Raymond of Tripoli had hewn his way through the enemy and ridden away to Tyre.  The king, with a few of the remaining nobles, including Renaud de Chatillon, were brought before Saladin in his tent.  There occurred a scene strangely typical of the mingled strains in the creed or the culture that triumphed on that day; the stately Eastern courtesy and hospitality; the wild Eastern hatred and self-will.  Saladin welcomed the king and gracefully gave him a cup of sherbet, which he passed to Renaud.  “It is thou and not I who hast given him to drink,” said the Saracen, preserving the precise letter of the punctilio of hospitality.  Then he suddenly flung himself raving and reviling upon Renaud de Chatillon, and killed the prisoner with his own hands.  Outside, two hundred Hospitallers and Templars were beheaded on the field of battle; by one account I have read because Saladin disliked them, and by another because they were Christian priests.

There is a strong bias against the Christians and in favour of the Moslems and the Jews in most of the Victorian historical works, especially historical novels.  And most people of modern, or rather of very recent times got all their notions of history from dipping into historical novels.  In those romances the Jew is always the oppressed where in reality he was often the oppressor.  In those romances the Arab is always credited with oriental dignity and courtesy and never with oriental crookedness and cruelty.  The same injustice is introduced into history, which by means of selection and omission can be made as fictitious as any fiction.  Twenty historians mention the way in which the maddened Christian mob murdered the Moslems after the capture of Jerusalem, for one who mentions that the Moslem commander commanded in cold blood the murder of some two hundred of his most famous and valiant enemies after the victory of Hattin.  The former cannot be shown to have been the act of Tancred, while the latter was quite certainly the act of Saladin.  Yet Tancred is described as at best a doubtful character, while Saladin is represented as a Bayard without fear or blame.  Both of them doubtless were ordinary faulty fighting men, but they are not judged by an equal balance.  It may seem a paradox that there should be this prejudice in Western history in favour of Eastern heroes.  But the cause is clear enough; it is the remains of the revolt among many Europeans against their own old religious organisation, which naturally made them hunt through all ages for its crimes and its victims.  It was natural that Voltaire should sympathise more with a Brahmin he had never seen than with a Jesuit with whom he was engaged in a violent controversy; and should similarly feel more dislike of a Catholic who was his enemy than of a Moslem who was the enemy of his enemy.  In this atmosphere of natural and even pardonable prejudice arose the habit of contrasting the intolerance of the Crusaders with the toleration shown by the Moslems.  Now as there are two sides