The Christians heard, paused in their headlong flight, and seeing the red cross flag streaming from the citadel, cried, "God has had mercy on us and has driven away the barbarians."
Thousands of them at once returned, and directly they had entered their homes, the foemen rushed upon them from secret hiding-places and killed or threw into prison every person they found.
In a great pitched battle fought near Gaza the allied armies of the Moslems and the Christians were almost entirely destroyed. Amongst the prisoners was the Prince of Joppa, who was forthwith led before the walls of his own city, placed upon a cross, and threatened with instant death if he would not command his people to surrender. But this brave man only cried to the men upon the walls, "It is your duty to defend this Christian city, and mine to die for Christ," and so, rather than surrender, he suffered death at the hands of a howling mob.
Nevertheless, Joppa was taken, and every other Christian city; and not until the rulers of Egypt and Syria united with each other as well as with the few Christians left, was there any hope of driving the invaders from the land. But even when this was at length accomplished the Holy City remained in the hands of Islam, and all that the Seventh Crusade had accomplished was entirely swept away.
CHAPTER XIX
The Crusade of St Louis
(The Eighth Crusade)
Some grey crusading knight austere
Who bore St Louis company
And came home hurt to death....
MATTHEW ARNOLD: A Southern Night.
A hundred years earlier, the news of the destruction of Jerusalem would have stricken all Europe with horror and roused her to action. It was not so now. That earlier fervour of religion which had sent pilgrims rejoicing to an almost certain death had died away, and had been replaced by a more practical form of faith which found its outlet in a zeal for converting the souls of men, and healing their bodies, rather than in a thirst for the blood of infidels.