RETURN OF CRUSADERS. 285 count of which town was himself assassinated, remained the only bulwark of the kingdom. The eyes of Palestine were turned again upon Europe. But from Europe little help could now be expected. Louis, returning defeated and inglorious, had been hailed as a conqueror. Medals were struck in his honour, with the lying legend— lied inviclo ab Oriente reduci ί! rementes lajtitia cives. And, though he promised to lead another Crusade, bis conscience was appeased by his pilgrimage, and his love of praise was satisfied by the honours he received. Therefore he went no more. Moreover, two new methods of crusading were discovered, nearer home, and far more profitable. In the north of Germany lay a large and fertile country, inhabited wholly by pagans. Why not conquer that, and reduce so fair a land to. Christianity ? And in Spain, so close at hand for pious Frenchmen, were vast provinces, rich beyond measure, all in the hands of those very Saracens whom they were asked to go all the way to Palestine in order to fight. And then there died both Bernard and Suger, the sagacious Suger, who saw the disgrace which had fallen on the Christian arms, and wished to repair it by sending out another army in place of that which Louis had madly thrown away. The boundaries of poor young Baldwin's kingdom were greatly contracted. Nothing now remained but what we may call Palestine proper, with a dubious and tottering hold on a few outlying towns. Fifty years had been sufficient to turn the sons of the rough and straightforward soldiers of Godfrey, whose chief fault seems to have been their ungovernable fits of rage, into crafty and double-faced Syrians, slothful and sensual, careless of aught but their own interests, and brave only when glory, to which they still clung, could be got out of it. Nor