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M.Besant E.Walter
Jerusalem, the city of Herod and Saladin

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M.Besant E.Walter
Jerusalem, the city of Herod and Saladin
page 301



DEATH OF BALDWIN. in the country and invade it, he refused, with that stately courtesy which distinguished even the least of the Saracen princes. "Let us," said he, "have compassion and indulgence for a grief so just, since the Christians have lost a prince such that the world possesses not his equal." The wiseacres remembered how, when he stood godfather to his brother's infant son, he gave him his own name, and on being asked what else he would give him, " I will give him," said the king, with his ready laugh— it was his laugh wbich the people loved—" I will give him the kingdom of Jerusalem." The gossips had shaken their heads over words so ominous, and now, with that melancholy pleasure, almost a consolation, which comes of finding your own prognostications of evil correct, they recalled the words of fate and strengthened themselves in their superstition. Ill-omened or not, the words had come true. Baldwin was dead, his brother was to succeed him, and his nephew was to come after. And henceforth the days of the kingdom of Jerusalem are few, and full of trouble. The kingdom of Jerusalem, like a Boman colony, was founded by men alone. Those women who came with the Crusaders either died on the way, unable to endure the fatigue, heat, and misery of the march, or fell into the hands of the Turks, whose mistresses they became. The Crusaders therefore had to find wives for themselves in the country. They took them from the Syrian Christians or the Armenians, occasionally, too, from Saracen women who were willing to be baptized. Their children, subjected to the enervating influences of the climate, and imbibing the Oriental ideas of their mothers, generally preserved the courage of their fathers for one or two generations, when they lost it and became wholly cowardly and sensual and treacherous. But the kingdom was always being reinforced by the arrival of new knights and men at arms, so


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