens with the Barbarians, it is only relative to their wars, or rather inroads, in Italy and France, where their sole purpose was to plunder and destroy. On this interesting subject, the progress of society in Europe, a strong ray of philosophic light has broken from Scotland in our own times; and it is with private, as well as public regard, that I repeat the names of Hume, Robertson, and Adam Smith. [M. Guizot here cites Heeren's prize Essay on the Influence of the Crusades, in which that able writer has developed, with a philosophy not less sagacious than erudite, the happy, though remote, effect of these wars. The great minds here adduced, have ably shown how a portion of Europe emerged from the gloom in which for a thousand years it had been plunged; Mr. Hallam in his History of the Middle Ages, has equally illustrated the same subject; nor must we forget how much we owe to Gibbon himself. They, however, regarded the

which were buried in the East, would have been more profit. ably employed in the improvement of their native country; the accumulated stock of industry and wealth would have overflowed in navigation and trade; and the Latins would have been enriched and enlightened by a pure and friendly correspondence with the climates of the East. In one respect I can indeed perceive the accidental operation of the crusades, not so much in producing a benefit as in removing an evil. The larger portion of the inhabitants of Europe was chained to the soil, without freedom, or property, or knowledge; and the two orders of ecclesiastics and nobles, whose numbers were comparatively small, alone deserved the name of citizens and men. This oppressive system was supported by the arts of the clergy and the swords of the barons. The authority of the priests operated in the darker ages as a salutary antidote; they prevented the total extinction of letters, mitigated the fierceness of the times, sheltered the poor and defenceless, and preserved or revived the peace and order of civil society. But the independence, rapine, and discord, of the feudal lords, were unmixed with any semblance of good; and every hope of industry and improvement was crushed by the iron weight of the martial aristocracy. Among the causes that undermined that Gothic edifice, a conspicuous place must be allowed to the crusades. The estates of the barons were dissipated, and their race was often extinguished, in these costly and perilous expeditions. Their poverty extorted from their pride those preceding period as a natural alternation of darkness with light, an ordained period of repose for wearied faculty. But we think the obscurity was artificial, and the returning morn only the removal of intruded vapours that had hidden a never-setting sun; and believe with Gibbon, that but for this obscuration, we might have reached a much higher point of intellectual progress. Among the direct consequences of the crusades, none is so prominent and undeniable, as the advance of papal aggrandizement. This increase of an influence, the most obstructive of any to social improvement-the deadliest paralyzer of activity and the most malignant foe of reason-is an evil of such magnitude as is not to be compensated by any accidental good. The eventual triumph of the Gothic mind over this monster mischief, may have been col laterally aided by circumstances arising out of the crusades. But these had not the impellent virtue which is by some ascribed to them. There was nothing more in them than may be found in a greater or less degree in the events of all wars, especially those which first brought the Barbarian tribes into the abodes of civilization.— ED.]

charters of freedom which unlocked the fetters of the slave, secured the farm of the peasant and the shop of the artificer, and gradually restored a substance and a soul to the most numerous and useful part of the community. The conflagration which destroyed the tall and barren trees of the forest, gave air and scope to the vegetation of the smaller and nutritive plants of the soil.

Digression on the family of Courtenay.

THE purple of three emperors who have reigned at Constantinople will authorise or excuse a digression on the origin and singular fortunes of the house of ČOURTENAY,* in the three principal branches, I. Of Edessa; II. Of France; III. Of England; of which the last only has survived the revolutions of eight hundred years.

I. Before the introduction of trade, which scatters riches, and of knowledge, which dispels prejudice, the prerogative of birth is most strongly felt and most humbly acknowiedged. In every age, the laws and manners of the Germans have discriminated the ranks of society; the dukes and counts, who shared the empire of Charlemagne, converted their office to an inheritance; and to his children each feudal lord bequeathed his honour and his sword. The proudest families are content to lose, in the darkness of the middle ages, the tree of their pedigree, which, however deep and lofty, must ultimately rise from a plebeian root; and their historians must descend ten centuries below the Christian era, before they can ascertain any lineal succession by the evidence of surnames, of arms, and of authentic records. With the first rays of light,t we discern the nobility and opulence of Atho, a French knight; his nobility, in

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* I have applied, but not confined, myself to A genealogical History of the noble and illustrious family of Courtenay, by Ezra Cleaveland, tutor to Sir William Courtenay, and rector of Honiton, Exon. 1735. in folio. The first part is extracted from William of Tyre; the second from Bouchet's French History; and the third from various memorials, public, provincial, and private, of the Courtenays of Devonshire. The rector of Honiton has more gratitude than industry, and more industry than criticism. The primitive record

of the family is a passage of the continuator of Aimoin, a monk of

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the rank and title of a nameless father; his opulence, in the foundation of the castle of Courtenay in the district of Gatinois, about fifty-six miles to the south of Paris. From the reign of Robert, the son of Hugh Capet, the barons of Courtenay are conspicuous among the immediate vassals of the crown, and Joscelin, the grandson of Atho and a noble dame, is enrolled among the heroes of the first crusade. A domestic alliance (their mothers were sisters) attached him to the standard of Baldwin of Bruges, the second count of Edessa; a princely fief, which he was worthy to receive, and able to maintain, announces the number of his martial followers; and after the departure of his cousin, Joscelin himself was invested with the county of Edessa on both sides of the Euphrates. By economy in peace, his territories were replenished with Latin and Syrian subjects; his magazines with corn, wine, and oil; his castles with gold and silver, with arms and horses. In a holy warfare of thirty years, he was alternately a conqueror and a captive; but he died like a soldier, in a horse-litter at the head of his troops; and his last glance beheld the flight of the Turkish invaders who had presumed on his age and infirmities. His son and successor, of the same name, was less deficient in valour than in vigilance; but he sometimes forgot that dominion is acquired and maintained by the same arts. He challenged the hostility of the Turks, without securing the friendship of the prince of Antioch; and amidst the peaceful luxury of Turbessel, in Syria,* Joscelin neglected the defence of the Christian frontier beyond the Euphrates. In his absence, Zenghi, the first of the Atabeks, besieged and stormed his capital, Edessa, which was feebly defended by a timorous and disloyal crowd of Orientals; the Franks were oppressed in a bold attempt for its recovery, and Courtenay ended his days in the prison of Aleppo. He still left a fair and ample patrimony. But the victorious Turks oppressed on all sides the weakness of a widow and orphan; and for the equivalent of an annual pension, they resigned to the Greek emperor the charge of defending, and the shame of losing, the last relics of the Latin conquest. The countess Fleury, who wrote in the twelfth century. See his Chronicle in the Historians of France (tom. xi. p. 276). * Turbessel, or, as it is now styled, Telbesher, is fixed by D'Anville four-and-twenty miles from the great passage over the Euphrates at Zeugma

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