Note 742 — Chapter III · THE FALL OF ACRE 1191.

Extract from Imad-ed-Din, in Abu Shama, Hist. des Crois., iv. 277, 278. It is probably to this that Bohadin alludes when he speaks of “reprisals” as one of the motives to which the massacre at Acre was attributed; and it is he who adds (p. 243) that it was also ascribed to Richard’s sense of the risk of leaving so many prisoners behind him. The story told in the Gesta, 189, and R. Howden, iii. 127, that Saladin had wantonly provoked the retaliation by beheading on August 18 all the Christian prisoners who should have been exchanged for his own men next day, is obviously a fiction; and it is clear that the leaders of the host were not even misled by a false report, for the Estoire and the Itinerarium make no mention of any such thing.