anything to hinder them. Yet the Sultan refused to return Ascalon; he granted them the Holy Sepulchre instead and imposed upon every pilgrim a fee to be collected from each of them. The English would agree only if Ascalon were restored to them and its walls rebuilt as before ⦗1⦘, but the Sultan was resolute in withholding his consent ⦗2⦘.
Thereafter the Sultan rode out with his vast army until he reached Jaffa. He laid a stringent siege to the city and captured it; [his troops carried off abundant spoils, while the citadel held out. He pressed it so hard that it weakened, yielded, and was on the point of sending him its keys ⦗3⦘] and of requesting ⦗4⦘ safe-conduct for young and old alike ⦗5⦘. While matters stood thus, English ships ⦗6⦘ suddenly appeared upon the heaving sea; the defenders’ spirits rose and their resistance stiffened. The accursed king then burst in ⦗7⦘, retook the town ⦗8⦘, and cold-bloodedly slew the Muslims who had remained behind there before his very eyes. The Sultan withdrew from his siege lines ⦗9⦘ to positions beyond them, fearing for the army should the Franks ⦗10⦘ engage in battle.
The English king ⦗11⦘ was amazed at the Sultan’s formidable might—how he had taken so great a city in two days when others could not conquer it in two years—and he said: “I never imagined that, for all his gallantry and stern resolve, he would retreat from his post merely at my arrival, when my men and I had landed from the sea stripped ⦗12⦘, without weapons of war or equipment for combat.”
He then pressed hard for a treaty that would include Ascalon, but the Sultan refused most emphatically. Later, during those nights, the Sultan launched a sudden raid against the English with only seventeen horsemen, accompanied by a few infantrymen. The Sultan encircled him with his army and hemmed him in so tightly that no escape remained ⦗13⦘ had the troops only resolved to charge with him; yet they all shrank back—there is no power nor strength save in Allah. The Sultan urged them on with every form of encouragement, but each recoiled as a patient shrinks from drinking medicine ⦗14⦘.