Saladin: Sultan of Egypt and Syria and the Liberator of Jerusalem

Among the figures of the medieval world who achieved a reputation that crossed the frontiers of religion, language, and civilization, few stand higher than Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, the soldier of Kurdish descent whom the Latin West came to know simply as Saladin. Born in obscurity in a Mesopotamian fortress town in the year 1137, the son of a provincial administrator in the service of a Turkish warlord, he rose in the course of a single lifetime to become the sultan of Egypt and Syria, the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, the destroyer of the Shia Fatimid caliphate that had ruled Egypt for two centuries, the unifier of the long-fragmented Muslim Near East, and, above all, the commander who, on a barren hilltop above the Sea of Galilee in the high summer of 1187, annihilated the field army of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and within three months recovered for Islam the city that the warriors of the First Crusade had taken by storm and drowned in blood eighty-eight years before. The recapture of Jerusalem, the central religious and emotional objective of the long contest between the Latin Christian settlers of the Levant and the Muslim powers that surrounded them, was the achievement that fixed Saladin's name permanently in the memory of both civilizations, and it was an achievement so resonant that it provoked the greatest of all the Crusading expeditions, the Third Crusade, and brought to the shores of Palestine the most famous warrior-king of the European Middle Ages, Richard the Lionheart of England, in a confrontation that has been retold and reimagined in the literature of East and West for more than eight hundred years.

What distinguished Saladin in the eyes of contemporaries, and what has preserved his reputation across the centuries, was not military genius alone, for his record on the battlefield was uneven and included serious reverses as well as his single overwhelming triumph. It was rather the combination of personal qualities that even his enemies were compelled to acknowledge: a piety that was sincere and unostentatious, a generosity so extravagant that he died possessed of almost no personal wealth, a clemency toward defeated opponents that stood in deliberate and conscious contrast to the conduct of the First Crusade, and a capacity to embody, in his own person, the ideal of the just and merciful ruler that both Islamic political theory and the chivalric imagination of Christian Europe held up as the proper measure of a prince. The Latin chroniclers who recorded the disasters that Saladin inflicted upon the Crusader states nonetheless wrote of him with a respect bordering on admiration, and within a few generations of his death the legend of the noble Saracen sultan had entered the storytelling traditions of Western Europe, where it would flourish in the poetry of Dante, the tales of Boccaccio, the Enlightenment drama of Lessing, and the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott. In the Islamic world his memory followed a more complicated path, neglected for long centuries and then revived with extraordinary intensity in the modern era, when the struggle against European colonialism and the politics of Arab nationalism transformed the medieval Kurdish sultan into a symbol of unity, resistance, and the recovery of a lost greatness.

The world into which Saladin was born was one of profound political fragmentation, and the scale of his eventual achievement can only be understood against the background of that disunity. The Muslim Near East of the early twelfth century was divided among a multitude of competing dynasties, principalities, and city-states: the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad retained spiritual prestige but had long since lost effective political power; the Great Seljuk sultanate had splintered into a patchwork of successor states ruled by Turkish atabegs and emirs who warred constantly with one another; the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt, a Shia Ismaili regime that rejected the religious authority of Baghdad altogether, had decayed into a hollow shell dominated by its own viziers and palace factions; and into the seam between these rival powers the armies of the First Crusade had driven in 1097 and 1098, establishing along the Syrian and Palestinian coast a chain of Latin Christian states, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Edessa, whose continued existence depended precisely upon the inability of their Muslim neighbors to combine against them. Saladin's historical role was to complete the work of welding that fragmented Muslim world into a single political and military instrument, a task begun by the Turkish atabegs Zangi and Nur ad-Din, and then to turn that instrument against the Crusader states with a concentration of force they had never before been compelled to face.

The biography that follows traces the long arc of that career: the Kurdish origins of the house of Ayyub and the family's migration into the service of the Turkish rulers of Syria; the boyhood and education of Saladin in the cultivated, devout, and militarized society of twelfth-century Damascus; the three Egyptian campaigns that carried him, almost against his own inclination, from a subordinate officer in his uncle's retinue to the vizier of a caliphate; the abolition of the Fatimid regime and the transformation of Egypt into the wealthy base of his power; the long and often morally awkward struggle to gather the Muslim lands of Syria and Mesopotamia into his own hands after the death of his overlord Nur ad-Din; the decades of frontier warfare against the Crusader states that culminated in the overwhelming victory at the Horns of Hattin and the recovery of Jerusalem; the grinding war of attrition of the Third Crusade and the famous, wary, mutually respectful contest with Richard the Lionheart; the negotiated peace that left the holy city in Muslim hands; and the sudden death, in Damascus in the spring of 1193, of a ruler who had governed an empire and yet left behind him too little money to pay for his own grave. It closes with an account of the Ayyubid state that he founded, the personal character that contemporaries recorded in unusual detail, and the long and divided afterlife of his memory in the traditions of Islam and of the Christian West.

The Muslim Near East on the Eve of Saladin

To understand the magnitude of what Saladin accomplished, it is necessary to grasp the depth of the political disintegration that characterized the Islamic Near East in the century before his birth. The great age of Arab and Persian Islamic civilization had reached its political climax in the eighth and ninth centuries under the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad, whose authority, at least nominally, had once extended from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the frontiers of India. By the eleventh century that unity had dissolved. The Abbasid caliphate survived as an institution, and the caliph continued to be revered by Sunni Muslims as the symbolic head of the community and the legitimating source of all temporal authority, but real power had passed first to a succession of military families who governed in his name and then, from the middle of the eleventh century, to the Seljuk Turks, a dynasty of converted nomads from the Central Asian steppe who had swept into the Islamic heartlands, defeated the Byzantine emperor at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, and reduced the caliph to a ceremonial figurehead within his own capital.

The Seljuk sultanate itself, however, proved unable to maintain its cohesion. The Turkish political tradition treated a realm as the collective property of a ruling family rather than as a unitary state to be passed intact to a single heir, and the death of each great sultan was followed by the partition of his dominions among sons, brothers, and nephews, and by wars among them. By the early twelfth century the western Seljuk lands of Syria and the Jazira, the fertile region of upper Mesopotamia, had broken into a mosaic of petty principalities. Real authority in these statelets often rested not with the nominal Seljuk princes but with their atabegs, the Turkish military officers originally appointed as guardians and tutors of young royal heirs, who frequently displaced their wards and founded dynasties of their own. Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Mosul, and a dozen lesser towns were ruled by rival emirs and atabegs who fought, allied, and betrayed one another with a fluidity that made any sustained common policy impossible. It was a world in which a Muslim ruler was at least as likely to ally with a Crusader prince against a Muslim rival as to make common cause against the Latin Christians, and in which the very notion of jihad, of organized holy war for the recovery of the lost lands, had fallen into long neglect.

