Contemporary history deplores with severity the corruption of morals that prevailed in Ptolemaïs, the crowds of strangers bringing with them the vices of all countries. Effeminacy and luxury pervaded every class, the clergy themselves being unable to escape the general contagion: the inhabitants of Ptolemaïs were esteemed the most voluptuous and dissolute of all the nations of Syria. Ptolemaïs was not only the richest city of Syria, it was further supposed to be the best fortified. St. Louis, during his abode in Palestine, had neglected nothing to repair and increase its fortifications. On the land side, a double wall surrounded the city, commanded at distances by lofty battlemented towers; and a wide and deep ditch prevented access to the ramparts. Towards the sea, the city was defended by a fortress built at the entrance of the port, by the castle of the temple on the south, and by the tower called the King’s Tower, on the east. Ptolemaïs appears then to have possessed much better means of defence than at the period at which it stood out for three years against all the forces of Europe. No power could have subdued it if it had been inhabited by true citizens, and not by foreigners, pilgrims, and traders, at all times ready to transport themselves and their wealth from one place to another. The persons who represented the king of Naples, the lieutenants of the king of Cyprus, the French, the English, the pope’s legate, the patriarch of Jerusalem, the prince of Antioch, the three military orders, the Venetians, the Genoese, the Pisans, the Armenians, the Tartars, had all and each their separate quarter, their jurisdiction, their tribunals, their magistrates—all independent of each other, and all enjoying the right of sovereignty. All these quarters were as so many different cities, opposed to each other by customs, by language, by manners, and above all, by rivalries and jealousies. It was impossible to preserve order in a city in which so many sovereigns made laws, which had no uniform government, and in which the crime pursued in one part, was protected in another. Thus all the passions were without a check, and often gave birth to sanguinary and disgraceful scenes: in addition to the quarrels that took their rise in the country, there was not a feud in Europe, particularly in Italy, that was not felt in Ptolemaïs. The discords of the Guelphs and the Ghibelines were here carried on with warmth, and the rivalries of Venice and Genoa had caused torrents of blood to flow. Each nation had fortifications in the quarter it inhabited, against the others; and the churches even were fortified. At the entrance to each division was a fortress, with gates and iron chains; it was plainly to be perceived that all these means of defence had been employed less for the purpose of stopping the progress of an enemy, than as a barrier against neighbours and rivals.