British Mandate: A Survey of Palestine: Volume II - Page 896

CHAPTER XXII.

Moslem conquerors from the taxes charged for the entry of pilgrims.

40. In the meantime new Crusading forces had arrived• in Palestine under the command of the Western Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Richard Coeur de Lion and Philip Augustus of France. After Barbarossa's death by drowning in 1190, his forces joined the English and the French and Acre surrendered to the allies after a two years' siege in 1192. Philip then returned to France and Richard was left to continue the Crusade alone, but, having failed in his attempt to recapture Jerusalem, he made a truce with Saladin in the same year. Among the results of this truce was the resumption of Latin pilgrimages to Jerusalem which had been interrupted since its conquest by Saladin in 1187.

41. In 1229, Jerusalem was occupied by the Western Emperor Frederick II following a truce of ten years concluded between the Emperor and the Sultan of Egypt Malek el Kamel. Frederick himself left Palestine the following year, but the Holy City remained in Latin occupation until the end of the truce in 1239. In 1213 the Latins returned once more, as the result of an alliance which they had concluded with the Sultans of Kerak and Damascus against the Egyptian Sultan, Nijm-ed-Din , but this further occupation lasted only for a year. In 1244 Jerusalem was sacked by the Khwarizmiana, a Tartar tribe from the south of Lake Aral, who thereafter joined Nijm-ed-Dins army which was operating at Gaza, and Palestine fell again under Egyptian domination. Shortly afterwards (in 1254) the Ayoubite dynasty of Egypt was overthrown by a conspiracy organized by their Mameluk mercenaries, who founded the Mameluk dynasty which ruled Palestine, Syria and Egypt until its overthrow by the Ottoman Turks in 1517.

42. During the occupation of Jerusalem by the Latin Kings (1099-1187) the Christians of the Latin Rite held the praedominium (the paramount position) in the Holy Places, but it would be a mistake to suppose that the Eastern Christians were excluded : on the contrary there is ample evidence that for many years after the conquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders, Latins and Orientals Jived and worshipped peacefully together. To cite only two examples separated by an interval of nearly seventy years : the Russian (Orthodox) Abbot Daniel, who made a pilgrimage to Palestine in 1106-1107, records that the ceremony of the Holy Fire was celebrated in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre on Easter Saturday by the Greek Abbot of St. Sabhas in the presence of the Latin King Baldwin I and the Latin clergy; while in 1172

896