Egypt, the wealthiest single region of the Near East, lay outside even the nominal framework of Sunni unity. Since 969 it had been ruled by the Fatimid caliphate, a dynasty that claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatima and that professed the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam. The Fatimid caliphs maintained their own rival claim to the leadership of the entire Muslim world in direct opposition to the Abbasids of Baghdad, and at the height of their power in the eleventh century they had controlled North Africa, Sicily, the Hejaz with the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and much of Syria and Palestine. By the twelfth century, however, the Fatimid regime had entered an advanced and visible decline. The caliphs had become prisoners of their own palace, secluded figures in whose name a succession of powerful viziers exercised the real authority of the state, and the office of vizier had itself become the prize in a series of violent factional struggles among the rival ethnic contingents of the Fatimid army, the Turks, the Berbers, the Armenians, and the regiments of black African infantry. Egypt remained immensely rich, its agricultural wealth renewed each year by the flooding of the Nile and its commerce sustained by the trade routes that linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, but its government was paralyzed, and to the ambitious powers that surrounded it, both Muslim and Christian, the Fatimid state appeared less a rival than a prize awaiting a conqueror.

Into this fragmented world the First Crusade had erupted at the very end of the eleventh century. Summoned by Pope Urban II in 1095 and drawing tens of thousands of warriors and pilgrims from across Latin Christendom, the expedition had crossed Asia Minor, captured Antioch after a desperate siege, and on the fifteenth of July 1099 stormed the walls of Jerusalem, putting much of its Muslim and Jewish population to the sword in a massacre that would be remembered in the Islamic world for centuries. From these conquests the Crusaders had carved out four Latin states strung along the eastern Mediterranean coast. Their survival through the first half of the twelfth century was made possible above all by the disunity of their neighbors, but it did not go entirely unchallenged. The first serious Muslim response came from Imad ad-Din Zangi, the Turkish atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo, who in 1144 captured the city of Edessa and extinguished the most exposed of the Crusader states, an event that shocked Christian Europe into launching the Second Crusade. Zangi's work was carried forward, with far greater consistency and a far more deliberate ideological program, by his son Nur ad-Din, who made the recovery of Jerusalem and the revival of the spirit of jihad the central purposes of his reign. It was in the service of Nur ad-Din, and as the eventual heir to his cause, that the family of Saladin would rise to greatness.

The Kurdish Origins and the House of Ayyub

The family of Saladin was Kurdish, a people of the mountainous borderlands where the modern frontiers of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria meet, and one with a long if politically subordinate presence within the Islamic world. The Kurds were Sunni Muslims, valued as soldiers and respected for their hardiness, but they had never founded a great dynasty, and within the Turkish-dominated military society of the twelfth-century Near East they occupied a position of honorable inferiority, a martial people who served the Turkish princes rather than ruling in their own right. Saladin's ancestors belonged to the Rawadiya, a branch of the larger Hadhabani Kurdish tribe, and the family traced its more recent origins to the town of Dvin, in the region of Armenia north of Lake Van. It was from Dvin that Saladin's grandfather, a man named Shadhi ibn Marwan, departed at some point early in the twelfth century, taking with him his two sons, Najm ad-Din Ayyub and Asad ad-Din Shirkuh, and migrating southward into Mesopotamia in search of the kind of advancement that a capable and ambitious family of soldiers might hope to find in the service of the Turkish warlords who then dominated the region.

The decisive connection was forged at Baghdad and then at the fortress town of Tikrit, on the Tigris River north of the Abbasid capital. Shadhi had a friend, or perhaps a patron, in a powerful figure named Bihruz, a former slave of the Seljuk household who had risen to become the military governor of the central Iraqi region for the Seljuk sultan. Through Bihruz's favor, Saladin's father, Ayyub, was appointed commander of the citadel of Tikrit, a position of real responsibility that placed the family in charge of a strategic crossing point on the great river. It was a respectable foothold, and Ayyub, a man of notable prudence, dignity, and administrative competence, governed Tikrit creditably for some years. But the family's tenure there ended in a crisis that has become one of the most celebrated episodes in the traditional accounts of Saladin's origins. Shirkuh, Ayyub's younger brother, a soldier of fierce temper and headlong courage, became involved in a violent quarrel, said in the sources to have arisen from his defense of a woman's honor, and killed a man, an associate or officer of Bihruz himself. The patron's favor turned at once to anger, and the family was ordered to leave Tikrit.

The traditional sources record, with the kind of symbolic neatness that often attaches itself to the early lives of great men and that should accordingly be treated with some caution, that it was on the very night the family departed Tikrit, in the year 1137, that Ayyub's wife gave birth to the son who would be named Yusuf and who would carry, in addition, the honorific title Salah ad-Din, meaning the righteousness or rectitude of the faith. The auguries were said to have appeared unfavorable; the family was leaving in disgrace, an exile cast out from a hard-won position, and there were those, the tradition holds, who counselled that the inauspicious infant be abandoned. Ayyub, a man of steadier judgment, refused, and the family carried the child with them on the road north to Mosul. Whatever embroidery later admirers added to this story, the central facts are plain enough: Saladin was born into a family of the Kurdish military service class at a moment of reversal, and his earliest months were spent in the uncertainty of a household that had lost its place and was seeking another.

That new place was found in the service of the most formidable Muslim ruler of the age. At Mosul the brothers Ayyub and Shirkuh entered the retinue of Imad ad-Din Zangi, the Turkish atabeg whose conquest of Edessa would soon make him the most celebrated warrior of the Islamic Near East. The family's value to Zangi was demonstrated almost at once. In 1138, when Zangi's forces were hard pressed, Ayyub, then holding the fortress of Baalbek in the Lebanese mountains, rendered services that Zangi rewarded generously, and the governorship of Baalbek became the family's new base. When Zangi was murdered in 1146 and his dominions were divided between his sons, Ayyub displayed the political acumen that would mark his whole career. He attached the family's fortunes to Nur ad-Din, the abler of Zangi's heirs, who had taken Aleppo and the Syrian portion of his father's inheritance, and Ayyub played a quiet but indispensable role in delivering the great city of Damascus into Nur ad-Din's hands in 1154, an act of statecraft that completed the unification of Muslim Syria under a single ruler and earned the house of Ayyub a position of high honor and trust. Ayyub became one of the leading civil figures of Nur ad-Din's Damascus, while his brother Shirkuh rose to be the most trusted and most aggressive of Nur ad-Din's military commanders.

Childhood and Formation in Damascus

Saladin thus passed from infancy through boyhood in the shadow of his family's steady advancement, and the city in which he came of age was Damascus, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth and, in the middle of the twelfth century, a flourishing center of Sunni Muslim learning, piety, and military culture. The Damascus of Nur ad-Din was a city being deliberately reshaped by its ruler into a model of Islamic orthodoxy and a forward base for holy war. Nur ad-Din was a prince of austere personal piety and serious religious conviction, and he poured resources into the construction of madrasas, the colleges of religious law that trained the scholars and judges of Sunni Islam, into hospitals, into mosques, and into the cultivation of an atmosphere in which the recovery of Jerusalem and the purification of the Muslim community were treated as the highest of public purposes. To grow up in this Damascus was to be immersed in an environment where religion and warfare, scholarship and statecraft, were understood as facets of a single enterprise, and the impress of that environment upon the developing character of Saladin would prove to be permanent.

