Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/239

1191.] been carried by the Europeans into Palestine, and had commended themselves to favour wherever a true soldier was to be found. In the East, as in the West, they shed a transient gleam of sunshine upon the bloody landscape of war, arousing whatever there is of high or noble to be found in poor humanity. Few historians have done justice to the character of Saladin; it is not easy for us now to cast our minds back, as it were, into that remote age and country in which he lived, and to weigh the acts of his life against the knowledge which was given him to guide them. We read history with more or less of prejudice and intolerance, viewing with the bright light of the nineteenth century those blots upon its page, which lay unseen in the early dawn of Christianity. And yet there is no name (but One) in all the records of the past, which we should dare to bring to the test of abstract virtue. The history of the world is the history of moral as of social advancement; the virtues of one age are the abomination of the next, and this process is continually going on. Thus slowly through the centuries rises the stately edifice of civilisation, whose fair proportions expand and grow in beauty with succeeding generations.

Saladin possessed abilities of a very high order, joined to bodily strength little inferior to that of Cœur-de-Lion himself. He was skilled in the learning of the East, added to which he possessed that refinement of manners induced by the usages of chivalry. The virtues of a warlike age appeared in him pre-eminently; he was brave, generous, and true to his word, preserving his plighted faith with a degree of scrupulousness not often observed by the princes of Christendom.



Descended from the race of the Seljuks, he had warmly embraced the religion of Mahomet, whose doctrines taught him to pursue to utter destruction all the enemies of the Prophet. But Saladin was no bigoted Mussulman, and when the foes he had conquered appeared before him as suppliants, he seldom failed to grant the mercy they implored. It is needless to say that this picture has its reverse, and that the character of the great soldan was not altogether blameless. He was in the highest degree ambitious, and his elevation to the throne was obtained by the unscrupulous shedding of blood. He trampled down whomsoever stood in his way; but, having attained that elevation, he proved himself a wise and just monarch, and his rule, on the whole, was free from tyranny.

The soldan and the Christian king, both of whom stood far above their contemporaries in military prowess and ability, had learnt mutual respect, and not all the injuries which each had inflicted on the other had power to subdue this feeling. Great minds can afford to be generous, and the depreciation of the merits of a rival seldom arises from any other cause than a consciousness of inferiority. Saladin and Richard met together many times with interchanges of courtesy, and the soldiers of both armies mingled in the tournament and in other martial exercises. Where the laws of chivalry prevailed, the warrior sheathed his enmity with his sword, and would have regarded it as a foul stain upon his knighthood to doubt for a moment the faith pledged to him by a foeman.

Pilgrims were continually arriving in the Holy Land from Europe, and from each traveller who appeared in the presence of Richard, he learnt news which compelled him to hasten his return to England, although he had sworn never to abandon the expedition so long as he had a war-horse to eat. In the hope of establishing peace among all parties, he consented that Conrad of Montferrat should be crowned King of Jerusalem, and gave to Lusignan, by way of compensation, the Island of Cyprus. It is probable that the energetic character of Conrad might ultimately have enabled him to obtain possession of Jerusalem, but at the time when he was preparing for his coronation, he was murdered in the streets of Tyre, by two men of the sect of the Assassins. This name, then quite new to the languages of Europe, was applied to those fanatical Moslems who devoted themselves to assassinating the enemies of their faith by surprise, in the belief that they should thus secure admission into paradise. In the mountain defiles of Lebanon there lived a whole tribe of these enthusiasts, under the rule of the Old Man of the Mountain—a mysterious chief, whose name became a sound of terror throughout Europe. They were called in Arabic, "Haschischi," from an intoxicating plant well known in the East, which they made use of to stupefy the brain and excite themselves to their desperate deeds of blood.

It would appear that Conrad was murdered in revenge for certain injuries which he had inflicted upon this extraordinary people. An Arabic writer relates that when the two Assassins were seized and put to the torture, they confessed that they had been employed by the King of England; but this account differs from others, and is so completely at variance with all we know of the Assassins, as well as with the character of Richard, that it may be at once rejected as fabulous. Apart from the arguments which may be adduced to show, from the previous arrangements of the king, that he had no anticipation of the death of Conrad, the whole tenour of the life of Cœur-de-Lion serves to prove that he was not the man to strike a foe in secret. The French and German factions, however, at once spread a report that he had instigated the murder, and letters were sent to Philip of France containing the same news. Philip, who contemplated a descent upon the English territory, eagerly seized a pretext for his treason. He applied to the Pope to release him from his oath of peace, and declared that he had received a caution that the King of England had sent some of those dreaded Assassins of the East to murder him. Ostensibly with a view to repel these designs, he appointed a body-guard of armed men to attend