ion for men,
even his enemies, in whom he recognized superior qualities, courage,
loyalty, and loftiness of mind. For Christian knighthood, its precepts
and the noble character it stamped upon its professors, he felt so much
respect and even inclination that the wish of his heart, it is said, was
to receive the title of knight, and that he did, in fact, receive it with
the approval of Richard Coeur de Lion. By reason of all these facts and
on all these grounds he acquired, even amongst the Christians, that
popularity which attaches itself to greatness justified by personal deeds
and living proofs, in spite of the fear and even the hatred inspired
thereby. Christian Europe saw in him the able and potent chief of
Mussulman Asia, and, whilst detesting, admired him.

After the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin, the Christians of the East, in
their distress, sent to the West their most eloquent prelate and gravest
historian William, Archbishop of Tyre, who, fifteen years before, in the
reign of Baldwin IV., had been Chancellor of the kingdom of Jerusalem.
He, accompanied by a legate of Pope Gregory VIII., scoured Italy, France,
and Germany, recounting everywhere the miseries of the Holy Land, and
imploring the aid of all Christian princes and peoples, whatever might be
their own position of affairs and their own quarrels in Europe. At a
parliament assembled at Gisors, on the 21st of January, 1188, and at a
diet convoked at Mayence on the 27th of March following, he so powerfully
affected the knighthood of France, England, and Germany, that the three
sovereigns of these three states, Philip Augustus, Richard Coeur de Lion,
and Frederick Barbarossa, engaged with acclamation in a new crusade.
They were princes of very different ages and degrees of merit, but all
three distinguished for their personal qualities as well as their
puissance. Frederick Barbarossa was sixty-seven, and for the last
thirty-six years had been leading, in Germany and Italy, as politician
and soldier, a very active and stormy existence. Richard Cceur de Lion
was thirty-one, and had but just ascended the throne where he was to
shine as the most valiant and adventurous of knights rather than as a
king. Philip Augustus, though only twenty-three, had already shown
signs, beneath the vivacious sallies of youth, of the reflective and
steady ability characteristic of riper age. Of these three sovereigns,
the eldest, Frederick Barbarossa, was first ready to