In spite of these and other reasons the Christians of
Europe might have continued much longer their efforts to recover the Holy Land,
had they not lost faith in the movement. But after two centuries the old
crusading enthusiasm died out, the old ideal of the crusade as "the way of
God" lost its spell. Men had begun to think less of winning future
salvation by visits to distant shrines and to think more of their present
duties to the world about them. They came to believe that Jerusalem could best
be won as Christ and the Apostles had won it—"by love, by prayers, and by
the shedding of tears."
INFLUENCE OF THE CRUSADES ON FEUDALISM
The crusades could not fail to affect in many ways the
life of western Europe. For instance, they helped to undermine feudalism.
Thousands of barons and knights mortgaged or sold their lands in order to raise
money for a crusading expedition. Thousands more perished in Syria and their
estates, through failure of heirs, reverted to the crown. Moreover, private
warfare, that curse of the Middle Ages, also tended to die out with the
departure for the Holy Land of so many turbulent feudal lords. Their decline in
both numbers and influence, and the corresponding growth of the royal
authority, may best be traced in the changes that came about in France, the
original home of the crusading movement.
