for his own life he cared little, as he had proved a thousand times; but the few who still were faithful to him, and were ready to die at his side, surely it would have been a mean requital to drive them like sheep into the butcher's yard. Therefore must he yield at last. We were talking dismally about all this, and saying that the mountains would never again be fit for a gentleman to live in, when I received another call to Shamyl's room, and had another interview with him. He had spent some time in prayer, and been rewarded with a holy vision from on high, so that his eyes were full of fire, and his countenance shone with happiness. One would scarcely believe that gloom and ferocity so often darkened that wondrous face. "I have received the word of the Lord, the holy voice of Allah, to whom be all praise and glory! Imar of the Kheusurs, it is not for thee to hear it, being but an outer infidel. It is commanded that thou shouldest depart from among the chosen warriors of heaven, that they who bear witness be of the true faith. If thou and thy men can escape, behold it is my duty to aid thee. And verily I rejoice, for thou hast been a faithful friend to us. If he rejoiced, I could tell him of some one who rejoiced a hundredfold to escape a Russian jail and exile from his wife and children, even if his life were spared; of which there was no certainty, after the many atrocities committed by my faithful friend. Perhaps it was not magnanimous on my part to decline-if good luck should allow it-the glory of being shot or starved for the sake of the beloved country. But a lot of cross tangles came into that question. Was it my country in the first place? If it was, should I help it by quitting it so? And again, would that beloved land show equal love to me when gone, by attending to my belongings? No land I have heard of has ever done that. Therefore I showed my love of my country, by deciding to remain inside it. "Commander of the Caucasus," I said, knowing that he liked that appellation, though he never commanded half of it; "a revelation such as thine is not to be disregarded. But how is it to be carried out? By many devices, and some fighting, we have made our way to thee. But the foe hath closed in at our heels. Our little band could never hope to pass the Russian lines again. Thrice hast thou come to life again, when the enemy proclaimed thee dead. But this is beyond even thy resources." He smiled, with the pleasant smile of a man who feels himself under-rated. "Imar, it is not that I am beaten in the powers of the mind," he said, "but never was there mortal born, and filled with the breath of the Lord from birth, who could vanquish the love of gold in men. The son of Manoah could not do it; neither even our Great Prophet. I, who have gifts from Heaven also, suited to a weaker age, am beaten by that accursed Power. It is gold alone that hath vanquished Shamyl." Believing that this upon the whole was true, I left him to his sad reflections. But presently he raised his head again, and looked at me with his old grim smile. spread out his woolly arms, and spoke with a large mouth quivering. He "Knowest thou that I could carry off every man of my four hundred left, and laugh at the Russian beleaguerers? This night I would do it, and let them smell for us in the morning. But to what effect? To kill a Russian is no dinner. All the passes are closed against us, and all our villages occupied. The winter is nigh; we should be no more than hungry wolves upon the mountains. But thou art young, thou hast a home to go to, and art not of our religion. Take thy faithful fifty, and go this night. My son will show thee how. No more." That was the last I saw of Shamyl, and this much I will say for him. He never sent any man to face a peril which he himself would shrink from, neither did he fight for his own ambition, or hide in his turban one copek. The Russians behaved very generously and even nobly to him; and in the quiet evening of his days he may have looked back with sorrow upon his barbarities against them. Our little band had never shared in any of those atrocities. There fore it would be better for us, if we could not escape capture, to fall into the hands of the foe as a separate detachment, than to surrender with the General. And this was my reason for attempting an escape, rather than any fair prospect of success in such a situation. But, strange to say, by means of a tunnel in the cliff unknown to the enemy, and then some most perilous scaling of rocks-such as Englishmen delight in, but a native of the mountains prefers to do by deputy-and then some midnight rushes through blockaded passes and defiles, we contrived with the loss of two men only to regain our own abodes. But more than a month had thus been spent after we quitted Shamyl, in wandering, fighting, and lying close, going out of our way for sustenance, and being driven out of it by enemies and tempests. With 50,000 men to stop them, not a horse to help them, no supplies to start with, and no village-folk to provide them, nothing but