Raymond opened a passage for his men and escaped to Tripoli, where he died of grief. So long as a single group of horsemen remained, they returned to the charge; but it melted before the Saracens like wax before a blazing furnace. Finally the king's standard fell to rise no more. Guy de Lusignan was made a prisoner, and Saladin, taking the sword of the King of Jerusalem from the hands of the man who brought it to him, dismounted from his horse, and, kneeling down, gave thanks to Mohammed for the victory.
Never did Christians in Palestine or elsewhere suffer such a defeat. "In looking over the number of the dead," says an eye-witness, "one could not credit the fact that any prisoners had been made; in looking upon the prisoners one could not believe that there were any dead."
The king, after having sworn to renounce his kingdom, was sent to Damascus. All the chevaliers of the Temple and the Hospitallers lost their heads. Saladin, fearing that his soldiers might feel the touch of that pity which left him unmoved, offered fifty gold pieces for the head of every one of these soldiers-monks which should be brought to him.
Scarcely a thousand men were left out of the whole Christian army. The Arab authors say that prisoners were sold for a pair of sandals, and that they exposed the heads of the Christians like melons in Damascus.
Monseigneur Mislin, in his beautiful book, "Les Saints Lieux," says that a year after this horrible carnage, in crossing the field of Hittin, he still found heaps of bones, and that the mountains and valleys adjoining were covered with remains which wild beasts had dragged thither.
After the battle of Mount Tabor the jackals of the plain of Esdrelon had no need to envy the hyenas of the mountain of Tiberias.