After the capture of Aleppo, Hama and Baalbek were occupied. The latter, which, like so many other once famous cities, has become under Turkish rule a desolation with only a few miserable huts amid its superb ruins, was still a populous city, and contained large stores of provisions. Thence he went to Damascus and in January 1401 defeated the remainder of the Egyptian army in a battle which was hardly less bloody than that before Aleppo. The garrison, composed mostly of Circassian mamelukes and negroes, capitulated, but the chief was put to death for having been so slow in surrendering. Possibly by accident, the whole city was burned. Timour was stopped from advancing to Jerusalem by a plague of locusts, which ate up every green thing. The same cause rendered it impossible to attack Egypt, whose sultan had refused to surrender Syria.[119] From Damascus, Timour went to Bagdad, which was held by contemporaries to be impregnable. Amid the heat of a July day, when the defenders had everywhere sought shade, Timour ordered a general assault, and in a few minutes the standard of one of his sheiks, with its horsetail and its golden crescent, was raised upon the walls.[120] Then followed the usual carnage attending Timour’s captures. The mosques, schools, and convents with their occupiers were spared: so also were the _imaums_ and the professors. All the remainder of the population between the ages of eight and eighty were slaughtered. Every soldier of Timour, of whom there were ninety thousand, as the price of his own safety, had to produce a head. The bloody trophies were, as was customary in Timour’s army, piled up in pyramids before the gates of the city. It was on his return northwards from Damascus that, in 1402, Timour sent the message to Bajazed which at once forced him to raise the siege of Constantinople. Contemporaneously with this message, Timour requested the Genoese in Galata and at Genoa to obtain aid from the West and to co-operate with him to crush the Turkish sultan. [Sidenote: Bajazed’s reply to Timour’s summons.]