rate among males was particularly heavy. Many Frankish couples seem to have proved completely sterile. Thus Frankish settler-families tended to die out after a generation or two. In the twelfth century there was a second, then a third, wave of settlers. These, too, were decimated. There was no continuous process of reinforcing emigration, as the West learned to develop in the seventeenth century when populating America. Most of the intending emigrants were too poor. They could just about afford the land-route, where they could live off charity, but it was never made secure. The sea-route, run by Venice, Genoa and other Italian cityStates, was too expensive for most. Those going by sea had to sleep on their chests, which also served as their coffins if they died. Each had a space six feet by two, marked in chalk. The conditions were horrific; even so, few could afford the fare. Why did not the maritime states develop cheaper forms of masstransport? The answer is that they preferred to engage in highly lucrative trading, thus adumbrating the colonial merchant adventurer companies which developed in the late sixteenth century. They made huge profits shipping arms to the Moslems: in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries weapons were the Christians’ chief exports to their ideological enemies. They also ran the Egyptian slave-trade on behalf of the Moslems. By comparison, ferrying Christian emigrants to make the colonies viable brought a poor yield. Of course the Church itself, out of its huge resources, should have financed emigration. But the idea does not seem to have occurred to it, any more than the idea of creating missionary orders, to achieve by the word what the knights were manifestly failing to achieve by the sword. The whole crusading movement was dogged by intellectual bankruptcy. Among the Outremer barons and their docile clergy there was nothing which could conceivably be called an intellectual elite. Nor had they any economic contribution to make. They made no attempt to introduce a Cistercian-style pioneer farming order. Most of the land continued to be farmed by Moslems, whose surpluses were then milked by the Latin baronage. Thus Outremer was chronically short of cash; it ran at a huge deficit, which had to be supplied by the West. This evoked growing criticism. Matthew Paris, for instance, claimed that the Hospitallers alone possessed 19,000 manors in Europe. This was untrue, but it is clear that it took a large landed investment in the West to keep even one knight in action in the Holy Land. Despite their wealth, the two main military orders could never maintain more than 600 knights together. A roughly similar number of knights was provided by Outremer's feudal levy of the barons. These 1,200 knights (at maximum) were backed up by a total, at any one time, of about 10,000 sergeants. None of these men could be replaced at short notice. There were no reserves. The crusaders built huge castles, which were exceedingly difficult to take when fully manned and supplied. But if they manned the castles, they could not field an army. If they fielded an army, the castles had to be stripped: and if the army was heavily defeated, there was nothing to replace it, the castles fell, and the Latin kingdoms became untenable. This, in the end, is more or less what happened. After the twelfth century, the crusading idea lost its appeal in the West. Population was no longer rising at the same rate, and the Surplus, in France, tended to drift instead to the towns; in Germany, led by the Teutonic knights who had transferred their activities to Prussia and Poland, it pushed to the east. After about 1310 population actually fell, and from the mid fourteenth century there was an acute labour shortage in Europe. Population did not begin to expand again significantly until the sixteenth century, when emigration was resumed, but in a westerly direction. But the decline of the crusade was due to more than demographic factors. By the end of the twelfth century some Europeans, at least, rejected the crude popular theology of the crusading movement. Wolframe von Eschenbach, the lay author of Parsifal, also produced, about 1210, the Willehalm, which deals with crusading but differs markedly in tone from the Rolandslied, from the mid twelfth century, which accepted the crusading ethic uncritically and happily rejoiced at heathen being slaughtered like cattle. In the Willehalm, the hero's wife is a converted Saracen, and argues that the infidel are God's children, urging: ‘Hear the counsel of a simple woman and spare God's handiwork.’ Here the emphasis is anti-Augustinian. The author stresses that everyone has a soul to be saved, and that the Church fas a universalist mission; the poem is universalist in another sense - perhaps 719