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 ALEPPO, DAMASCUS, BAGDAD 141 followed the usual carnage attending Timour's captures. The mosques, schools, and convents with their occupiers were spared : so also were the imaums and the professors. All the remainder of the population between the ages of eight and eighty were slaughtered. Every soldier of Timour, of whom there were ninety thousand, as the price of his own safety, had to produce a head. The bloody trophies were, as was customary in Timour's army, piled up in pyramids before the gates of the city. It was on his return northwards from Damascus that, in 1402, Timour sent the message to Bajazed which at once forced him to raise the siege of Constantinople. Con- temporaneously with this message, Timour requested the Genoese in Galata and at Genoa to obtain aid from the West and to co-operate with him to crush the Turkish sultan. Timour organised or sent a large army on the Don and around the Sea of Azof on the Cimmerian Bosporus, connecting that sea with the Euxine, in order that, in case of need, it might act with his huge host now advancing towards the Black Sea from the south. His main body passed across the plain of Erzingan, and at Sivas Timour Bajazed's received the answer of Bajazed. The response was as Amour's insulting as a Turkish barbarian could make it. Bajazed summons, summoned Timour to appear before him and declared that if he did not obey, the women of his harem should be divorced from him, putting his threat in what to a Ma- hometan was a specially indecent manner. All the usual civilities in written communications between sovereigns were omitted, though the Asiatic conqueror himself had carefully observed them. Timour's remark when he saw employed by the Turks after the capture of Constantinople, had probably been used by them for many centuries previously. It is true that it had been made use of in Constantinople at an early period, and figures on several coins of Constantine, but I doubt whether it was used as the symbol of Constantinople in the later centuries of its history. The Crusades are not incorrectly described as wars between the Cross and the Crescent. The symbol is an ancient one and figures with the star on several coins belonging to about 200 b.c. The Abassid dynasty so used it. Professor Hilprecht considers it a remnant of moon- worship and connects it with the subsequent cult of Ashtaroth, Astarte, or Aphrodite.