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Holy Land, where their abode gave so much scandal and offence to the
devout. Romance, and even history, combined in representing all who were
out of the pale of the Church as the personal vassals of Satan, who
played his deceptions openly amongst them; and Mahound, Termagaunt, and
_Apollo_ were, in the opinion of the Western Crusaders, only so many
names of the arch-fiend and his principal angels. The most enormous
fictions spread abroad and believed through Christendom attested the
fact, that there were open displays of supernatural aid afforded by the
evil spirits to the Turks and Saracens; and fictitious reports were not
less liberal in assigning to the Christians extraordinary means of
defence through the direct protection of blessed saints and angels, or
of holy men yet in the flesh, but already anticipating the privileges
proper to a state of beatitude and glory, and possessing the power to
work miracles.

To show the extreme grossness of these legends, we may give an example
from the romance of "Richard Coeur de Lion," premising at the same time
that, like other romances, it was written in what the author designed to
be the style of true history, and was addressed to hearers and readers,
not as a tale of fiction, but a real narrative of facts, so that the
legend is a proof of what the age esteemed credible and were disposed to
believe as much as if had been extracted from a graver chronicle.

The renowned Saladin, it is said, had dispatched an embassy to King
Richard, with the present of a colt recommended as a gallant war-horse,
challenging Coeur de Lion to meet him in single combat between the
armies, for the purpose of deciding at once their pretensions to the
land of Palestine, and the theological question whether the God of the
Christians, or Jupiter, the deity of the Saracens, should be the future
object of adoration by the subjects of both monarchs. Now, under this
seemingly chivalrous defiance was concealed a most unknightly stratagem,
and which we may at the same time call a very clumsy trick for the devil
to be concerned in. A Saracen clerk had conjured two devils into a mare
and her colt, with the instruction, that whenever the mare neighed, the
foal, which was a brute of uncommon size, should kneel down to suck his
dam. The enchanted foal was sent to King Richard in the belief that the
foal, obeying the signal of its dam as usual, the Soldan who mounted the
mare might get an easy advantage over hi