there was a continuance of the struggle between Christendom and Islamry,
with various fortunes on either side. The Christian kingdom of Jerusalem
still stood; and after Godfrey de Bouillon, from 1100 to 1180, there had
been a succession of eight kings; some energetic and bold, aspiring to
extend their young dominion, others indolent and weak upon a tottering
throne. The rivalries and often the defections and treasons of the petty
Christian princes and lords who were set up at different points in
Palestine and Syria endangered their common 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.