THE ARAB ACCOUNT

I1t is well in a moment of such historic import as this to see how the other side accepts the crisis. The Arab historian Ibn Guzi[d] wrote as follows: “The Franks, when they set out from Antioch, numbered one million men, of whom five hundred thousand were fit for war. The rest consisted of workmen and those employed on the swivel-guns and other instruments of war. They marched along the sea shore. Jerusalem at that time belonged to the Egyptians. Their commander was named Iftikhar ad-Daulah, or ‘the glory of the empire.’

2“The siege lasted forty days. The Franks built two towers to command the walls of the town, one in the direction of the gate of Sidon, the other in that of the gates of Asbat and Amud, or the gates of the Tribes and of the Column. The besieged succeeded in burning the tower near the gate of Sidon; the second was brought up close to the walls. Then the Franks set all their machines to work at the same time; attacking like one single man, they put the Moslems to flight and entered the town by force. The inhabitants took refuge in the mosque Alacsa and its dependencies; the Franks, following them there, killed it is said one hundred thousand persons, and made an equal number prisoners. They did not even spare the aged of both sexes.

3“In this spot immense riches were stored. They found seventy lamps, twenty of which were of gold and the others of silver; they also carried off a _tennur_ or large silver lamp, weighing forty Syrian pounds. The Jews they shut up in their synagogue, and burned them there. Jerusalem had been in the power of Islam without a break since the reign of Caliph Omar, in the sixteenth year of the Hegira (637 A.D.). A Moslem author named Ibn Zulak,[d] thinking no doubt to give greater importance to this event, declares that at the moment when the Christians entered the Holy City the sun was eclipsed, the earth was hidden in darkness, and the stars appeared in broad daylight.”[d]

4The Moslem poets describe the horrors of massacre in vehement terms, bewailing the butchery of the women and the children and the fate of their fathers who “but lately masters of Syria, now found no other refuge than the backs of swift camels or even the entrails of the vultures!”[a]