The sources for Saladin's youth are frustratingly thin, for the chroniclers who recorded his life in such detail did so only after he had become famous, and the boyhood of an obscure officer's son had attracted no contemporary notice. What can be reconstructed is an education of the kind appropriate to a young man of the military service class with a cultivated father. Saladin learned the Quran and the religious sciences, the principles of Islamic jurisprudence, and the theology of the Sunni schools. He was reported in later life to have a deep and genuine knowledge of religious matters, to be able to discuss points of law and doctrine with the scholars whose company he sought out and rewarded, and to take real pleasure in such discussion. He also acquired the literary culture of an educated Arab gentleman: he was said to have known by heart the Hamasa, the great anthology of early Arabic heroic poetry compiled by Abu Tammam, and to have been versed in genealogy, in history, and in the lore of horses, that perennial passion of the Arab and Kurdish military aristocracy. He learned, of course, the arts of the soldier, horsemanship and the use of weapons and the conduct of the hunt, the training-ground of cavalry war, though the sources are at pains to record that the young Saladin showed no particular eagerness for a military career and seemed, if anything, more inclined toward the quiet pursuits of religious study and administration.

This reluctance is a recurring theme in the early biography, and although it is the kind of detail that a pious chronicler might be tempted to invent, in order to suggest that greatness was thrust upon a modest man rather than seized by an ambitious one, there is no strong reason to reject it. Saladin's biographer Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, who knew him well in his later years, recorded that the young man went to Egypt unwillingly, that he compared his summons to that expedition to a man being led to his death, and that the transformation of his character into that of a determined and tireless warrior of the faith came about only gradually, under the pressure of responsibility and, as Saladin himself understood it, under the direction of God. Whether or not the youthful diffidence has been somewhat exaggerated, the picture that emerges is coherent and plausible: a serious, devout, well-read young man, comfortable in the cultivated society of Damascus, attached to the household of a powerful and pious overlord, holding minor administrative and military posts, and giving as yet no sign of the extraordinary career that lay before him. He served in Nur ad-Din's entourage, held a post connected with the policing or administration of Damascus, and was, by his middle twenties, an unremarkable if well-connected member of the Syrian military establishment.

It was a near relation, and a quality of the family that the chroniclers emphasize, that the house of Ayyub functioned as a tightly knit and mutually loyal clan, and Saladin's uncle Shirkuh, childless of surviving heirs and devoted to the advancement of his kin, took a particular interest in the young man. When the great opportunity of the family's fortunes presented itself in the form of intervention in the affairs of Egypt, it was Shirkuh who insisted that his nephew accompany him, and it was thus through the agency of his uncle, and somewhat against his own stated wishes, that Saladin was carried out of the comfortable obscurity of Damascus and onto the stage of history.

The Egyptian Campaigns

The opportunity that transformed Saladin's life, and indeed the entire balance of power in the Near East, arose from the terminal decay of the Fatimid state. By the 1160s the government of Egypt had become the prize in a naked struggle between rival viziers, and the contest had drawn in the two external powers most capable of intervening: the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem under its energetic and ambitious king Amalric, and the Muslim state of Syria under Nur ad-Din. Both rulers understood with perfect clarity what was at stake. Egypt was the richest territory in the region, and whichever power absorbed it would gain a decisive preponderance. For Nur ad-Din, the prospect of the Crusaders seizing Egypt and encircling Muslim Syria between the Latin states of the coast and a Latin-dominated Nile valley was a strategic nightmare that had to be prevented; for Amalric, the conquest of Egypt promised the wealth and manpower that might secure the long-term survival of his kingdom. The immediate occasion for intervention was provided by Shawar, a Fatimid vizier who had been driven from office by a rival and who fled to Nur ad-Din's court to beg for an army that would restore him to power.

Nur ad-Din, after some hesitation, agreed, and the instrument of intervention was Shirkuh, who in 1164 led a Syrian expeditionary force across the desert into Egypt, with his nephew Saladin among the officers of his retinue. This first Egyptian campaign accomplished its narrow purpose: Shawar was restored to the vizierate. But the restored vizier, recognizing that his Syrian rescuers had ambitions of their own and had no intention of simply departing, promptly turned against them and appealed to King Amalric of Jerusalem for help in expelling them. The result was a confused and shifting three-cornered war among Shirkuh's Syrians, Shawar's Egyptians, and Amalric's Crusaders. Shirkuh found himself besieged in the town of Bilbeis, and the first campaign ended in 1164 with a negotiated agreement under which both the Syrian and the Crusader armies withdrew from Egypt, leaving Shawar in power and the underlying question unresolved.

It was during the second campaign, in 1167, that Saladin first emerged as a commander of consequence. Shirkuh led a second army into Egypt; Shawar again allied with Amalric against him; and the decisive engagement was fought in the desert near a place called al-Babein, on the western edge of the Nile valley south of Cairo. Shirkuh entrusted the center of his battle line to his nephew, with instructions to give way before the Crusader charge, drawing the heavily armored Frankish knights forward in a pursuit that would carry them out of the battle while the Syrian wings closed upon their flanks. The maneuver succeeded, and the battle of al-Babein was a tactical victory for Shirkuh, achieved in significant part through the steadiness of the contingent that Saladin had commanded. Saladin then took charge of the great port city of Alexandria, whose population had welcomed the Syrians, and held it through a hard siege when Shawar and Amalric turned the full weight of their forces against it. Once again the campaign ended in a negotiated mutual withdrawal, but Saladin had now been tested in independent command, in pitched battle and in the endurance of a siege, and had not been found wanting. His reputation, and his confidence, had grown.

The third and decisive campaign was precipitated by the Crusaders themselves. In 1168 King Amalric, judging that the moment had come to seize Egypt outright, invaded the country in force, stormed the town of Bilbeis, and massacred its inhabitants, an atrocity that destroyed whatever willingness the Egyptians might have had to accept Frankish protection and drove the desperate vizier Shawar to appeal once more to Nur ad-Din. Shirkuh marched into Egypt for the third time at the beginning of 1169, and this time the situation resolved itself decisively in the Syrians' favor. Confronted by Shirkuh's army and lacking the strength to besiege Cairo, Amalric withdrew his Crusader forces from Egypt. Shirkuh now held the field. The vizier Shawar, whose serial treacheries had earned him the enmity of every party, was seized and put to death, an act in which the sources record that Saladin himself played a part, and the Fatimid caliph al-Adid, having no alternative, appointed Shirkuh as vizier of Egypt. The house of Ayyub, in the space of five years and three campaigns, had risen from the command of a Syrian regiment to the effective government of the wealthiest kingdom in the Muslim world.

