Excerpt from Padilla: A Tale of Palestine This Tale is intended as a relation of the life of a young Spaniard, and of his catastrophe in the battle of Tiberias, shortly after the conquest of Jerusalem. He bore the Oriflamb, or standard of St. Dennis, under hugh-of-tabary, when, [contrary to the injunctions of godfrey-de-bouillon, that prince hazarded an action. Saladin with his Saracens was victorious. The gene rous Saladin was always as noble in victory as he was mighty in the combat: it is to be lamented, that the crusaders deemed it derogatory to imitate even the vir tues of an enemy. As to the crusades themselves, I neither condemn nor justify them perhaps to repel the Turks from Christendom it was necessary to in vade Asia; yet the final achievement bore a miserable proportion to the immensity of the means employed perhaps a profuse letting of blood was requisite to that age of grossness; certain it is, that those strange expeditions were not in the end unsalutary to Europe from her disasters in Holy Land she reaped advantages, political and moral, which, in all probability, ficould neverhave arisen from her success. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.