The Carizmians had advanced into the plain of Ramleh by way of Baalbec, Tiberias, and Naplous, and they now directed their footsteps towards Jerusalem. They entered the Holy City sword in hand, massacred the few remaining Christians in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, pillaged the town, and rifled the tombs of the kings for treasure. They then marched upon Gaza, stormed the city, and put the garrison to the sword, after which they sent messengers across the desert to the sultan of Egypt to announce their arrival. Ayoub immediately sent a robe of honour and sumptuous gifts to their chief, and despatched his army from Cairo in all haste, under the command of Rokmeddin Bibars, one of his principal Mamlooks, to join them before Gaza. The Grand Masters of the Temple and the Hospital, on the other hand, collected their forces together, and made a junction with the troops of the sultan of Damascus and the lord of Carac. They marched upon Gaza, attacked the united armies of the Egyptians and Carizmians, and were exterminated in a bloody battle of two days’ continuance. The Grand Master of the Temple and the flower of his chivalry perished in that bloody encounter, and the Grand Master of the Hospital was taken prisoner, and led away into captivity.[119] The government of the order of the Temple, in consequence of the death of the Grand Master, temporarily devolved upon the Knight Templar, Brother William de Rochefort, who immediately despatched a melancholy letter addressed to the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury, detailing the horrors and atrocities of the Carizmian invasion. “These perfidious savages,” says he, “having penetrated within the gates of the holy city of Israel, the small remnant of the faithful left therein, consisting of children, women, and old men, took refuge in the church of the sepulchre of our Lord. The Carizmians rushed to that holy sanctuary; they butchered them all before the very sepulchre itself, and cutting off the heads of the priests who were kneeling with uplifted hands before the altars, they said one to another, ‘Let us here shed the blood of the Christians _on the very place where they offer up wine to their GOD, who they say was hanged here_.’ Moreover, in sorrow be it spoken, and with sighs we inform you, that laying their sacrilegious hands on the very sepulchre itself, they sadly knocked it about, utterly battering to pieces the marble shrine which was built around that holy sanctuary. They have defiled, with every abomination of which they were capable, Mount Calvary, where Christ was crucified, and the whole church of the resurrection. They have taken away, indeed, the sculptured columns which were placed as a decoration before the sepulchre of the Lord; and, as a mark of victory, and as a taunt to the Christians, they have sent them to the sepulchre of the wicked Mahomet. They have violated the tombs of the happy kings of Jerusalem in the same church, and they have scattered, to the hurt of