The Rise and Decline of the Muslim Civilization 45
cessor, with the result that, while the transfusion of warm and
living blood which he administered to the Muslim religion averted
a fatal outcome of its crisis, he could not arrest the creeping paraly-
sis, the choking of the spirit by the letter, which in the following
centuries spread progressively over its members. The only vitality
that survived was in the mystics, and as the centuries passed they
diverged ever further from orthodoxy into extravagance or vulgar
chicanery. Meanwhile, original scientific and scholarly speculation
tended to be abandoned for less original and intellectually-exacting
pursuits, such as the compilation of encyclopaedias and universal
histories; and even the Nizamiya was devoted to the amassing of
conventional learning rather than the promotion of research.
The Seljuk Turkish unification of the greater part of the Middle
East lasted less than forty years. Immediately after 1092 their
empire broke up into independent Seljuk principalities, leaving
Syria and Palestine a crazy quilt of Turkish and Arab petty states.
Christian Europe, which saw in the pilgrimage to the Holy Land a
means of absolution from, the most grievous sins, and had enjoyed
access to the Holy Places with only the minimum of molestation
from the Fatimids and their predecessors, had found that a genera-
tion of warfare between the Seljuks and the Fatimids had made
travel more hazardous for the pilgrims. After the Seljuk conquest
of Asia Minor the Byzantine Emperor had appealed to the Pope
for a Christian alliance against Islam. The energetic Nordic peoples
who dominated Western Europe were seeking new outlets for
their warlike instincts, and now that the expulsion of the Muslims
from Spain was making progress, they were attracted further
afield. The feudal laws of succession produced a numerous class of
landless younger sons who, with other adventurers, were eager to
carve out for themselves estates in new lands. The Italian and other
rising commercial cities of the Mediterranean were anxious to
develop a larger trade in the luxury products of the Levant and
further Asia. All these martial and material impulses were canal-
ized, directed, and consecrated by the powerful influence of the
Church into the First Crusade, which took the Levant by storm in
1099-
The importance of the Crusades in the cultural history of
Western Europe can hardly be overestimated for their effect in
throwing open the windows of men's minds to the influences of the
Middle East, whose level of civilization was still far higher than