which mere knights sprung from the breach upon the throne; when the helmet learned to bear the diadem, and the wounded hand which wielded the pike, was nobly wrapped in the regal purple. Godfrey refused to put on his head the brilliant crown that was offered him, declaring that he would not wear a crown of gold where Christ had worn a crown of thorns." Naplusia opened its gates; the army of the sultan of Egypt was defeated at Ascalon. Robert, the monk, in his description of this defeat, makes use of the very same comparison which has been employed by J. B. Rousseau, and which, by the bye, is borrowed from the Bible: Now Palestine, her cruel suff'rings past, It is probable that Godfrey died at Jaffa, the walls of which he had rebuilt. He was succeeded by his brother Baldwin, Count of Edessa. The latter expired in the midst of his victories, and in 1118 left the throne to his nephew, Baldwin du Bourg. Melisandra, eldest daughter of Baldwin II. married Foulqes d'Anjou, and conveyed the kingdom of Jerusalem into her husband's family about the year 1130. Foulques dying in consequence of a fall from his horse, was succeeded in 1140 by his son Baldwin III. The second Crusade, preached up by St. Bernard, and conducted by Louis VII. and the emperor Conrad, took place during the reign of this third Baldwin, who filled the throne twenty years, and left it to his brother Amaury. After a reign of eleven years, Amaury was succeeded by his son Baldwin IV. SALADIN TAKES JERUSALEM. 59 Saladin now appeared. Unfortunate at first, but afterwards victorious, he finally wrested the Holy Land from its new masters. Baldwin had given his sister Sybilla, widow of William Longue-Epée, in marriage to Guy de Lusignan. The grandees of the kingdom, jealous of this choice, divided into parties. Baldwin IV. dying in 1184, left as his heir his nephew Baldwin V. the son of Sybilla and William Longue-Epée. The young king, only eight years of age, sunk in 1186 under a fatal disease. His mother Sybilla caused the crown to be conferred on Guy de Lusignan, her second husband. The count of Tripoli betrayed the new monarch, who fell into Saladin's hands at the battle of Tiberias. Having completed the conquest of the maritime towns of Palestine, the sultan laid siege to Jerusalem, and took it in 1188. Every Every man was obliged to pay ten gold besants; and, from inability to raise this sum, fourteen thousand of the inhabitants were made slaves. Saladin would not enter the mosque of the Temple, which had been converted into a church by the Christians, till he had caused the walls to be washed with rosewater; and we are told by Sanuto that five hundred camels were scarcely able to carry all the rosewater employed on this occasion-a story worthy of the East. The soldiers of Saladin pulled down a gold cross erected above the Temple, and dragged it through the streets to the top of Mount Sion, where they broke it in pieces. One church only was spared, and this was the church of the Holy Sepulchre it was ransomed by the Syrians for a large sum of money. The crown of this kingdom, thus shorn of its lustre, devolved to Isabel, daughter of Baldwin, sister to the deceased Sybilla, and wife of Eufroy de Turenne. Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur-deLion arrived too late to save the Holy City, but they took Ptolemais, or St. John d'Acre. The valour of Richard struck such terror into his enemies, that, long after his death, when a horse trembled without any visible cause, the Saracens were accustomed to say that he had seen the ghost of the English monarch. Saladin died soon after the taking of Ptolemais: he directed that, on the day of his funeral, a shroud should be carried on the point of a spear, and a herald proclaim in a loud voice: "Saladin, the conqueror of Asia, out of all the fruits of his victories, carries with him only this shroud." Richard, Saladin's rival in glory, on leaving Palestine, contrived to get himself imprisoned in a tower in Germany. His confinement gave rise to adventures, which history has rejected, but which the Troubadours have preserved in their ballads. In 1242, Saleh Ismael, emir of Damascus, who was at war with Nedjmeddin, sultan of Egypt, and had gained possession of Jerusalem, restored the city to the Latin princes. The sultan sent the Karismians to besiege the capital of Judea. They retook it, and slaughtered the inhabitants. They plundered it once more the following year, before they delivered it up to Saleh Ayub, the successor of Nedjmeddin. During these events, the kingdom of Jerusalem had been transferred from Isabel to her new husband, Henry, Count of Champagne, and from him to Amaury, brother of Lusignan, to whom she was married, for the fourth time. By him she had a son, who died while an infant. Mary, CRUSADE OF LOUIS IX. 61 daughter of Isabel and her first husband, Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat, now became heiress to an imaginary kingdom. She married John, Count de Brienne, by whom she had a daughter, Isabel, or Yolante, afterwards the wife of the emperor Frederic II. The latter arriving at Tyre, made peace with the sultan of Egypt. The conditions of the treaty stipulated that Jerusalem should belong jointly to the Christians and the Mussulmans. Frederic, in consequence, assumed the crown of Godfrey, at the altar of the Holy Sepulchre, placed it on his head, and returned to Europe. It is probable that the Saracens did not long keep the engagement which they had contracted with Frederic, since we find that twenty years afterwards Jerusalem was pillaged by Nedjmeddin, as I have mentioned above. St. Louis arrived in the East seven years after this last calamity. It is remarkable, that this prince, while a prisoner in Egypt, beheld the last heirs of Saladin's family butchered before his face. "The king," says the Sire de Joinville, "who was seized with the disease of the East, like those whom he had left, might have escaped, if he had pleased, in his great ships; but he said that he chose rather to die than to desert his men: he therefore began to shout, and call to us to stay. And he pulled us stoutly by the saddle-bows to make us stop, till he gave us leave to swim. Now I will tell you the manner in which the king was taken, as he related to me himself. I have heard him say that he had left his guards and his division of the army, and that he and Messire Geffroy de Sergine had joined Messire Gualtier de Chatillon, who commanded the rear-guard. And the king was mounted on a low horse, covered with a silk horse-cloth; and, as I have since heard him tell, he had none left of all his men at arms but the brave knight Messire Geffroy de Sergine, who attended him to a little village, named Casel, where the king was taken. But before the Turks could see him, as I have heard him say, Messire Geffroy de Sergine defended him in the same manner as a good servant defends his master's face from the flies. For every time the Saracens approached, Messire Geffroy laid about him with lusty cuts and thrusts, so that he seemed to exert double his usual strength and bravery. And in every attack he drove them away from the king. In this manner he brought him to Casel, and there took him into the house of a woman who was a native of Paris. And they fully expected to see him expire, and had no hopes of his living over that day.' By a freak of fortune not a little astonishing, she had delivered one of the greatest monarchs that France ever had into the hands of a young sultan of Egypt, the only remaining heir of the great Saladin. But this fortune, which disposes of empires, determined, as it would appear, to display, in one day, her unbounded power and caprice, caused the conqueror to be murdered before the face of the vanquished king. "The Sultan, who was yet young, seeing this, and perceiving the mischief that had been plotted against his person, fled to the high tower which he had near his chamber, and of which I have spoken already. For his own people had already overthrown all his pavilions, and surrounded the tower in which he had taken refuge. And within the tower there were three of his bishops, who had eaten with him, and who wrote to desire that he would come down. And he said to them that he |