The victims of this wholesale execution comprised the entire Moslem garrison of Acre except a few persons of distinction who were specially reserved for ransom. Richard himself stated the number of the slain to be about two thousand six hundred.[734] Bohadin, whose computation is doubtless that of the Moslem troops who visited the place of slaughter next morning, says “more than three thousand.”[735] This writer, whose narrative we have been following, and who was Saladin’s confidential secretary and constant companion, says that in this matter “the English king, seeing all the delays interposed by the Sultan to the execution of the treaty, acted perfidiously with regard to his Mussulman prisoners.” This charge of perfidy is based upon a clause which occurs only in the same writer’s account of the terms of the capitulation of Acre; according to him, the garrison were thereby promised that in any case their lives should be spared; if the Sultan failed to do his part of the agreement, their fate was to be slavery.[736] The Frank writers know nothing of this stipulation. Two of them distinctly assert that the promise of life to the garrison was made conditional on Saladin’s fulfilment of the bargain.[737] Another says they were to go out free and unharmed if the agreement were carried out within the term, but if not, they were to be at the mercy of the kings for their limbs and lives.[738] The others simply speak of them as hostages. If the Frankish version of this matter be the correct one, then the persistent “delays interposed by the Sultan to the execution of the treaty” had unquestionably, on the principles universally recognised by both Franks and Saracens, rendered the lives of these hostages legally forfeit at mid-day on August 20. Bohadin’s admission about the “delays” is practically an acknowledgement that they would have been so but for the special promise which he alleges to have been made to these men. Even if that promise were given, indeed, a feudal lawyer might have made out a case for Richard and his colleagues in the war-council, on the plea that the moment the garrison became legally slaves, they became, as such, the absolute property of their masters, to be kept alive or slain at their masters’ will; and a Mussulman lawyer might have had even more difficulty than a Christian one in finding an answer to such a plea. It is, however, quite possible that the treaty—drawn up as it was, in haste, in two different languages, between parties who could only hold communication through interpreters[739]—may have been honestly understood by the Moslems in one sense and by the Christians in another. As for Richard’s personal responsibility in the matter, Bohadin certainly exaggerates it. The other princes of the Crusade clearly concurred in the determination of the hostages’ fate.[740] The cruelty of such wholesale slaughter shocked neither their moral sense nor that of their contemporaries; the chroniclers