Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/291

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first Crusaders lost their lives, either by fatigue and hunger or by disease and the weapons of the Saracens, before they rescued a single city from their grasp.

A.D. 1147.


Siege of Acre, A.D. 1189.


Armistice, A.D. 1192. The second Crusade called into action the whole of the West, from Rome to Britain. At its head were displayed the banners of the dukes of Burgundy, Bavaria, and Aquitaine; and the kings of Poland and Bohemia obeyed the summons of the leader of an army estimated at more than four hundred thousand men. But the numbers appear to have been still greater in the third Crusade, which was made both by sea and land, and included the siege of Acre, graphically described by Gibbon[1] in his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." After the surrender of Acre, and the departure of Philip, Richard of England, whose name was long an object of terror among the Saracens, led the Crusaders to the recovery of the sea-coast; and the cities of Cæsarea and Jaffa, afterwards added to the fragments of the kingdom of Guy de Lusignan, fell into his hands, as Jerusalem would also have done, had he not been deceived by the envy or the treachery of his companions. But Plantagenet and Saládin became, in time, alike weary of a war so tedious and disastrous in its results, especially as both had suffered in health. An agreement between them was, after much delay, brought about, and was, naturally, disapproved by the zealots of both parties alike—the Roman pontiff and the Khalif of Baghdad. Its leading features were, that Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre should be open, without hindrance or tribute, to the pilgrimages of the Latin Christians; and that during three years

  1. Gibbon, c. lix.