Vizier of Egypt and the End of the Fatimid Caliphate

Shirkuh's tenure as vizier was extraordinarily brief. He had held the office for only two months when, in March 1169, he died suddenly, the victim, according to the chroniclers, of his own intemperate appetite at the table. The death of the formidable old soldier created an immediate crisis of succession within the Syrian expeditionary force and at the Fatimid court, and the choice that resolved it fell, to the surprise of many and perhaps of Saladin himself, upon the nephew. The reasons were partly practical and partly cynical. Among the Syrian emirs there was no obvious single successor commanding universal acceptance, and Saladin, as Shirkuh's kinsman and a proven officer, was a candidate around whom the contingent could unite without provoking the jealousies that the elevation of a rival emir would have aroused. The Fatimid caliph al-Adid and his courtiers, for their part, are said to have favored Saladin precisely because they judged him the youngest and least imposing of the available candidates, a man of perhaps thirty-one years whom they expected to be pliable and easily managed, a convenient figurehead through whom the palace might hope to recover its lost authority. It was a calculation that would prove to be one of the most consequential misjudgments of the century.

Saladin took office in 1169 with the title al-Malik an-Nasir, the Victorious King, and at once revealed that the expectations of his pliability had been gravely mistaken. His position was, in fact, exceedingly precarious. He was a young Sunni Kurd governing a Shia country in the name of a Shia caliph he intended ultimately to depose, at the head of a Syrian army whose senior officers included men who resented his promotion, and as the nominal subordinate of an overlord, Nur ad-Din, in distant Damascus, whose suspicions of his increasingly independent power would steadily deepen. Saladin met these dangers with a combination of decisiveness and patience that would characterize his statecraft throughout his life. He moved first to secure his military base. In the autumn of 1169 the regiments of black African infantry that formed a large part of the Fatimid army, recognizing in the new vizier a mortal threat to the old order, rose in revolt in the streets of Cairo. Saladin suppressed the rising with severity, breaking the power of the African regiments and the palace factions that had relied upon them, and he followed this by bringing his own family and additional Syrian and Kurdish troops down from Syria, steadily replacing the unreliable elements of the Egyptian military with men bound to himself by ties of kinship and loyalty.

In the same period he repelled an external attack that demonstrated the continuing danger from the Crusader side. In the late autumn of 1169 a combined force of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Byzantine Empire, the two great Christian powers of the eastern Mediterranean acting in rare concert, laid siege to the Egyptian port of Damietta on the Nile delta. Saladin organized the defense, the besiegers fell out among themselves and were hampered by supply failures and the onset of bad weather, and the great Christian expedition withdrew in failure. The successful defense of Damietta confirmed Saladin's military standing and his indispensability, and it underscored the strategic logic that bound Egypt to the Muslim cause: under his government, the country had ceased to be a prize that the Crusaders might hope to seize and had become instead a bastion against them.

There remained the delicate and dangerous question of the Fatimid caliphate itself. The continued existence of a Shia Ismaili caliph in Cairo, maintaining a claim to the leadership of all Islam in defiance of the Sunni Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, was an anomaly intolerable to the orthodox convictions of both Nur ad-Din and Saladin, and Nur ad-Din pressed his lieutenant repeatedly to make an end of it. Saladin proceeded with characteristic care, preparing the ground by appointing Sunni judges, founding Sunni madrasas, and gradually shifting the religious complexion of Cairo, until the moment was ripe. In September 1171 the decisive step was taken: the preacher at the Friday congregational prayer in Cairo pronounced the khutba, the formal sermon that named the sovereign in whose authority the community worshipped, in the name not of the Fatimid caliph but of the Abbasid caliph al-Mustadi of Baghdad. With that pronouncement, made without disorder or resistance, the Fatimid caliphate that had ruled Egypt for two hundred and two years was simply extinguished. The last Fatimid caliph, al-Adid, lay gravely ill at that very moment and died within days, by the merciful account of the chroniclers without ever learning that his dynasty had been abolished. Egypt had been restored to Sunni Islam and to the symbolic obedience of Baghdad, and Saladin, still in form a vizier and a subordinate, was now in substance the master of a great kingdom.

The Death of Nur Ad-Din and the Seizure of Damascus

The years between the abolition of the Fatimid caliphate and the death of Nur ad-Din were a period of mounting tension between Saladin and the overlord in whose name he ruled. The fundamental problem was structural and probably insoluble. Saladin had become, in fact if not in form, an independent sovereign. He controlled the revenues of Egypt, commanded an army loyal to himself, and pursued a policy shaped by the needs of his own position; yet he remained, in the theory of the relationship, merely the lieutenant of the ruler of Syria. Nur ad-Din, a man of austere conviction and exacting standards, increasingly suspected, with considerable justice, that his lieutenant was building a power that would never again be subordinated to Damascus. The friction came to a head over joint operations against the Crusader fortresses of Oultrejourdain, the great castles of Kerak and Montreal that dominated the desert routes between Egypt and Syria. On more than one occasion when Nur ad-Din advanced to attack these strongholds and expected Saladin to march up from Egypt to join him, Saladin withdrew before the two armies could unite. His motives were the subject of suspicion then and of debate since: he may have feared that a face-to-face meeting would compel a humiliating submission, or that the elimination of the Crusader buffer states would leave Egypt exposed to direct pressure from a Syria he no longer wished to obey. Whatever the reason, Nur ad-Din was angered, spoke of leading an army into Egypt to bring his insubordinate servant to heel, and was, by the testimony of the sources, preparing to do exactly that when death intervened.

On the fifteenth of May 1174, Nur ad-Din died in Damascus of a sudden illness, an infection of the throat that carried him off within days. His death transformed Saladin's situation at a stroke. The threatened invasion of Egypt evaporated; the one man whose authority Saladin had been bound to acknowledge was gone; and the formidable Syrian state that Nur ad-Din had assembled was left to an heir wholly incapable of holding it together, a boy of eleven named as-Salih Ismail. Within weeks the situation grew more fluid still, for in July 1174 King Amalric of Jerusalem also died, leaving his own kingdom to the thirteen-year-old Baldwin IV, a gifted and courageous youth already marked by the first symptoms of the leprosy that would kill him. In the space of two months the two strongest rulers of the Near East had been replaced by children, and the field lay open to whoever possessed the will, the resources, and the army to act.

