The Crusades Issue 40 | 1993 Purchase this issue

ARTICLE TOOLS

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A very important Frankish knight … had come on a pilgrimage and was going home again. We got to know one another, and became firm friends. He called me “Brother,” and an affectionate friendship grew up between us.

When he was due to embark for the return journey, he said to me, “My brother, as I am about to return home, I should be happy if you would send your son with me” (the boy, who was about 14 years old, was beside me at the time), “so that he could meet the noblemen of the realm and learn the arts of politics and chivalry. On his return home, he would be a truly cultivated man.”

A truly cultivated man would never be guilty of such a suggestion; my son might as well be taken prisoner as go off into the land of the Franks!

I turned to my friend and said, “I assure you that I could desire nothing better for my son, but unfortunately the boy’s grandmother, my mother, is very attached to him, and she would not even let him come away with me without extracting a promise from me that I would bring him back to her.”

I was present myself when one of them [Templars] came up to the emir Mu’in ad-Din—God have mercy on him—in the Dome of the Rock, and said to him, “Would you like to see God as a baby?”

The emir said that he would, and the fellow proceeded to show us a picture of Mary with the infant Messiah on her lap. “This,” he said, “is God as a baby.”

Almighty God is greater than the infidels’ concept of him!

This is an example of Frankish barbarism, God damn them! When I was in Jerusalem, I used to go to the Masjid al-Aqsa, beside which is a small oratory which the Franks have made into a church. Whenever I went into the mosque, which was in the hands of Templars, who were friends ...