Page:PhilipK.Hitti-SyriaAShortHistory.djvu/208

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The Crusades

ment of pacific campaign in which persuasion should replace violence. He himself studied Arabic from a slave and taught it. With Raymond, the Crusading spirit turned into a new channel: converting the Moslem rather than expelling or exterminating him. The Carmelite order, still active in the area, was founded in 1154 by a Crusader in that country and named after one of its mountains. Early in the thirteenth century two other monastic orders, the Franciscan and the Dominican, were founded and their representatives were stationed in many Syrian towns. In the last years of that century Beirut had a large Franciscan church. In 1219 the founder of the Franciscan order, St. Francis of Assisi, visited the Ayyubid court in Egypt and held a fruitless religious discussion with al-Kamil. A Dominican bishop, William of Tripoli, wrote in 1270 one of the most learned treatises in medieval times on the Moslems, bringing out points in which Islam and Christianity agree and advocating missionaries rather than soldiers to undertake the recovery of the Holy Land.

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