Saladin acted. The young as-Salih had been carried off to Aleppo by the Zangid emirs who intended to govern in his name, while Damascus and the other Syrian cities were held by a scattering of officers of the late Nur ad-Din, none strong enough to dominate the rest. Saladin announced that he came not as a usurper but as the loyal protector of his late master's son, the guardian who would defend the boy's inheritance against the factions that were tearing it apart, and in the autumn of 1174 he marched from Egypt across the desert at the head of a small picked force of perhaps seven hundred horsemen. The gamble succeeded brilliantly. Damascus, the city in which his own family had long held honor and where his father had governed, opened its gates to him in October 1174 with little resistance. From Damascus he moved swiftly to take Homs and Hama, and before the year was out he had advanced to lay siege to Aleppo itself, the seat of the young as-Salih and the heart of the Zangid resistance.

Aleppo did not fall, and the campaign to master Syria would occupy Saladin, on and off, for the better part of a decade. But the seizure of Damascus in 1174 was the decisive turning point of his career, the moment at which the lieutenant became a sovereign. It was also the moment at which the moral ambiguity of his position became unavoidable, and his enemies did not fail to exploit it. The Zangid princes and the chroniclers loyal to them, of whom the most eloquent was the great historian Ibn al-Athir of Mosul, denounced Saladin as an ingrate and a usurper, a servant who had turned upon the family of the benefactors who had raised his own house from obscurity, a man who cloaked naked ambition in the language of guardianship. Saladin's defenders answered that the unity of the Muslim lands under a capable ruler was the precondition of any successful war against the Crusaders, that the boy as-Salih could never have provided that unity, and that the cause of the faith required precisely the consolidation that Saladin was carrying out. The argument has never been fully settled, and it is fair to say that the recovery of Jerusalem, when it came, did much to silence the critics by demonstrating, in the most public way imaginable, that the unification had served a purpose larger than the aggrandizement of one family.

The Long Struggle for Muslim Syria

The decade that followed the seizure of Damascus was consumed by the slow, frustrating, and frequently interrupted work of bringing the whole of Muslim Syria and the Jazira under Saladin's authority. It was a campaign fought as much with diplomacy, money, and the patient exploitation of his rivals' divisions as with the sword, and it was complicated throughout by the awkward fact that Saladin's principal opponents were not the Crusaders, against whom he claimed to be marshalling the resources of Islam, but fellow Muslims, the Zangid princes of Aleppo and Mosul and their allies. Saladin was acutely conscious of how this looked, and he devoted great care to securing the formal sanction of the one authority whose blessing could clothe his wars against other Muslims in legitimacy: the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. In 1175 the caliph al-Mustadi granted Saladin a diploma of investiture recognizing his rule over Egypt and the Syrian lands he had taken, and from that point Saladin governed as the caliph's acknowledged sovereign, struck coins in his own name, and had the khutba pronounced for himself, the outward signs of a recognized and independent monarchy.

The military contest was punctuated by two pitched battles that broke the back of Zangid resistance. In April 1175, at a place called the Horns of Hama, Saladin defeated a coalition army of the Zangids of Aleppo and Mosul. In the spring of 1176, at Tell al-Sultan near Aleppo, he defeated a second and larger Zangid coalition decisively. After this victory Saladin showed the politic generosity that was a consistent feature of his treatment of defeated Muslim opponents: he made peace on terms that left the Zangids in possession of their cities while acknowledging his suzerainty, took no vengeance, and released his prisoners. He understood that the Muslims of Syria and the Jazira had to be reconciled to his leadership, not merely subjugated, if they were to fight willingly under his banner in the war against the Crusaders, and a humiliated and resentful enemy was of no use to that purpose. In the same year he reinforced his legitimacy by a marriage of considerable symbolic weight, taking as his wife Ismat ad-Din Khatun, the widow of Nur ad-Din himself and the daughter of an earlier ruler of Damascus, a union that bound him into the family of the dynasty he was accused of supplanting.

The final pieces of the Syrian puzzle fell into place in the 1180s. The young as-Salih Ismail, in whose name Saladin had originally claimed to act, died at Aleppo in 1181, still a youth, and his death removed the last figure around whom legitimist opposition to Saladin could plausibly gather. Aleppo passed first to the Zangid line of Mosul, but in June 1183 Saladin acquired the great northern city through a negotiated exchange of territories, entering it in triumph and completing at last the unification of Muslim Syria from the Egyptian frontier to the borders of Anatolia. Mosul itself, the original seat of the Zangid power, held out longest, but in 1186, after a further campaign and a serious illness that nearly killed Saladin, the ruler of Mosul too acknowledged his overlordship, sending contingents to serve in his armies while retaining the government of his own city. By 1186, therefore, Saladin presided over a vast arc of territory, Egypt with its incomparable wealth, the whole of Muslim Syria, the upper Mesopotamian lands of the Jazira, and, through the conquest carried out by his brother Turan-Shah, the distant province of Yemen. For the first time since the early days of the Crusader presence, the Latin states of the coast were ringed on every landward side by the dominions of a single Muslim ruler, and the strategic encirclement that Nur ad-Din had dreamed of was at last a reality.

This was the indispensable precondition of everything that followed. The Crusader states had survived for nearly ninety years because their enemies had never been able to bring their full combined weight to bear against them at one time and place. Saladin had now removed that protection. The campaigns against the Zangids, however unedifying they might appear when set against the rhetoric of holy war, had created the unified military instrument without which the recovery of Jerusalem would have remained an impossibility, and the years of patient consolidation, far from being a distraction from Saladin's true purpose, were the foundation upon which that purpose would be achieved.

The Assassins and the Perils of Power

The long ascent to mastery of Syria was shadowed by a danger of a peculiar and sinister kind: the hostility of the Nizari Ismailis, the Shia sect that the medieval world, both Muslim and Christian, knew as the Assassins. The Nizaris were a radical offshoot of the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam, and from a string of nearly impregnable mountain fortresses, in Persia and in the highlands of Syria, they pursued their objectives through the selective and theatrical murder of their enemies, dispatching devoted agents who would infiltrate a victim's household or entourage, sometimes over a period of years, and strike him down at close quarters, usually at the cost of their own lives. The Syrian branch of the sect was led in Saladin's day by a formidable figure named Rashid ad-Din Sinan, remembered in legend as the Old Man of the Mountain, and Saladin, as a Sunni conqueror extinguishing Shia power and threatening the autonomy of every minor lord in Syria, was precisely the kind of target the Assassins existed to remove.

They tried at least twice. On one occasion a band of Assassins penetrated Saladin's camp and very nearly reached him; on another, in 1176, an attacker actually wounded him, the blow turned aside, by the accounts of the chroniclers, only by the armor he had taken to wearing beneath his clothes after the first attempt. Shaken and angered, Saladin marched into the Nizari mountains and laid siege to Masyaf, the chief of their Syrian strongholds. The siege, however, was abruptly abandoned, and the reason became the stuff of one of the most famous legends attached to Saladin's name. According to the story, Saladin awoke one night in his closely guarded tent to find beside him a cake of a kind made only by the Assassins, a poisoned dagger, and a note warning him that he was wholly within Sinan's power and would do well to come to terms. Whatever the literal truth of the tale, an accommodation was indeed reached: Saladin lifted the siege, the Assassins ceased to pursue him, and for the remainder of his career he was left unmolested by the sect, which redirected its energies, on at least one celebrated later occasion, against his Crusader enemies instead. The episode illustrates a quality that runs through the whole of Saladin's statecraft, the readiness to convert an implacable enemy into a tolerable neighbor through negotiation rather than to pursue a vendetta to a costly and uncertain conclusion.

