Probably, however, nothing of the kind in history equals what Abdallatif, a sober and scientific physician, describes as having occurred before his own eyes in the great Egyptian famine of A.H. 597 (1200).  The horrid details fill a chapter of some length, and we need not quote from them.

Nor was Christendom without the rumour of such barbarities.  The story of King Richard’s banquet in presence of Saladin’s ambassadors on the head of a Saracen curried (for so it surely was),—­

      “soden full hastily
  With powder and with spysory,
  And with saffron of good colour”—­

fable as it is, is told with a zest that makes one shudder; but the tale in the Chanson d’Antioche, of how the licentious bands of ragamuffins, who hung on the army of the First Crusade, and were known as the Tafurs,[9] ate the Turks whom they killed at the siege, looks very like an abominable truth, corroborated as it is by the prose chronicle of worse deeds at the ensuing siege of Marrha:—­

  “A lor cotiaus qu’il ont trenchans et afiles
  Escorchoient les Turs, aval parmi les pres. 
  Voiant Paiens, les ont par pieces decoupes. 
  En l’iave et el carbon les ont bien quisines,
  Volontiers les menjuent sans pain et dessales."[10]

(Della Penna, p. 76; Reinaud, Rel. I. 52; Rennie’s Peking, II. 244; Ann. de la Pr. de la F. XXIX. 353, XXI. 298; Hayton in Ram. ch. xvii.; Per.  Quat. p. 116; M.  Paris, sub. 1243; Mel.  Asiat.  Acad.  St. Petersb. II. 659; Canale in Arch.  Stor.  Ital. VIII.; Bergm.  Nomad.  Streifereien, I. 14; Carpini, 638; D’Ohsson, II. 30, 43, 52; Wilson’s Ever Victorious Army, 74; Shaw, p. 48; Abdallatif, p. 363 seqq.; Weber, II. 135; Littre, H. de la Langue Franc. I. 191; Gesta Tancredi in Thes.  Nov.  Anecd. III. 172.)

NOTE 10.—­Bakhshi is generally believed to be a corruption of Bhikshu, the proper Sanscrit term for a religious mendicant, and in particular for the Buddhist devotees of that character. Bakhshi was probably applied to a class only of the Lamas, but among the Turks and Persians it became a generic name for them all.  In this sense it is habitually used by Rashiduddin, and thus also in the Ain Akbari:  “The learned among the Persians and Arabians call the priests of this (Buddhist) religion Bukshee, and in Tibbet they are styled Lamas.”

According to Pallas the word among the modern Mongols is used in the sense of Teacher, and is applied to the oldest and most learned priest of a community, who is the local ecclesiastical chief.  Among the Kirghiz Kazzaks again, who profess Mahomedanism, the word also survives, but conveys among them just the idea that Polo seems to have associated with it, that of a mere conjuror or “medicine-man”; whilst in Western Turkestan it has come to mean a Bard.