As part of our common heritage of misunderstandings from the past, the term "Crusader" has survived as a designation of honor and virtue. This is rather incredible, considering that the original crusaders were little more than loosely organized mobs of cutthroats. Seldom in history have such vicious gangs of self-opinionated invaders robbed and slaughtered in such righteousness. If there is any lesson to be learned from the crusaders, it must be that the lowest acts of cruelty and violence can be motivated and hidden by the loftiest of ideals. Excesses are usually dangerous to everyone, and nothing goes to excess like religious zeal, since there is no internal check on power employed in a just cause.

One unanticipated boon of the Crusades for the Western world was the greater knowledge and awareness of peoples and cultures brought back by the brigands who returned, and this became a contributing factor to the outburst of secular enthusiasm for life which characterized the Renaissance. The fifteenth century saw a rebirth of interest in all dimensions of Western culture. Of particular interest to us was the renaissance in stupidity. No longer was idiotic irrelevance confined to scholastic arguments and monastic debates. A universe beckoned, and stupidity rushed out to fill the void. While, for the previous ten centuries, stupidity had been part of the exclusive domain of the Church, it suddenly was applied to any number of worldly pursuits.

Stupidity emanated like a burst of miasma from the stale closet of theology into the chaos and confusion of daily life. There was stupidity in exploration, stupidity in invention, stupidity in statecraft, medicine, art and war. Whereas until this age, only monks had been misinformed, Gutenberg's press made it possible for everyone to be misinformed. This was a tumultuous period when the zenith achieved in artistic expression was matched by the nadir attained in political morality. Whatever else it was, this was the period when a new religion of humanism and interest in worldly affairs challenged and to a degree supplanted the dogma of the Church and concern with the life hereafter.

As leaders of the Church, the Popes of this period (1470-1530) might be judged as unfortunate examples of Christian amorality. However, that would be to miss the point that they had eagerly embraced the secular norms of the age as standards for judging their behavior. They never did comprehend their successes according to their new standards designated them as failures to people who clung devoutly to the old. Their new schema of dedication to worldly achievement made them blind and deaf to the institutional dissonance and dissatisfaction their behavior engendered

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