The assault was furious and met with equal valor. Within and without, the walls were fairly buttressed with the bodies of the fallen. It was not until the principal gate was undermined, the ramparts tottering, and the soldiers of Saladin occupying some of the towers, that Balian d’Iselin, the commandant, proposed to accept the conditions the Christians had rejected before the fight. “It is too late,” replied Saladin, pointing to his yellow banners, which proclaimed his occupancy of many places along the walls. “Very well,” replied Balian; “we will destroy the city. The mosque of Omar, and the mysterious Stone of Jacob which you worship, shall be pounded into dust. Five thousand Moslems whom we retain shall be killed. We will then slay with our own hands our wives and children, and march out to you with fire and sword. Not one of us will go to paradise until he has sent ten Mussulmans to hell.” Saladin again bowed to the bravery which he might have punished, and accepted the capitulation (October 2, 1187).
The Christian warriors were permitted to retire to Tripoli or Tyre, cities as yet unconquered by Saladin. The inhabitants were to be ransomed at a nominal sum of money for each. Many, however, in their poverty could not produce the required amount. The fact, reported to the victor, led to a deed on his part which showed his natural kindliness, together with the exactness of his rule. The ransom money could not be remitted; it belonged of right to the men whose heroism had been blessed of Allah in taking the city. Saladin and his brother, Malek-Ahdel, paid from their own purses the redemption money for several thousand Christians, who otherwise, according to the usages of war, would have become the slaves of their conquerors.
On the day for the evacuation of the city Saladin erected his throne at the Gate of David to review the wretched army of the vanquished as it passed out. First came the patriarch and priests, carrying the sacred vessels and treasures of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Next followed Queen Sibylla with the remnant of her court. Saladin saluted her with great courtesy, and added words of seemingly genuine consolation as he noted her grief. Mothers carried their children, and strong men bore the aged and sick in their arms. Some paused to address the sultan, asking that members of their families from whom they were separated might be restored to them. Saladin instantly ordered that in no case should children be separated from their mothers, nor husbands from their wives. He permitted the Hospitallers to remain in the city on condition of their resuming those duties which their order was originally instituted to perform, and committed to them the care of the sick who could not endure being removed. Many writers are disposed to analyze the motives of Saladin and to attribute his clemency to politic foresight in subduing the hatred as well as the arms of his enemies. But surely the annals of war are too barren of such acts of humanity to allow us to mar the beauty of the simple narration; and the virtues of Christians in such circumstances have not been so resplendent that they may not emulate the spirit of one who was their noblest foe.
The new lord of Jerusalem purged the sacred city of what to him was the taint of idolatry, the worship of Jesus. The mosque of Omar on the temple site was washed within and without with rose-water. The pulpit which Nourredin had made with his own hands was erected by the side of the mihrab, towards which the people prayed as indicating the direction of Mecca. The chief imam preached from it on the glories of Saladin, “the resplendent star of Allah,” on the redemption of Jerusalem, from which Mohammed had made his miraculous night journey to Mecca, and on the holy war, which must be continued until “all the branches of impiety should be cut” from the tree of life.
The joy of the Moslem world had its refrain in the wails of Europe. It is said that Pope Urban III., on hearing the news, died of a broken heart. The minstrels composed lamentations as the captives did by the rivers of Babylon. Courts and churches were draped in mourning. The superstitious saw tears fall from the eyes of the wooden and stone saints that ornamented the churches. The general gloom was described by one who felt it as “like the darkness over the earth from the sixth to the ninth hour, when Christ was crucified.”
CHAPTER XXVII.
EUROPE BETWEEN THE SECOND AND THIRD CRUSADES—SUPERSTITION—THE WALDENSES—DEGRADATION OF THE PAPACY—FRANCE UNDER LOUIS—ENGLAND UNDER HENRY II.—RICHARD CŒUR DE LION.
Forty years had elapsed since the ill-fated crusade of Louis VII. and Conrad (1147) to avenge the capture of Edessa by Zenghi, and the crowning calamity, the fall of Jerusalem into the hands of Saladin (1187). We may briefly note some of the conditions and changes in Europe during this period.
Men were thinking, though the dense darkness of mediæval night yet remained, and the spectres of superstition which inhabited the human mind were as many and as strange as ever. For example, the year 1186 was looked for with alarm by the people of northern Europe, because of the predictions of astrologers that certain conjunctions of the stars then betokened dire evils to mankind. In the language of a contemporary: “The planets being in an aërial and windy sign, ... there shall arise in the East a mighty wind, and with its stormy blasts it shall blacken the air and corrupt it with poisonous stench.... The wind shall raise aloft the sands and dust from the face of the earth, and utterly overwhelm such cities as Mecca, Baldac [Bagdad], and Babylon. The regions of Egypt and Ethiopia shall become almost uninhabitable. In the West shall arise dissensions, raised by the wind, and seditions of the people shall take place; and there shall be one of them who shall levy armies innumerable, and shall wage war on the shores of the waters, on which a slaughter so vast will take place that the flow of blood will equal the surging waves. This conjunction signifies the mutation of kingdoms, the superiority of the Franks, the destruction of the Saracenic race, together with longer life to those who shall be born hereafter.”
Other astrologers blew their star-blasts of similar warning. More startling still were the reported words of a pious monk, which he chanted while in a trance, confirming the astrologers with rhapsodic quotations from Scripture and the Greek mythologists. The popular consternation was somewhat allayed by Pharamella the Moor, whose humanity was stronger than his religious bigotry, and led him to write to the Christian Bishop of Toledo, from the tower on which he was watching the stars, that their prognostications of the “aërial or windy signs” were wrong; but that there would be sufficient force of evil abroad in the atmosphere to produce “scanty vintage, crops of only moderate average, much slaughter by the sword, and many shipwrecks.” The most serious chroniclers of the time still associated as effect and cause the rise and fall of kings and the issue of battles with natural phenomena of comets, eclipses, and storms. Epidemic madness continued to see celestial warriors through the dust of earthly combat, and the ubiquitous presence of the mother of God in churches and cells, in the silence of the roadway, and, in company with Mary Magdalene, trudging along amid bands of pilgrims. Men visited purgatory and returned to describe its burning floor and the writhing shapes of its inhabitants. Indeed, the human mind was not yet sufficiently awake to know that it had been dreaming.
Yet here and there were those who threw off the age delusion. The logic of Abélard and the love of liberty voiced by Arnold of Brescia roused more than one of the sleepers, who kept awake and jostled their fellows.