To Gerard de Riderfort succeeded (A. D. 1189) the Knight Templar, Brother WALTER.[84] Never did the flame of enthusiasm burn with fiercer or more destructive power than at this famous siege of Acre. Nine pitched battles were fought, with various fortune, in the neighbourhood of Mount Carmel, and during the first year of the siege a hundred thousand Christians are computed to have perished. The tents of the dead, however, were replenished by new-comers from Europe; the fleets of Saladin succoured the town, the Christian ships brought continual aid to the besiegers, and the contest seemed interminable. Saladin’s exertions in the cause of the prophet were incessant. The Arab authors compare him to a mother wandering with desperation in search of her lost child, to a lioness who has lost its young. “I saw him,” says his secretary Bohadin, “in the fields of Acre afflicted with a most cruel disease, with boils from the middle of his body to his knees, so that he could not sit down, but only recline on his side when he entered into his tent, yet he went about to the stations nearest to the enemy, arranged his troops for battle, and rode about from dawn till eve, now to the right wing, then to the left, and then to the centre, patiently enduring the severity of his pain.” Having received intelligence of the mighty preparations which were being made in Europe for the recovery of Jerusalem, and of the march of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa through Hungary and Greece to Constantinople, with a view of crossing the Hellespont, into Asia, Saladin sent orders to the governors of Senjâr, Al Jazîra, Al Mawsel, and Arbel, ordering them to attend him with their troops, and directed his secretary Bohadin to proceed to the caliph Al Nâssr Deldin’illah, at Bagdad, humbly to request the Mussulman pontiff to use his spiritual authority and influence to induce all the Moslem nations and tribes to heal their private differences and animosities, and combine together against the Franks, for the defence of Islam. Bohadin was received with the greatest distinction and respect by the caliph and the whole divan at Bagdad, and whilst the pope was disseminating his apostolical letters throughout Christendom, calling upon the western nations to combine together for the triumph of the CROSS, the Mussulman pontiff was addressing, from the distant city of Bagdad, his pious exhortations to all true believers, to assemble under the holy banners of the prophet, and shed their blood in defence of _Islam_.