the fruit the bears had left, to keep body and soul together-even veterans of Shamyl's training might have been proud to force passage thus. Alas that we ever achieved it! For my men's sake I am glad, of course; but for my own, I would that God had seen fit in His mercy to lay me dead by a Russian gun, or stretch me frozen on the mountain side! SALADIN AND KING RICHARD. THE EASTERN QUESTION IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY. IT is not often that so complete a double account of a great struggle can be found in medieval history as that which exists regarding the third crusade, of which the opposing heroes were Saladin and Richard Lion Heart. On the Frankish side Geoffrey de Vinsauf gives us a vivid description of the expedition in which he took part; and on the Moslem side Boha ed Din, Kâdy of Jerusalem, relates the life of his friend and patron, Salâh ed Dîn, the "honour of the Faith." Though tinged by admiration of their respective masters, these two works are so completely in accord as to the main facts that we are able to form an impartial estimate of events, while the details are in either case so full, and so easily understood by the light of recent exploration, that we can trace every movement on the ground, and are able to recognise the battle-fields of the hard-fought campaigns in which Palestine was lost to Christendom, and again recovered, in part, by English arms. The personal characters of the chroniclers are unconsciously betrayed in an interesting manner by their incidental remarks. Geof frey de Vinsauf was a monk to whom the grim facts of actual warfare were previously unknown. "Oh how different," he exclaims, "are the speculations of those who meditate amidst the columns of the cloister from the fearful exercise of war!" Boha ed Dîn was also a man of peace, unused to campaigning. He explains to us on each occasion why he was unable (through illness or other cause) to take part in the actual fighting; how he was terrified by the stormy sea of winter, when he saw it first on the harbourless shores of Ascalon; and how he admired Saladin's determination to pursue the Franks over the waves "till not one unbeliever be left in the islands." He relates how he was unable to manage his mule, and dashed past Saladin on a rainy day of entry into Jerusalem, splashing the great Sultan with mud, and cannoning against him; and how Saladin only laughed good-naturedly at his awkward riding. ing. The worthy scribe was respected for his intimate knowledge of Korân traditions, and Saladin had taken him into his service, after making his acquaintance during negotiations with the Khalif of Baghdad and the Atabek princes of Mosul on the Tigris. The charming picture which he draws of the champion of Islam is supported by the less partial accounts of Christian writers, and Saladin appears to have been distinguished by his sympathy, humility, and piety, not less than by his enormous energy, prudence, and daring. The chivalrous courtesy and valour of King Richard are equally admitted in the Moslem record, and the personal characters of these two great leaders took much from the bitterness of the struggle, and rendered possible a final agreement, which formed the modus vivendi in the East for nearly a century after. The modern historian of European progress is apt to pass over the story of this English crusade with somewhat contemptuous curtness; and the general impression seems to be that King Richard would is thus worthy of greater considerhave been better employed in mind- ation than it usually obtains, while ing the affairs of his own kingdom, the picturesque and romantic charand that he failed notably to do acter of the events is brought any good in the Holy Land. It vividly before us in the chronicles should not, however, be forgotten mentioned. The five years which that King Richard wrested half intervened between the disastrous his conquests from his great adver- battle of Hattîn and the final sary, and that the Eastern Question treaty with Saladin were full of in the twelfth century was as im- wonderful events, and the struggle portant and harassing to Europe between France, England, and as it is in our own times. The Germany on the one side, and great families of "Outre Mer" Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia on were intimately connected, by the other, was of far-reaching inbirth and intermarriage, with the fluence on the immediate future. kings and princes of the West. The Courtenays of Edessa, the Italian Normans from Sicily in Antioch, the Angevin and Lusignan houses in Jerusalem, had behind them strong family influences in France, England, and Italy; and an extensive trade with the East had been organised by Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Marseilles during the ninety years in which the Holy Land was ruled by the Latin Christians. By his success in the East Richard became the hero of Christendom, and the most admired prince in Europe. He restored to the Templars and Hospitallers, and to the rulers of Lebanon, all their best