Damietta was therefore more closely invested; its garrison was reduced to starvation. To prevent possible defection among his miserable soldiers, the commander of Damietta walled up the gates of the city. The Christians made an assault in full force; the rams battered the trembling towers; ladders swarmed with assailants; no one opposed them. Sweeping over the ramparts with naked swords, they found the streets and houses filled with the dead. Of seventy thousand scarcely three thousand of the inhabitants had remained alive. The air was fraught with poisonous stench from the decaying corpses; as the chronicler says, “the dead had killed the living.” The crusaders could abide only long enough to gather the booty, and left the city to be cleansed by carrion-birds and the air of heaven. This temporary success of his policy inflamed the conceit of Cardinal Pelagius. According to his own people, the “King of kings and Lord of lords” had given him the city; “under the guidance of Christ” the soldiers had scaled the walls. The victors took as their reward the rich plunder of the place, and gratefully “baptized all the children who were found alive in the city, thereby giving to God the first-fruit of souls.” The Moslems, afflicted by these reverses, enlarged their conditions of peace to the yielding up, not only of Jerusalem, but all the Holy Land. The cardinal refused even these terms, and proposed to march to the capture of Cairo, the capital of Egypt. In vain did the military leaders protest against that which they esteemed impracticable in itself, and which, in the event of its success, would leave on their hands a land which they could not hope to defend against the myriads who were swarming from all parts of the Moslem world. The cardinal accused the warriors of timidity and irreligion. This was too much for John of Brienne, who would have dared to sheathe his good sword in the bowels of Lucifer himself. Orders for the ascent of the Nile were given. At the junction of its two branches, the southern extreme of the Delta, the Moslems made their fortified camp, and built what has since been known as the city of Mansourah. The enemy approached; once more the sultan offered peace, including now the gift of the Delta, together with the previously offered conditions.