The Assassins were not the only danger that the consolidation of Saladin's power provoked, for the abolition of the Fatimid caliphate had left behind in Egypt a residue of loyalists who had never reconciled themselves to the new Sunni order and who watched for any opportunity to restore the dynasty that Saladin had extinguished. In 1174, during the very months when Saladin was absent in Syria seizing Damascus, a conspiracy took shape in Cairo among partisans of the old regime, men of the displaced Fatimid establishment who plotted to rise against the Ayyubid governors, to proclaim the restoration of the Fatimid line, and to coordinate their rising with an attack from the sea by a Norman fleet from Sicily and with simultaneous pressure from the Crusaders. The plot was betrayed before it could mature. Saladin's administration, served by an efficient apparatus of intelligence and directed by his vigilant chief secretary, uncovered the conspirators, and the ringleaders, among them a celebrated poet of the vanished Fatimid court, were arrested and put to death. The Norman fleet duly appeared off Alexandria in the summer of 1174, but, finding the city forewarned and the rising already crushed, it accomplished nothing of consequence and withdrew.

The danger was not confined to the capital. In Upper Egypt, the long stretch of the Nile valley south of Cairo where Fatimid sympathies ran deepest and where the remnants of the disbanded regiments of black African infantry had taken refuge, a more dangerous revolt broke out, and it required a hard and sustained campaign by Saladin's brother al-Adil to break the rising and to restore the authority of the new regime in the south. These episodes are a salutary corrective to any impression that Saladin's rise was a smooth or an inevitable progress. At every stage of his ascent he governed against the grain of entrenched and powerful interests: the displaced Fatimid establishment of Egypt, the resentful Zangid loyalists of Syria, the autonomous lords of the mountains, the Assassins in their fortresses, and a perpetually shifting coalition of rivals who would have pulled down his power at the first convincing sign of weakness. That he survived these perils, and that he succeeded in converting so many of those who had opposed him into supporters of his cause, was a measure not of good fortune alone but of the patience, the vigilance, and the political skill with which he met each successive danger as it arose.

War Along the Crusader Frontier

Even as Saladin labored to gather the Muslim lands into his hand, the war against the Crusader states went on, in the form of the raids, counter-raids, sieges, and occasional pitched battles that were the normal texture of life along the frontier between the Latin kingdom and its Muslim neighbors. These years, from the late 1170s to the middle 1180s, were not a story of unbroken Muslim success. They included, in fact, the most humiliating defeat of Saladin's entire career. In November 1177, while much of his army was dispersed, Saladin led a large force into the southern part of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, expecting little serious resistance. He was caught off guard near a place the Latins called Montgisard, in the country between Ramla and Ascalon, by the boy-king Baldwin IV, the young leper, who fell upon the strung-out and overconfident Muslim army with a small but concentrated force of knights, including the Templars, and shattered it. Saladin's army was routed, a large part of it destroyed in the flight across the desert, and Saladin himself escaped capture only narrowly, riding back toward Egypt on a swift camel. Montgisard was a disaster, and it stands as a permanent corrective to any picture of Saladin as an invincible captain; his greatness lay not in an unbroken record of victory but in the resilience with which he absorbed reverses and the patience with which he waited for the conditions of a decisive success.

He recovered. In 1179 he defeated the Crusaders in the north at Marj Ayyun, and later that year he captured and destroyed the Crusader castle that the Latins were building at the strategic ford of the Jordan known as Jacob's Ford, a fortress whose completion would have threatened Damascus and whose destruction was a significant strategic gain. The frontier war continued through the early 1180s in a pattern of raids into Galilee, attacks on the coastal towns, and probing operations against the great Crusader castles. One episode in these years did more than any other to inflame Muslim opinion and to lend the eventual war its character of righteous retribution. Reynald of Chatillon, the lord of Oultrejourdain, a Crusader baron of reckless courage and few scruples whose castles of Kerak and Montreal commanded the desert south of the Dead Sea, conceived in 1182 and 1183 the audacious scheme of carrying the war into the Red Sea itself. He had ships built, transported in sections across the desert and launched on the Red Sea, and his raiders fell upon the Muslim shipping of those waters, plundered the pilgrim traffic, and threatened, or were believed to threaten, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina themselves. The outrage in the Muslim world was profound. The raiders were hunted down and destroyed by Saladin's forces, and the prisoners were put to death, but Reynald himself, secure in his desert castles, escaped punishment, and Saladin is said to have sworn that he would take the man's life with his own hand should he ever fall into his power.

By the middle of the 1180s, with Syria and the Jazira at last secured, Saladin was in a position to contemplate the full-scale offensive against the Kingdom of Jerusalem that had been the ultimate object of all his preparations. A truce concluded in 1185, negotiated on the Crusader side during the regency of the moderate and far-sighted Raymond III of Tripoli, gave both sides a pause; but it was a pause, not a peace, and the internal condition of the Crusader kingdom was meanwhile deteriorating in ways that would soon hand Saladin both the opportunity and the pretext for which he had waited so long.

The Kingdom of Jerusalem in Crisis

The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem in the 1180s was a state consuming itself from within. Its underlying weakness was demographic and strategic, a small Latin ruling class governing a much larger native population and dependent for survival on a chronic shortage of fighting men and on reinforcement from a distant Europe; but its immediate crisis was dynastic and factional, and it was the crisis, more than the underlying weakness, that delivered the kingdom to destruction. The reigning king through most of the decade was Baldwin IV, the leper, a young man of genuine ability and courage, the victor of Montgisard, who governed with distinction despite the progressive and visible ravages of his disease. But a leper king could leave no direct heir, and as the illness advanced toward its inevitable end the question of the succession opened a poisonous division at the heart of the kingdom.

The heir presumptive was Baldwin's sister Sibylla, and the question of whom Sibylla should marry was therefore the question of who would rule Jerusalem. Her choice fell, to the dismay of much of the baronage, upon Guy of Lusignan, a recent arrival from the French province of Poitou, a man widely judged to be vain, irresolute, and inadequate to the burden of a crown perpetually at war. Around this marriage the kingdom polarized into two bitterly opposed factions. On one side stood what may be called the court party: Guy and Sibylla themselves, the reckless Reynald of Chatillon, and Gerard de Ridefort, the aggressive and vindictive Grand Master of the Knights Templar. On the other stood the party of the established baronage, led by Raymond III of Tripoli, a sober and experienced statesman who favored a cautious policy toward Saladin, and supported by the powerful Ibelin family. When Baldwin IV died in 1185 he was succeeded by Sibylla's young son by an earlier marriage, the child Baldwin V, but the boy died within a year, and in 1186 the court party carried out what amounted to a coup, crowning Sibylla and Guy as queen and king of Jerusalem before the baronial faction could organize any effective alternative. Raymond of Tripoli withdrew in anger to his wife's city of Tiberias and entered, for a time, into a separate truce of his own with Saladin, a measure of how completely the kingdom had fractured on the very eve of its supreme trial.

