you are women and children, but I’m going to make every man
here over sixteen into a knight, and we’ll do our best to fight for
Jesus and Jerusalem!’
The siege began, and at first the Franks held the city. But after
a few days, Saladin moved his army and all his siege engines
to attack the town’s walls from the Mount of Olives. Muslim
arrows made the blue sky as black as night, and fell like rain
on the Franks. Worse was ‘Greek fire’, a terrible weapon that
Saladin’s soldiers shot from their siege engines. It lit fires at once
on anything that it hit, and so the town began to burn, and the
city walls began to fall. The Franks prayed for God’s help in their
churches, and mothers cut their daughters’ hair very short
in the hope of making them ugly, to keep them safe from the
soldiers. People remembered what happened when the Franks
took the town one hundred years before. They couldn’t stop
thinking about how many people died then.
Patriarch Heraclius not only worried about the people, but
also about all the holy things and the gold in the churches. He
told Balian, ‘Go and see Saladin. He’s always generous.’
‘My men are already on the walls!’ the Muslim commander
told Balian when he came to talk, ‘You said that you wanted to
fight, so the time to be merciful is over!’
Balian answered, ‘Many of the people are not fighting very
hard in the hope that you will be generous with us as you have
been with other towns in Palestine. But we soldiers, when we see
that a fight to the death is the only way, we’ll come out and fight
you and we’ll die for God. We’ll take as many of your men as we
can with us, or we’ll win with honour!’
Saladin liked Balian’s brave words so he turned to his generals
and the imams and said, ‘What must I do? I promised to take
the town by the sword, and I can’t break my word!’