‘We cannot yield the city in which our God died. Still less can we sell it to you.’
By and by, when they saw that they could not hold out against Saladin, they offered to agree to what he had said.
‘It is too late,’ replied Saladin; ‘look at my yellow banners floating from the wall!’ He did not know how brave the men were. When they heard his answer they sent this message:
‘Very well, we will destroy the city. Your mosque and the stone of Jacob which you worship shall be made into dust. Five thousand Moslem prisoners shall be slain. Then we will kill our wives and our children, and march out to you with fire and sword. Not one of us will die till ten Moslems lie slain by his sword.’
When Saladin heard these threats, he said he would let each citizen who could pay for his ransom go free.
On the day on which the Christians were to leave Jerusalem, Saladin sat on a throne and watched the stream of people press out of the gate. First came the priests. They bore the Communion vessels and the ornaments of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Then the queen came, and with her a band of nobles, and then the great crowd of people. They were very sad. They were leaving their homes and their city, and some of them were leaving friends for whom no ransom money could be found. Now and again the line was broken and some one took courage to fall before the Sultan to beg for the freedom of husband or of children who had been left behind. Saladin and his brother paid the ransom money for thousands, and only a small band stayed to be the slaves of the Moslems.
The saddened Christians were gone from the streets of the Holy City, and a crowd of joyous and excited people surged everywhere. Jerusalem was nearly as sacred to the Moslems as to those they had conquered. They hurled down a great cross from the dome above which it stood. They washed the mosque of Omar within and without with rosewater, that no Christian dust even might lie on the walls or floors. Allah is the name by which Moslems speak of God, and Saladin was welcomed everywhere as ‘the bright star of Allah.’
When the news of the fall of Jerusalem reached Europe, the grief was terrible. The Pope died of sorrow. The royal courts went into mourning. The priests veiled the statues in the churches. Songs of love and chivalry were forgotten, and the minstrels sang only of the captured city.
Three great kings vowed to regain the Holy City. They were King Richard of England, King Philip of France, and the Emperor Frederick of Germany. The emperor was the first to set out. He is called ‘Barbarossa,’ because that means ‘red beard,’ and he had a great red beard. He had an army of strong warriors. His men loved him, and they did what he bade them without a murmur. He never allowed them to idle away their time or to grow soft and lazy after a victory, but swept them on in perfect order from battle to battle and carried all before him. The news of his great march came to Saladin, and even he feared lest his armies might not be able to face so great a band of warriors. But one day as Frederick rested on the banks of a river that flowed through the country north of the Holy Land, he longed to bathe in the cool stream. He plunged in, but something stunned him, and the great Emperor Barbarossa was drawn up on the bank only to die. He was buried in the Crusader Church at Tyre. But his people in Germany could not believe that he was dead. They made this beautiful legend about him. They said he had been borne from the East by magic, and that he lies in a great hall in Germany and waits there until his country needs him. When her need is greatest he will waken, they say, and burst the doors of his prison and come to save her. But no one has seen the red glow of Barbarossa’s beard in the dimly lighted hall, nor has any one found the castle in which he lies.
