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.