There were no more great Crusades. Considerable bands of private adventurers still continued to move eastward; but disaster and disgrace attended every effort, and Europe at last became disheartened when the bones of two millions of her sons lay whitened on the plains of Asia, and so little had been accomplished. Nevertheless, in the year 1202, Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was able to raise another considerable army for the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre; but having reached Constantinople at a time when there was a dispute in the succession to the throne, he readily laid aside the project of the Crusade, took part in the quarrel, and in the course of five months he was himself the emperor. The citizens of Venice in Italy, who had lent their vessels for this enterprise, shared in the triumphs of the piratical Crusaders: they obtained the Isle of Candia, or Crete. Baldwin, however, was soon driven from the throne, and murdered; though the Latins, as his successors from the West were called, kept possession of Constantinople for fifty-seven years.
At this period (1227) a great revolution took place in Asia. Ghenghis Khan, at the head of a body of Tartars, broke down from the north upon Persia and Syria, and massacred indiscriminately Turks, Jews, and Christians, who opposed them. The European settlements in Palestine must soon have yielded to these invaders, had not their fate been for a while retarded by the last attempt at a Crusade under Louis IX of France. This prince, summoned, as he believed, by Heaven, after four years’ preparation set out for the Holy Land with his queen, his three brothers, and all the knights of France (1248). His army began their enterprise, and we may say ended it also, by an unsuccessful attack on Egypt. The king went home, and reigned prosperously and wisely for thirteen years; but the same frenzy again taking possession of him, he embarked on a Crusade against the Moors in Africa, where his army was destroyed by a pestilence, and he himself became its victim (1270).
Before the end of the thirteenth century (1291) the Christians were driven out of all their Asiatic possessions. ‘The only common enterprise,’ says Robertson, ‘in which the European nations were engaged, and which they all undertook with equal ardor, remains a singular monument of human folly.’