Page:A History of the Knights of Malta, or the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.djvu/100

74 was lost to Palestine. Following in the train of the emperor, these knights left the Holy Land, and their achievements, though frequently brilliant and well worthy of record, have no further place in these pages. It is true that a few of them declined thus to abandon the cause they had originally adopted. These remained in Palestine until the final expulsion of the Latins from its shores, and are mentioned as sharing in the defence of Acre; but the main body, with their Grand-Master, retired with Frederic.

It is asserted by writers in the imperial interests that during Frederic’s stay in Jerusalem a conspiracy was entered into between the Hospitallers and the Templars to betray him into the hands of the Saracens, and that in this disgraceful and treasonous plot they were instigated by the Pope, who was his most virulent enemy. This treachery was discovered through the magnanimity of the sultan of Egypt, who, with righteous indignation at the authors of so foul a scheme, lost no time in making the emperor acquainted with it. That there was some truth in the accusation seems, from collateral evidence, to be most probable, although writers in the Papal interest have not hesitated to assert that the story had its origin in the fertile brain of Frederic himself, anxious to frame some plausible pretext for abandoning an enterprise into which he had been forced much against his own inclination. The discovery of such a conspiracy would in a great measure account for the animosity with which Frederic ever after regarded those Orders, and the persecutions and extortions to which he subjected them. The true facts of the case, and the due share of blame to be allotted to the various members of the plot, are very difficult to discover. All the historians of the epoch are biassed by their own political views and inclinations, and their narratives must be received with great caution. Those who wrote in the imperial interest, whilst dwelling strongly on the treachery of the military fraternities, aver that in the treaty entered into with the Saracens by Frederic, the Christians were placed on as advantageous a footing as that which they had held before the ill-fated battle of Tiberias. On the other hand, the papal writers not only deny the existence of any plot, but assert that the much-vaunted treaty was useless. It contained, they said, a clause that the