a sister, Joan of England, widow of William ii., king of Sicily; and Saladin had a brother, Malek-Adhel, a valiant warrior, respected by the Christians.  Richard had proposals made to Saladin to unite them in marriage and set them to reign together over the Christians and Mussulmans in the kingdom of Jerusalem.  The only result of the negotiation was to give Saladin time for repairing the fortifications of Jerusalem, and to bring down upon King Richard and his sister, on the part of the Christian bishops, the fiercest threats of the fulminations of the Church.  With the exception of this ridiculous incident, Richard’s life, during the whole course of this year, was nothing but a series of great or small battles, desperately contested, against Saladin.  When Richard had obtained a success, he pursued it in a haughty, passionate spirit; when he suffered a check, he offered Saladin peace, but always on condition of surrendering Jerusalem to the Christians, and Saladin always answered, “Jerusalem never was yours, and we may not without sin give it up to you; for it is the place where the mysteries of our religion were accomplished, and the last one of my soldiers will perish before the Mussulmans renounce conquests made in the name of Mahomet.”  Twice Richard and his army drew near Jerusalem, “without his daring to look upon it, he said, since he was not in a condition to take it.”  At last, in the summer of 1192, the two armies and the two chiefs began to be weary of a war without result.  A great one, however, for Saladin and the Mussulmans was the departure of Richard and the crusaders.  Being unable to agree about conditions for a definitive peace, they contented themselves, on both sides, with a truce for three years and eight months, leaving Jerusalem in possession of the Mussulmans, but open for worship to the Christians, in whose hands remained, at the same time, the towns they were in occupation of on the maritime coast, from Jaffa to Tyre.  This truce, which was called peace, having received the signature of all the Christian and Mussulman princes, was celebrated by galas and tournaments, at which Christians and Mussulmans seemed for a moment to have forgotten their hate; and on the 9th of October, 1192, Richard embarked at St. Jean d’Acre to go and run other risks.

Thus ended the third crusade, undertaken by the three greatest sovereigns and the three greatest armies of Christian Europe, and with the loudly proclaimed object of retaking Jerusalem from the infidels, and re-establishing a king over the sepulchre of Jesus Christ.  The Emperor Frederick Barbarossa perished in it before he had trodden the soil of Palestine.  King Philip Augustus retired from it voluntarily, so soon as experience had foreshadowed to him the impossibility of success.  King Richard abandoned it perforce, after having exhausted upon it his heroism and his knightly pride.  The three armies, at the moment of departure from Europe, amounted, according to the historians of the time, to five or six hundred thousand men, of whom scarcely one hundred thousand returned; and the only result of the third crusade was to leave as head over all the most beautiful provinces of Mussulman Asia and Africa, Saladin, the most illustrious and most able chieftain, in war and in politics, that Islamry had produced since Mahomet.