Around the time of Easter last year, the knight I mentioned earlier, whom we called the prefect of Tiberiad, and who had been victorious in that battle, was involved in another encounter, less fortunate for our men, in which he was captured, and brought alive by the pagans to a city belonging to them. During I don't know which one of their sacrilegious celebrations, they brought this knight out and urged him to renounce and to abjure his own belief. Splendidly obdurate, he rejected such criminal behavior, and was horrified even to hear such a suggestion. This praiseworthy man was immediately seized, tied, as they say, to a tree that stood in the middle of a field, and was torn by a hail of arrows from all sides. The crown was then sawed from his head, and the rest was made into the form of a cup, as though to hold drinks for the king of Damascus, by whose orders these acts had been done, to frighten our men. By dying to preserve the confession of his faith, this knight made himself a martyr who would be known for ages to come. His name was Gervais, of noble blood, from the castle of Basilcas[268] in Soissons. These are the things that, by the grace of God, we have found out from entirely reliable men up to this day. If, in following the opinions of other men, we have said anything false, we have not done so with the intention of deceiving anyone. We are grateful to God, the Redeemer of this holy City, through the efforts of our people. For when the siege of the city began, He himself revealed, to an anchorite living in Bethania, as the story has been reliably told to us, that the city would be besieged furiously, but that it would be entered on Easter day, at the hour at which Christ was brought to the cross, to demonstrate that He again redeemed it from its afflictions by the suffering of his own limbs. This anchorite then called together some of our leaders, and told them these things, which were all proven true by the manner in which the city was actually captured. We thank God for having composed these deeds with his own spirit, through our mouth. For the rest, if anyone thinks that we have not laid things out as diligently as Julius Caesar and Hirtius Pansa[269] did in the history of the Gauls, Spaniards, Pharsalians, Alexandrians, and Numidians, he should carefully consider the fact that the same people who waged the wars wrote them down. As a result, nothing general or particular that happened is omitted from their accounts. They tell how many thousands of men there were, how many from each region, who the princes were, to whom power was delegated, who the leaders and princes were on the other side, what the cavalry, what the lightly armed troops did, how many shields were pierced by javelins, and, if I may use their own words, "after the consuls and their officers had sounded the retreat," how many men were missing and wounded at the end of the battle. Since another profession