It was into this divided and demoralized kingdom that Reynald of Chatillon hurled the final provocation. At some point in the winter of 1186 to 1187, in flagrant violation of the truce that bound the kingdom and Saladin, Reynald attacked and plundered a great Muslim caravan making its way from Egypt toward Damascus, seizing its goods and its people and refusing every demand for restitution. Saladin sent envoys to King Guy demanding that the stolen property be restored and the captives freed, as the terms of the truce required, and Guy, though he is said to have recognized the justice of the demand, found that he had no power to compel the overbearing Reynald to obey. The truce was, in effect, broken, and broken by the Crusader side, and Saladin now possessed not merely the strategic opportunity but the unambiguous moral and legal pretext for the war of conquest he had so long prepared. He proclaimed the jihad, and from across his vast dominions, from Egypt and Damascus and Aleppo and the Jazira, the contingents of his army began to gather.

The Road to Hattin

In the early summer of 1187 Saladin assembled at the staging grounds south of Damascus the largest army he had ever commanded, a host drawn from every quarter of his empire and numbering, by the most credible estimates, some thirty thousand men, of whom perhaps twelve thousand were cavalry, the disciplined and mobile horse-archers and lancers who were the striking arm of a Muslim field army. It was a force whose assembly only the unification of the Muslim Near East had made possible, and Saladin intended to use it not for the raiding and the reduction of frontier castles that had characterized the previous decade but for the destruction of the Crusader kingdom's capacity to resist. His strategy was simple and rested on a sound appreciation of his enemy's weakness: he would compel the Latin kingdom to commit its entire field army to a single battle, on ground and in conditions of his own choosing, and there destroy it. Once the army was gone, the castles and the cities, stripped of defenders, would fall of their own weight.

An ominous prelude foreshadowed the campaign. In May 1187 Saladin's son al-Afdal led a strong reconnaissance in force into Galilee. Raymond of Tripoli, still bound by his separate truce, had reluctantly granted the Muslim column passage through his territory on condition that it shed no blood and return by nightfall. But Gerard de Ridefort, the Templar Master, learning that the Muslim force was abroad, gathered the few knights of the military orders within reach, perhaps no more than a hundred and forty, and flung them against a body many times their number at the Springs of Cresson. The result was annihilation. Almost the entire Christian force was destroyed; Gerard de Ridefort was among the handful who escaped. The catastrophe at Cresson had one constructive effect for the Crusaders: it shamed and frightened the factions into a reconciliation, and Raymond of Tripoli, abandoning his truce with Saladin, was reconciled with King Guy so that the kingdom might at least face the coming storm united.

United, the kingdom mustered every man it could find. The full feudal levy was called out, the garrisons were stripped from the castles and towns, mercenaries were hired with the treasure that King Henry II of England had sent to the Holy Land in expiation of the murder of Thomas Becket, and the military orders emptied their houses. The army that gathered at the springs of Saffuriya, in the hills of Galilee, in the first days of July 1187 was, by the standards of the kingdom, immense, perhaps twenty thousand men including some twelve hundred knights, very probably the largest force the Latin state had ever placed in the field. But it had been assembled by mortgaging the kingdom's whole capacity for defense; every fortress and every walled town had been denuded of its garrison to fill the ranks, so that if this army were lost, nothing would remain behind it.

Saladin, understanding all of this, applied the lever that would compel the Crusaders to fight. On the second of July 1187 he crossed the Jordan and laid siege to the town of Tiberias on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. Tiberias belonged to Raymond of Tripoli, and within its citadel, when the lower town quickly fell, Raymond's own wife, the countess Eschiva, was trapped. The siege of Tiberias was the bait, and it was aimed with precision at the fracture lines of the Crusader command. In the war council at Saffuriya that night, Raymond of Tripoli, with a self-command that does him lasting honor, argued against marching to the relief of his own besieged wife and city. To advance, he warned, would mean crossing in the burning heat of July a high, arid plateau without water, harassed at every step by Saladin's horsemen, to arrive exhausted and parched before a fresh enemy of Saladin's choosing; better, he urged, to remain at Saffuriya, where there was abundant water and good ground, and let Saladin come to them, or let Tiberias and even his own wife be lost rather than risk the only army the kingdom possessed. The argument was sound, and at first it prevailed; King Guy agreed to hold the position at Saffuriya. But in the course of the night Gerard de Ridefort and Reynald of Chatillon came to the king in his tent and worked upon his fears and his vanity, telling him that to sit still while a city burned would be cowardice, that Raymond's caution was very near to treason, and that a king must march. Guy, irresolute as ever and unwilling to seem weak, reversed the decision. In the morning the army would advance.

The Battle of Hattin

On the morning of the third of July 1187 the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem marched out from the water and the shade of Saffuriya toward Tiberias, and as it climbed onto the dry plateau it marched into the trap that Saladin had prepared. The distance was not great, some fifteen miles, but it lay across a treeless, waterless tableland under the full ferocity of the Palestinian July sun, and from the moment the columns left their wells Saladin's mounted archers closed upon them, swarming about the line of march, loosing their arrows and falling back, never offering the massed target against which the Crusader knights might have delivered a decisive charge, wearing the long column down with thirst, heat, exhaustion, and the steady attrition of the harassing fire. The army's discipline began to fray. The rearguard, where the Templars marched, was so heavily pressed that the whole column was forced to slow and finally to halt. By the afternoon it was clear that the army could not reach the Sea of Galilee and its water that day, and the decision was taken, a fatal one, to halt for the night on the open plateau, near the village of Lubiya, within sight of a double-peaked hill of black volcanic rock that the people of the country called the Horns of Hattin.

It was a night of torment. The Crusader army, thousands of men and horses, passed the hours of darkness without water on the parched plateau, ringed by an enemy whose camp fires they could see on every side and whose voices, raised in prayer and in confident anticipation, they could hear through the dark. Saladin's men, by contrast, were amply supplied; strings of camels brought water up from the lake, and the Muslim army rested and made ready. As the night wore on Saladin's troops set fire to the dry summer scrub of the plateau, and the smoke rolled across the Christian camp, adding the sting of smoke and a fresh torment of thirst to the misery of men who had now gone many hours without drink under a merciless sun.

