adition of the Armenian
princes brought in new elements of luxury and cynicism;
and by the time of the disputed truce of Raymond of Tripoli,
the crown had descended to a man named Guy of Lusignan who seems
to have been regarded as a somewhat unsatisfactory character.
He had quarrelled with Raymond, who was ruler of Galilee, and a
curious and rather incomprehensible concession made by the latter,
that the Saracens should ride in arms but in peace round his land,
led to alleged Moslem insults to Nazareth, and the outbreak of the furious
Templar, Gerard of Bideford, of which mention has been made already.
But the most serious threat to them and their New Jerusalem
was the emergence among the Moslems of a man of military genius,
and the fact that all that land lay now under the shadow of the ambition
and ardour of Saladin.

With the breach of the truce, or even the tale of it, the common
danger of Christians was apparent; and Raymond of Tripoli repaired
to the royal headquarters to consult with his late enemy the king;
but he seems to have been almost openly treated as a traitor.
Gerard of Bideford, the fanatic who was Grand Master of the Templars,
forced the king's hand against the advice of the wiser soldier,
who had pointed out the peril of perishing of thirst in the waterless
wastes between them and the enemy. Into those wastes they advanced,
and they were already weary and unfit for warfare by the time
they came in sight of the strange hills that will be remembered
for ever under the name of the Horns of Hattin. On those hills,
a few hours later, the last knights of an army of which half had
fallen gathered in a final defiance and despair round the relic
they carried in their midst, a fragment of the True Cross.
In that hour fell, as I have fancied, more hopes than they themselves
could number, and the glory departed from the Middle Ages.
There fell with them all that New Jerusalem which was the symbol
of a new world, all those great and growing promises and possibilities
of Christendom of which this vision was the centre, all that "justice
for the bourgeois and the peasant, and for the trading communes,"
all the guilds that gained their charters by fighting for the Cross,
all the hopes of a happier transformation of the Roman Law wedded
to charity and to chivalry. There was the first slip and the great
swerving of our fate; and in that wilderness we lost all the things
we should have loved, and shall need so long