Saladin’s men found their own leader’s generosity as naïve as they found Heraclius’s greed detestable.

All the Christians who could pay for their freedom then left for Tyrus, escorted by Saladin’s soldiers so that they wouldn’t be plundered by robbers and Bedouins on the way. When they were gone Saladin remitted the debt for the remaining twenty thousand people who would have been forced to go into slavery because they couldn’t pay the ransom or had received no mercy from the patriarch or the knights.

When the Christians were gone, Muslims and Jews began to move in at once. The holy sites that the Christians called the Temple of the Lord and the Temple of Solomon were cleansed with rose water for several days; the cross on top of the cupola was removed and dragged in triumph through the streets, now rinsed clean and free of blood; and the crescent moon was raised for the first time in eighty-eight years over Al Aksa and the Dome of the Rock.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was closed for three days and closely guarded while they argued what should be done with it. Almost all of Saladin’s emirs thought that the church should be razed to the ground. Saladin rebuked them by saying that the church was only a building; the grave crypt in the rock beneath the building was the actual holy site. It would be an empty gesture to tear down the church itself.

After three days he won them over in this matter as well. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was reopened and entrusted to Syrian and Byzantine priests. It was guarded by the forbidding Mamelukes against any attempt at desecration.

A week later Saladin was able to hold prayers in the newly cleansed and most remote prayer site, the third most important holy site in Islam, Al Aksa. As usual, he wept. No one was surprised at this. He had finally fulfilled the promise he had made to God, to liberate the holy city of Al Quds.

From the point of view of a business transaction, Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem was one of the worst undertaken during the entire long war in Palestine. And for that he had to endure both laughter and scorn by his contemporaries.

But in terms of posterity he had done something extraordinary. His name became immortal, and forever after he was the only Saracen on whom the Frankish lands looked with genuine respect.

Arn had not been present during Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem. Saladin had spared him from those sights, although he did take the city with the gentle measures that Arn had recommended.

Arn now wanted to leave for home, but Saladin pressed him to stay a while longer. It was a peculiar situation; at the same time that Saladin assured Arn that he was free to go whenever he chose, he spared no efforts to persuade him to stay and help.

As everyone could predict, a new crusade was imminent. The German Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa was on his way through Asia Minor with a mighty army. The king of France, Philippe Auguste, and the king of England, Richard the Lionheart, were sailing across the Mediterranean.

Saladin’s opinion was that the coming war would be decided more by negotiations than on the battlefield, because his experience told him that so many new Franks arriving at once would have a hard time fighting. Arn had to agree with that assessment. It was also difficult for him to contradict Saladin in his belief that no one was better as a negotiator than Arn, who spoke God’s language fluently and Frankish like a native. He also had Saladin’s trust, and he ought to have the same trust among the Franks because he had served for twenty years as a Templar knight in the Holy Land.

This was also hard to contradict. Arn wanted to go home. He was so filled with longing that it made his recent wounds ache, although they had healed well. But he could not deny that he owed a debt to Saladin that would be hard to repay, because on more than one occasion he had spared Arn’s life. Without Saladin’s mercy he would never come home at all. But he was suffering from having to participate in a war that no longer concerned him.

Yet God showed mercy on the Muslims in more than one instance. The German Emperor Barbarossa drowned in a river, before he even reached the Holy Land. His body was conveyed further in a cask of vinegar, but he rotted anyway and was buried in Antiochia. The German crusade seemed to die with him.

And it happened just as Arn had predicted: only ten thousand Christian Franks appeared after Jerusalem’s fall, not a hundred thousand.

Saladin had released King Guy de Lusignan without even demanding a ransom. Faced with the new crusade from the lands of the Franks, Saladin knew that he needed a man like King Guy released among his own people; the king could be of much greater use there than as a prisoner. And Saladin was right. King Guy’s return led instantly to endless squabbling about the succession to the throne and treason among the Christians.

But Saladin did make one mistake that he would long regret. King Guy led a Christian army from Tyrus south along the coast in an attempt to retake Acre, which had been the Christians’ most important city after Jerusalem. Saladin chose not to take this threat seriously. When King Guy began to lay siege to Acre, Saladin of course sent off an army which would in turn attack the Christians, who were now trapped between the defenders of the city and Saladin’s army. Saladin thought that time, camp illnesses, and the lack of provisions would easily defeat the less-than-terrifying King Guy. Had Saladin been prepared to sacrifice many lives, he could have won the war swiftly, but he thought it unnecessary to pay that price.

Such a long delay permitted first the Frankish King Philippe Auguste and soon thereafter the English King Richard the Lionheart to come to the aid of the Christian besiegers outside Acre. And with that Saladin had brought upon himself an unreasonably hard war, just what he had been trying to avoid.

Arn was summoned to Saladin’s service, of course, since there would soon be various matters to negotiate. Saladin eventually put together a force of what he thought was a sufficient number of the men he had sent home to a well-deserved rest after a long and victorious war. Then he attacked recklessly, counting on a quick victory.

He had reckoned wrongly in more ways than one. Certainly the newly arrived Frankish and English crusaders were just as unused to the sun and heat as Saladin had been counting on, and it was now the middle of summer. But the Englishmen were used to fighting attacking cavalry. In fact, that was what they did best.

When the first Saracen cavalry stormed across the field toward the Frankish besiegers outside Acre, the sky grew dark in front of the attackers before they even understood why. A few seconds later they found themselves riding into thousands of arrows that seemed to be falling like hail from the sky. And the few riders who avoided being hit, those who were leading the charge and hadn’t noticed that no one was following them, rode straight into a shower of crossbow bolts at close range.

It was all over in less time than it takes a horse to gallop the distance of four normal arrow-shots. The field before Acre was a sea of wounded and dying men, as well as horses that lay kicking on the ground or ran back and forth in panic, trampling the wounded, some of whom staggered around in confusion or scared out of their wits.

Then Richard the Lionheart himself attacked at the head of his knights. It was his swiftest victory ever.

Looking on with a mixture of horror and the professional interest of a warrior, Arn had seen what longbows and crossbows could do. That lesson would never fade from his mind.

And so it was time to negotiate. The first step was to agree to a cease-fire that would allow them to collect all their dead from the battlefield, to the benefit of both sides in the summer heat. Arn was asked to take charge of this himself, since he was dressed as a Templar knight and so could ride straight toward the Englishmen without the risk of being shot.