FOOTNOTES

[173] It was very seldom that the Christians thought of converting the Mussulmans. When the sword failed, then they resorted to arguments. The occasion will excuse us from departing from chronological order, and saying, that in the year 1285, Pope Honorius IV in his design to convert the Saracens to Christianity, wished to establish schools at Paris for the tuition of people in the Arabic and other oriental languages, agreeably to the intentions of his predecessors. In every subsequent project for a crusade, it was always proposed to instruct the Saracens sword in hand. The Council of Vienne in 1312 recommended the conversion of the infidels, and the re-establishment of schools, as the way to recover the Holy Land. It was accordingly ordered that there should be professors of the Hebrew, Chaldaic, and Arabic tongues in Rome, Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca; and that the learned should translate into Latin the best Arabic books. It was not till the time of Francis I that this decree was acted upon. He founded the royal college, and sent even into the East for books.

2[74] The oriental chronicle says that the French lost in this defeat, besides the brother of the king, fourteen hundred knights.

3[75] De Joinville[f] quotes the Saracens as saying that “if Mohammed had allowed them to suffer the manifold evils that God had caused the king to undergo, they would never have had any confidence in him, nor paid him their adorations.”

4[76] “Pure paganism and native infidelity, like white cloth, will take the tincture of Christianity; whereas the Turks are soiled and stained with the irreligious religion of Mohammedanism, which first must with great pains be scoured out of them.”--FULLER.[d]

5[77] Le Blanc makes the ransom of St. Louis equivalent to seven millions of livres modern French money [£280,000 or $1,400,000].

6[78] See Matthew of Paris[c] and also Fuller.[d] “About this time (1250) many thousands of the English were resolved for the holy war, and would needs have been gone, had not the king strictly guarded his ports, and kept his kingdom from running away out of doors. The king promised he would go with them; and hereupon got a mass of money from them for this journey. Some say that he never intended it, and that this only was a trick to stroke the skittish cow to get down her milk. His stubborn subjects said that they would tarry for his company till midsummer, and no longer. Thus they weighed out their obedience with their own scales; and the king stood to their allowance. But hearing of the ill success of the French, both prince and people altered their resolution, who had come too late to help the French in their distress, and too soon to bring themselves into the same misery.”

7[79] “It is storied,” says Fuller,[d] “how Eleanor, his lady, sucked all the poison out of his wounds without doing any harm to herself. So sovereign a remedy is a woman’s tongue, anointed with the virtue of loving affection. Pity it is that so pretty a story should not be true (with all the miracles in love’s legends), and sure he shall get himself no credit, who undertaketh to confute a passage so sounding to the honour of the sex. Yet can it not stand with what others have written.”

8[80] Henry when young had endeavoured to implant Christianity in Lithuania _vi et armis_. When king he gained the friendship of the clergy by aiding them to put down the followers of Wycliffe.

9[81] [See also the History of the Papacy for a full account of this tragedy.]

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