A vast multitude of determined men filled not only
Clermont but the adjacent towns and villages, even sleeping in the fields,
although the weather was bitterly cold, who demanded to know the policy of
the Church. Urban seems to have procrastinated as long as he safely could,
but, at length, at the tenth session, he produced Peter on the platform,
clad as a pilgrim, and, after Peter had spoken, he proclaimed the war.
Urban declined, however, to command the army. The only effective force
which marched was a body of laymen, organized and led by laymen, who in
1099 carried Jerusalem by an ordinary assault. In Jerusalem they found the
cross and the sepulchre, and with these relics as the foundation of their
power, the laity began an experiment which lasted eighty-eight years,
ending in 1187 with the battle of Tiberias. At Tiberias the infidels
defeated the Christians, captured their king and their cross, and shortly
afterward seized the tomb.
If the eleventh-century mind had been as rigid as the Roman mind of the
first century, mediaeval civilization could hardly, after the collapse of
the crusades, have failed to degenerate as Roman civilization degenerated
after the defeat of Varus. Being more elastic, it began, under an
increased tension, to develop new phases of thought. The effort was indeed
prodigious and the absolute movement possibly slow, but a change of
intellectual attitude may be detected almost contemporaneously with the
fall of the Latin kingdom in Palestine.
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