The second Crusade was ended. Exploits as heroic as those in the first Crusade, under Godfrey of Bouillon, had been performed, but no battles as glorious as those in the first had been fought. It was a difficult task to wrest Palestine from the domination of the Turks. Scarcely the tenth part of the stout champions who set out from the various provinces of France and Germany returned, and of this little remnant many were exhausted by marches, enfeebled by disease, and doomed to speedy death. Most of the castles resounded with lamentations over the death of their masters. Widows and orphans stood wringing their hands around catafalques in front of the altars in the castle chapels, as the chaplains prayed for the souls of the noble ones who had given their lives for the Christian religion in the far distant wastes of Asia.
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