before him. First came the patriarch, followed by the clergy, carrying
the sacred vessels, and the ornaments of the church of the Holy
Sepulchre. After him came Sibylla, Queen of Jerusalem, who had remained
in the city, whilst her husband, Guy de Lusignan, had been a prisoner at
Nablous since the battle of Tiberias. Saladin saluted her respectfully,
and spoke to her kindly. He had too great a soul to take pleasure in the
humiliation of greatness.

[Illustration: The Christians of the Holy City defiling before Saladin.--
--28]

The news, spreading through Europe, caused amongst all classes there,
high and low, a deep feeling of sorrow, anger, disquietude, and shame.
Jerusalem was a very different thing from Edessa. The fall of the
kingdom of Jerusalem meant the sepulchre of Jesus Christ fallen once more
into the hands of the infidels, and, at the same time, the destruction of
what had been wrought by Christian Europe in the East, the loss of the
only striking and permanent gage of her victories. Christian pride was
as much wounded as Christian piety. A new fact, moreover, was
conspicuous in this series of reverses and in the accounts received of
them; after all its defeats and in the midst of its discord, Islamry had
found a chieftain and a hero. Saladin was one of those strange and
superior beings who, by their qualities and by their very defects, make a
strong impression upon the imaginations of men, whether friends or foes.
His Mussulman fanaticism was quite as impassioned as the Christian
fanaticism of the most ardent crusaders. When he heard that Reginald of
Chatillon, Lord of Karat, on the confines of Palestine and Arabia, had
all but succeeded in an attempt to go and pillage the Caaba and the tomb
of Mahomet, he wrote to his brother Malek-Adhel, at that time governor of
Egypt, "The infidels have violated the home and the cradle of Islamism;