mon cause. Fortunately similar
rivalries, dissensions, and treasons prevailed amongst the Mussulman
emirs, some of them Turks and others Persians or Arabs, and at one time
foes, at another dependants, of the Khalifs of Bagdad or of Egypt.
Anarchy and civil war harassed both races and both religions with almost
equal impartiality. But, beneath this surface of simultaneous agitation
and monotony, great changes were being accomplished or preparing for
accomplishment in the West. The principal sovereigns of the preceding
generation, Louis VII., King of France, Conrad III., Emperor of Germany,
and Henry II., King of England, were dying; and princes more juvenile and
more enterprising, or simply less wearied out,--Philip Augustus,
Frederick Barbarossa, and Richard Coeur de Lion,--were taking their
places. In the East the theatre of policy and events was being enlarged;
Egypt was becoming the goal of ambition with the chiefs, Christian or
Mussulman, of Eastern Asia; and Damietta, the key of Egypt, was the
object of their enterprises, those of Amaury I., the boldest of the kings
of Jerusalem, as well as those of the Sultans of Damascus and Aleppo.
Noureddin and Saladin (Nour-Eddyn and Sala-Eddyn), Turks by origin, had
commenced their fortunes in Syria; but it was in Egypt that they
culminated, and, when Saladin became the most illustrious as well as the
most powerful of Mussulman sovereigns, it was with the title of Sultan of
Egypt and of Syria that he took his place in history.

In the course of the year 1187, Europe suddenly heard tale upon tale
about the repeated disasters of the Christians in Asia. On the 1st of
May, the two religious and warlike orders which had been founded in the
East for the defence of Christendom--the Hospitallers of St. John of
Jerusalem and the Templars--lost, at a brush in Galilee, five hundred of
their bravest knights. On the 3d and 4th of July, near Tiberias, a
Christian army was surrounded by the Saracens, and also, ere long, by the
fire which Saladin had ordered to be set to the dry grass which covered
the plain. The flames made their way and spread beneath the feet of men
and horses. "There," say the Oriental chroniclers, "the sons of Paradise
and the children of fire settled their terrible quarrel. Arrows hurtled
in the air like a noisy flight of sparrows, and the blood of warriors
dripped upon the ground like rain-water." "I saw," adds one of them who
was present at the battle, "hill