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The sun was high when those men with their horses and on foot marched down the winding causeway beneath the seven gates, and so forth into the plains, and charging unarmed upon the Moslems, they perished every man. After, it was asked of one who had seen the great slaughter, "Say how my King bore himself." And he who had seen told this:
There is no more ridiculous or extravagant boast among a certain class of self-appointed evangelists than the oft-repeated statement that all the modern blessings of Western civilisation are the fruit of Christianity and that the backward state of oriental Moslems is due to the absence of Christianity.
After the departure of the Greeks, the fugitive princes returned to their capitals; the subjects disclaimed their involuntary oaths of allegiance; the Moslems again purified their temples, and overturned the idols of the saints and martyrs; the Nestorians and Jacobites preferred a Saracen to an orthodox master; and the numbers and spirit of the Melchites were inadequate to the support of the church and state.
"And because the Koran denounces usury by Moslems, and you are a pious man and also perhaps because of the risk attached to using your name in the matter your wife Jael's name was used. Nevertheless, your seal was used at the time as a check on her. Now, at a word from me the British would impound that money, interest and all." "A murrian on them! But you spoke of being friends?"
The way of the sword had failed, though indeed the Crusades had probably been the means of preventing all Europe from being overrun by the Moslems. At the time when the last Crusade had begun a man was planning a new kind of Crusade, different in method but calling for just as much bravery as the old kind. We are going to hear his story now. The Young Knight's Vision
The ancient Capital of the Pharaohs was reduced to a village, and the houseless residents moved across to the eastern bank, to people as Moslems the newly-founded town of Fostat, or sought a home on Christian territory. Among the houses that had escaped was that of Rufinus, and thither the Kadi escorted Orion and Paula.
The prelate drew his still upright figure to its full height, and his mild features assumed a determined nay a stern expression as he exclaimed: "You know the, decision pronounced by the Synod of Ephesus the words which should be graven on the heart of every true Jacobite as on marble and brass 'May all who divide the nature of Christ and this is what the Melchites do be divided with the sword, be hewn in pieces and be burnt alive! No Head of our Church has ever hurled such a curse at the Moslems who adore the One God!"
But the sultan, unlike his western contemporaries, was not content with irregular troops, and the serf-communes of Greece had to deliver up a fifth of their male children every fourth year to be trained at Constantinople as professional soldiers and fanatical Moslems.
So he appealed to the judges; and the Moslems who had been present at the partition came and bore witness of that which they knew, wherefore the judge forbade them from one another; but Judar and his brothers wasted much money in bribes to him.
Aladin, or Iftikhar, the caliph's lieutenant, was intrusted with the defence: his policy strove to restrain the native Christians by the dread of their own ruin and that of the holy sepulchre; to animate the Moslems by the assurance of temporal and eternal rewards.
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