[Footnote 601: Raymond's advice would have prevented the abandonment of a secure camp abounding with water near Sepphoris. The rash and insolent valor of the master of the order of Knights Templars, which had before exposed the Christians to a fatal defeat at the brook Kishon, forced the feeble king to annul the determination of a council of war, and advance to a camp in an enclosed valley among the mountains, near Hittin, without water. Raymond did not fly till the battle was irretrievably lost, and then the Saracens seem to have opened their ranks to allow him free passage. The charge of suggesting the siege of Tiberias appears ungrounded Raymond, no doubt, played a double part: he was a man of strong sagacity, who foresaw the desperate nature of the contest with Saladin, endeavored by every means to maintain the treaty, and, though he joined both his arms and his still more valuable counsels to the Christian army, yet kept up a kind of amicable correspondence with the Mahometans. See Wilken, vol. iii. part ii. p. 276, et seq. Michaud, vol. ii. p. 278, et seq. M. Michaud is still more friendly than Wilken to the memory of Count Raymond, who died suddenly, shortly after the battle of Hittin. He quotes a letter written in the name of Saladin by the caliph Alfdel, to show that Raymond was considered by the Mahometans their most dangerous and detested enemy. "No person of distinction among the Christians escaped, except the count, (of Tripoli) whom God curse. God made him die shortly afterwards, and sent him from the kingdom of death to hell."--M.] [Footnote 61: Benaud, Reginald, or Arnold de Chatillon, is celebrated by the Latins in his life and death; but the circumstances of the latter are more distinctly related by Bohadin and Abulfeda; and Joinville (Hist. de St. Louis, p. 70) alludes to the practice of Saladin, of never putting to death a prisoner who had tasted his bread and salt. Some of the companions of Arnold had been slaughtered, and almost sacrificed, in a valley of Mecca, ubi sacrificia mactantur, (Abulfeda, p. 32.)] [Footnote 62: Vertot, who well describes the loss of the kingdom and city (Hist. des Chevaliers de Malthe, tom. i. l. ii. p. 226--278,) inserts two original epistles of a Knight Templar.]