After the storming of the walls there took place in the crooked, steeply sloping streets of the town, the massacre for which Beziers and the Albigensian Crusade itself are principally remembered. Priest and layman, woman and child seem to have suffered equally. Of a great crowd which had taken sanctuary in the church of St. Mary Magdalene, not one survived. With the sword came fire. Since, as we have seen, the camp followers, probably mixed with the peasant infantry, had been the first to enter, the knights began to drive them out by force, for fear that they themselves would get no loot. In their anger at this, the “villeins” set fire to the town, which burned fiercely. The cathedral of St. Nazaire got so hot that the stone vaulting cracked and fell in. One admiring Cistercian contemporary makes Arnaut Amalric answer the question as to whether the Catholic citizens should be spared with the famous “Kill them all, for God will know His own,” for fear that many heretics might escape by feigning orthodoxy. Certain modern Catholic writers maintain that the lay chieftains of the Crusade had determined beforehand upon a massacre, as a military measure, to terrify the country. It would seem as if no such decision could have been made by the lay nobles if the legates had opposed. Still the point is not worth labouring, inasmuch as it has over and over again on these occasions proved impossible to restrain armies much more regularly and firmly disciplined than the Crusaders. The definite reasons for doubting the completeness of the massacre are that the church of St. Mary Magdalene, where the slaughter was heaviest, is so small that not a third of the seven thousand supposed to have been killed in it could possibly have packed into the place, and further, that the corporate life of the town was so quickly reconstituted that it was soon able to resist the Crusaders again. At all events the impression caused by the massacre was tremendous. As many as a hundred castles, some say, were abandoned by their garrisons who fled to the mountains. The turbulent city of Narbonne made haste to put itself on record by executing some heretics, by contributing generously to the expenses of the Crusade, and by allowing certain of its castles to be garrisoned by Crusaders as pledges of good faith.