Λ.Β . 1188. LETTER OF FREDERIC TO SÂLADIN. 101 empire, to Saladin, ruler over the Saracens ; may he take warning from Pharaoh, and flee from Jerusalem. The letters which your devoted services addressed to us a long time since, on matters of importance to yourself, and which would have benefitted you, if reliance could have been placed on your words, we received, as became the mightiness of our majesty, and deemed it proper to communicate, through the medium of our letters, with your mightiness. But now, inasmuch as you have profaned the Holy Land, over which we, by the authority of the Eternal King, bear rule, solicitude for our imperial office admonishes us to proceed with due rigour against audacity so rash, so criminal, and so presumptuous. Wherefore, unless before all things you restore the land of Judœa, Samaria, and Palestine, which you have seized, with the addition thereto of due satisfaction to be adjudged for excesses so nefarious according to the Holy Constitutions, that we may not appear to wage an unlawful war against you, we give you the space of the revolution of one year from the beginning of the calends of November, in the year of the Incarnation of our Lord one thousand one hundred and eighty-eight, after which time you must make trial of the fortune of war on the plains of Tanis,90 by virtue of the vivifying Cross and in the name of the true Joseph. For we can scarcely believe that you are ignorant of what, being testified by the writings of the ancients and the histories of antiquity, we are to presume is to be the course of events in our time. Do you pretend not to know that both the JEthiopias, Mauritania, Persia, Syria,91 Parthia, where our9 2 dictator Marcus Crassus met with a premature death, Judaea, maritime Samaria, Arabia, Chaldœa, Egypt itself as well, where, shameful to repeat! a Eoman citizen, Antony, a man endowed with distinguished virtues, passing the limits of propriety and temperance, and, acting otherwise than as became a soldier sent from the mistress of the world, became enslaved by his sensual- passion for Cleopatra—do you pretend not to know that all these and Armenia and innumerable other lands 9 0 Roger of Wendover says, " the field of Zoan," which, if correct, may possibly allude to Psalm lxxviii. 12. It is more probable, however, that he alludes to the city of Tanais, or Tanis, in Saladin's kingdom of Egypt, which was situate at the Tanaitic mouth of the Nile, and was rebuilt by the Caliphs of the line of the Ommiades. 9 1 More probably " Scythia," with Roger of Wendover 9 2 He speaks in his capacity of emperor of Rome.