COMMERCIAL RELATIONS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 47
which is well manifested in the words of St. Bernard, respecting the soldiers of the 2nd crusades, when he says, “In that countless multitude you will find few except the utterly wicked and impious, the sacrilegious, homicides, and perjurers, whose departure is a double gain. Europe rejoices to lose them and Palestine to gain them: They are useful in both ways, in their absence from here and their presence there.” [1] The discontented noble, the restless who was eager to shun reponsibilities and the criminal and the sinful had their points of view of the crusades and the objectives as had the religiously devout and naturally romantic. But “the cunning traders and sea men of the commercial republics looked on the crusaders with very different eyes from the average catholic lords and labourers of the inland districts: they were not without religious enthusiasm but they cultivated it rather as a useful commodity than as an inevitable state of feeling ; and they felt but little of the blind hatred against Islam, and the passionate veneration for the Gospel sites, which sincerely animated the great body of the warriors and pilgrims they conveyed to Palesttine. Merchantile interest was never absent from the minds of those who governed, bought, or sold in Venice and Pisa, in Genoa and Amalfi.” [2] The results of the Crusades were contrary to expectation. They achieved what was perhaps never intended by the Crusaders and the gain was by no means small. “The heyday of the crusading power on land was also the heyday of the maritime prosperity of many western cities : and at the conclusion of the religious wars the main results of the struggle was to be found in the expansion of the Christain trade, and in the assimilation of no small part of oriental and moorish civilization. For the meeting of east and west in this tremendous conflict, brought little permanent gain to Europe and the Catholic world, in the political sense : Through the medium of commerce, on the other hand it directed the energies of the Christian nations to their true future. The frontal attack of the crusaders was unsuccessful, but the crusading struggle imported a new culture and material prosperity, an increased knowledge, an immensely extended wealth, a restless but obstinate ambition, whose results were seen in the Renaissance of the
1 Quoted by Brasely and Robinson in “ Outlines of European History” Part I, p. 471.
2 Brasely—Vol. II , p. 408.