") whose surname he
afterwards adopted. He became the fourth of the Mameluke Sultans, and
reigned from 1259 to 1276. The two great objects of his life were the
repression of the Tartars and the expulsion of the Christians from Syria,
so that his reign was one of constant war and enormous activity. William
of Tripoli, in the work above mentioned, says: "Bondogar, as a soldier,
was not inferior to Julius Caesar, nor in malignity to Nero." He admits,
however, that the Sultan was sober, chaste, just to his own people, and
even kind to his Christian subjects; whilst Makrizi calls him one of the
best princes that ever reigned over Musulmans. Yet if we take Bibars as
painted by this admiring historian and by other Arabic documents, the
second of Friar William's comparisons is justified, for he seems almost a
devil in malignity as well as in activity. More than once he played tennis
at Damascus and Cairo within the same week. A strange sample of the man is
the letter which he wrote to Boemond, Prince of Antioch and Tripoli, to
announce to him the capture of the former city. After an ironically polite
address to Boemond as having by the loss of his great city had his title
changed from Princeship (_Al-Brensiyah_) to Countship (_Al-Komasiyah_),
and describing his own devastations round Tripoli, he comes to the attack
of Antioch: "We carried the place, sword in hand, at the 4th hour of
Saturday, the 4th day of Ramadhan,... Hadst thou but seen thy Knights
trodden under the hoofs of the horses! thy palaces invaded by plunderers
and ransacked for booty! thy treasures weighed out by the hundredweight!
thy ladies (_Damataka_, 'tes DAMES') bought and sold with thine own gear,
at four for a dinar! hadst thou but seen thy churches demolished, thy
crosses sawn in sunder, thy garbled Gospels hawked about before the sun,
the tombs of thy nobles cast to the ground; thy foe the Moslem treading
thy Holy of the Holies; the monk, the priest, the deacon slaughtered on
the Altar; the rich given up to misery; princes of royal blood reduced to
slavery! Couldst thou but have seen the flames devouring thy halls; thy
dead cast into the fires temporal with the fires eternal hard at hand; the
churches of Paul and of Cosmas rocking and going down--, then wouldst thou
have said, 'Would God that I were dust!' ... As not a man hath escaped to
tell thee the tale, I TELL IT THEE!"

A little later, when a mission went to treat with Boemond, Bibars himself
accompa