lands in the shore plains, and to the great trading cities all their ports in the Levant. He added to the Latin possessions an island equal in area to the Syrian domains, by the conquest of Cyprus; and he made with Saladin a treaty which became the basis of many succeeding agreements. It not merely from religious motives that the European princes spent their treasure on the Holy Land, for the spread of Moslem power was arrested, and ceased to menace the Mediterranean, while the commerce of the East continued to enrich the poorer lands of the West. This episode of European history For more than sixty years the kingdom won by the Latins under Godfrey de Bouillon in 1099 A.D. had grown stronger and more prosperous. It included the whole of Western Palestine, and the regions east of Jordan excepting Bashan; and its frontiers were guarded by a line of mighty castles. On the north the whole Lebanon as far as the Orontes was ruled by the allied Princes of Antioch and Counts of Tripoli; but the great province of Edessa, stretching over the Euphrates almost to the Tigris, which had been occupied in 1098 by Baldwin, brother of Godfrey de Bouillon, had fallen before Zanghi, the first Atabek Sultan of Mosul, in 1144 A.D. The native subjects of the Latins were partly oriental Christians and partly Sunnee Moslems. Both alike appear to have been content under the strong and wise rule of the Franks; and Islam was still divided by the internecine hatred of the Sunnees, who acknowledged the supremacy of the Khalif of Baghdad as a religious head, and of the Shi'ah or "sectaries" of 'Ali, who followed the Fatimite Khalif of Egypt. We hear little during this period of any internal troubles in Syria; and the frontiers west of the Euphrates had, so far, been successfully maintained, and were constantly strengthened by the building of new castles. Yet there were already signs of danger on every side; and not only valour but wise statesmanship was greately needed, to preserve the Latin supremacy. The Egyptians were weak, and the communication with Europe might easily be threatened by any strong Moslem Power able to hold the Nile mouths, and to employ the fleets of the Delta. On the east the two sons of Zanghi were united in determination to wrest Palestine from the Franks; and Nûr ed Dîn, who inherited his father's power in Aleppo and Damascus, was a formidable foe. On the north the Christian kingdom of Lesser Armenia (in Cilicia) bordered on Antioch, but the Armenians looked coldly on the Latins, and were threatened themselves on the west by the Sultans of Iconium-the last representatives of the Seljuks who had founded the Turkish empire in the eleventh century under Melek Shah. The Greek Emperor of Byzantium (Manuel Comnenos) was friendly to the kings of Jerusalem, but the enmity of the Greek clergy to the Latins, who had set up their own Patriarch and bishops in the place of the Greeks, had become more and more bitter as time passed by; and the Greek populace shared the opinions of their priests. In Europe the wars had so distracted the various kingdoms that no armies had come for fourteen years to help the Franks against the Turks, nor did any such help reach Syria until Europe was roused, too late, by the news of Saladin's surprising success. Such briefly was the condition of the East when the unfortunate Amaury, second son of Fulk of Anjou, succeeded his brother on the throne of Jerusalem in 1162 A.D. The former kings had been distinguished for gallantry and justice, but Amaury was half Armenian by birth, and was neither loved nor trusted by his subjects. The policy which he adopted of attempting to conquer Egypt weakened his kingdom, and failed as all other Frankish attempts on Cairo failed both before and after his time. He received no help from Europe, nor was his alliance with Manuel Comnenos of any use. Nûr ed Dîn despatched successive expeditions under Shirkoh (Saladin's uncle) to help the Egyptians, and on the death of the vizir of the last Fatimite Khalif (El 'Adîd) in 1169, Shirkoh became Sultan of Egypt, and was succeeded two months later by his nephew. In 1171 El 'Adîd died, and three years later Amaury was succeeded by his leper son Baldwin IV. Nûr ed Dîn also died in 1174, and left only a boy as his heir. By this rapid series of important changes Saladin became suddenly the greatest power in the Moslem world, and having proclaimed the religious supremacy of the Khalif of Baghdad at Cairo, he united the forces of Islam in Egypt, and in Syria east of the Jordan and of the Orontes. Yusef Ibn Eyûb Salâh ed Dîn was born in 1137 A.D., the son of a Kurdish governor at Tekrît on the Tigris, named Eyûb, who was much trusted by Sultan Zanghi. Eyûb followed Nûr ed Dîn to Syria, and became governor of Baalbek. He defended Damascus against Louis VII. of France in 1148; and his brother Shirkoh, in 1163, took with him to Egypt his young nephew, whose ambition was not yet awakened, and who, according to his own statement, was very unwilling to leave Damascus. Succeeding Shirkoh as Sultan at Cairo, and becoming |