48 A Short History of the Middle East
completely enveloping the Crusader kingdom except for its out-
. post on the Red Sea at Aqaba. The Crusader freebooter Raynald
de Chatillon provoked Saladin to a jihad by an abortive attempt to
seize Mecca and Madina by way of the Red Sea. At the Horns of
Hattin above Tiberias Saladin outgeneralled and shattered the
Crusader army in 1187; Jerusalem fell, and two years later all that
was left of the Prankish kingdom were the ports of Aiitioch,
Tripoli, and Tyre.
The Third Crusade, in which Richard Coeur-de-Lion of Eng-
land played a prominent part, failed to do more than recover
Cyprus and a strip of the Levant coast with Akka as its principal
port; and for fifty years (1192-1244) the situation was a stalemate
with, on the whole, peace between the Franks and their Muslim
neighbours. Characteristic of the new age, in which both the
fierce Crusading spirit and that of the jihad were out-of-date, was
the peaceable accommodation between the Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II and Saladin's successor on the throne of Egypt, by
which in 1229 the Prankish kingdom recovered the Holy Places of
Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth and a strip of territory con-
necting them with the port of Akka. In these pacific conditions the
most important contribution of the Crusades was able to take root:
namely, the great development of the Eastern trade by the Italian
and other commercial cities, notably Venice, Genoa, and Pisa.
Already in the early years of the Crusader kingdom they had ob-
tained from the Prankish feudal rulers important concessions for
their traders as the price of their participation in the material
fitting-out of the Crusades: exemption from taxation and customs-
dues, and legal autonomy in their special quarters in the Levant
ports under the jurisdiction of their own consuls. Their friendly
relations with Egypt at the beginning of the thirteenth century en-
abled them to extend their commerce to that country, by treaties
with the Ayyubid sultans dating from 1208, and so to lay the
foundations of the prosperous Levant trade of Mediterranean
Europe.
After Saladin's victories the Muslims no longer had any fear of
the Crusader power, but treated them as a convenient minor piece
on the Middle Eastern chessboard. Early in the thirteenth century,
however, the Muslims had to face a far more deadly menace in the
invasion of their eastern lands by the heathen and desperately cruel
Mongols, who, under their leader Jingiz Khan, came out of the