The battle was fought on the fourth of July 1187 and it was less a battle than an execution. The Crusader army, when it tried to move at dawn, was a body of men half-mad with thirst and already half beaten. The infantry, the great mass of foot soldiers, broke away from the army in a desperate, disordered rush toward the gleam of the Sea of Galilee and the promise of water, and were cut off, surrounded, and driven up onto the slopes of the Horns of Hattin, where they were killed or taken in their thousands, of no further use to the defense. The knights, the armored core of the army, were left isolated. Raymond of Tripoli, leading the vanguard, formed his knights for a charge and drove it straight at the Muslim line; Saladin's commanders, by a maneuver of disciplined coolness, opened their ranks and let the charge pass harmlessly through, then closed again behind it, and Raymond and his men, unable to turn back, rode clear of the field and away, escaping the destruction but unable to avert it. The remaining knights, with King Guy and the great relic of the True Cross at their center, fell back onto the higher of the two Horns and there, around the royal tent, made a last stand, charging again and again down the slope in attacks of furious courage that the chronicler on the Muslim side, Saladin's own son al-Afdal watching at his father's side, remembered for the rest of his life. Twice the king's tent stood and twice the Muslims were thrown back; but the men were spent, and when at last the red tent of the king was seen to fall, al-Afdal cried out in triumph, and Saladin, the sources record, dismounted, bowed to the ground, and wept for joy and gave thanks to God.

The victory was total. The field army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem had ceased to exist. Captured on the Horns of Hattin were King Guy of Lusignan himself, his brother, Reynald of Chatillon, Gerard de Ridefort the Master of the Temple, Humphrey of Toron, and a great part of the baronage of the kingdom; killed or enslaved were the thousands of the rank and file; and taken, the heaviest blow of all to Christian morale, was the relic of the True Cross, the fragment of the cross of the Crucifixion that the army of Jerusalem carried into battle as its most sacred standard and its surest pledge of victory. In the aftermath Saladin's conduct displayed, in a single afternoon, both the magnanimity and the calculated severity that ran together through his character. The captive King Guy was brought before him faint with thirst, and Saladin received him with courtesy and handed him a goblet of water cooled with snow, the gesture, in the etiquette of the region, of a host granting the protection of his hospitality. But when Guy passed the cup to Reynald of Chatillon, Saladin pointedly observed that it was the king and not he who had given Reynald to drink, and then he turned upon Reynald himself, the violator of truces, the plunderer of pilgrims, the man who had threatened the holy cities, and reproached him for his crimes, and when Reynald answered with defiance, Saladin struck him down and had him dispatched, fulfilling, by the accounts of the chroniclers, the oath he had sworn years before. The captured knights of the Templar and Hospitaller orders, whom Saladin regarded as the most fanatical and irreconcilable of his enemies, men who could never be ransomed or turned to any use, were with one or two exceptions put to death. But King Guy and the great barons were spared, treated honorably, and held for ransom, and the mass of the ordinary prisoners, though many were sold into slavery, were not subjected to a general massacre. Saladin had destroyed an army; he had not, as the First Crusade had done at Jerusalem, destroyed a people.

The Conquest of Jerusalem

With the field army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem annihilated at Hattin, the whole structure of the Crusader state in the interior and along the coast lay open and very nearly undefended, for the garrisons that might have held the walls had been marched out to die or to be captured on the plateau of Galilee. Saladin understood that speed was now everything, and through the late summer and autumn of 1187 he moved with great rapidity to gather in the harvest of his victory before any relief could arrive from Europe. City after city and castle after castle fell, many of them surrendering on terms without a fight because they had no means of resistance left. The great port of Acre, the commercial heart of the kingdom, surrendered within days of Hattin. Nablus, Jaffa, Sidon, Beirut, Ascalon, and a long list of lesser towns and fortresses followed through August and September. The most conspicuous exception was the city of Tyre, a port set on a peninsula and almost impregnable from the land, whose fall Saladin probably could have secured had he pressed the matter immediately; but he turned aside to other objectives, and in the interval Tyre was saved for the Crusader cause by the timely arrival from the sea of Conrad of Montferrat, an able and determined Italian nobleman who took command of the defense and made the city the one secure foothold from which the Latin recovery would later begin. The decision to leave Tyre unsubdued would prove, in the longer reckoning, to be among the costliest of Saladin's career.

But the supreme objective was Jerusalem, and in September 1187 Saladin brought his army before the holy city. Jerusalem was crowded far beyond its normal population, swollen with refugees who had fled before the Muslim advance, and its plight was desperate: it possessed almost no knights, for they had fallen at Hattin, and its defense rested upon a populace of townsmen, refugees, and clergy. The conduct of that defense was undertaken by Balian of Ibelin, a baron who had survived Hattin and who had come to Jerusalem under a safe-conduct from Saladin himself merely to escort his own family away, and who found, on arriving, that the people of the city implored him to stay and lead them. Balian wrote to Saladin to explain that the necessity of honor compelled him to break the terms of his safe-conduct, and Saladin, with the courtesy that marked his dealings even with enemies, raised no objection and even provided an escort for Balian's family to leave the doomed city in safety. The siege began on the twentieth of September 1187. Saladin's engineers assailed the walls, and after some days of fighting his miners succeeded in undermining a stretch of the northern fortifications, the same quarter, by a resonance not lost on contemporaries, through which the First Crusade had broken in 1099.

With the wall breached and no hope of military relief, Balian of Ibelin came out to negotiate the surrender. The first exchanges were hard. Saladin, conscious that his men remembered the massacre of 1099 and looked for the city to be taken by storm and given over to sack, was at first reluctant to grant terms. Balian then made the threat that broke the deadlock. If no terms were granted, he warned, the defenders would themselves, before they died, destroy everything of value in the city: they would kill the thousands of Muslim prisoners held within the walls, they would put to death their own women and children rather than see them enslaved, they would burn their possessions, and, above all, they would demolish the sacred buildings of the Haram, the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest sanctuary of Islam, and then sally out to die fighting, so that Saladin would enter a city that held nothing but rubble and corpses. The threat was credible, and it was decisive. Saladin took counsel with his advisers, who reminded him that to gain the holy places intact and to spare the bloodshed was the greater victory, and he agreed to terms.

On the second of October 1187, a date that fell, with a symbolic appropriateness that Muslim contemporaries marked with wonder, on the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad's miraculous Night Journey to Jerusalem and ascent to heaven, the holy city surrendered to Saladin. The terms permitted the Latin Christian inhabitants to ransom themselves and depart in safety: ten dinars for each man, five for each woman, one for each child, with those unable to pay liable to enslavement. The ransom was, for the wealthy, easily met, and for many of the poor it was beyond reach, and it is the plain truth that some thousands of the poorer inhabitants, unable to find the sum, passed into slavery, so that the surrender of Jerusalem was not the unclouded act of mercy that later legend sometimes made of it. Yet within the framework of the age its humanity was real and was recognized as such even by the city's enemies. There was no massacre. The columns of departing Christians were marshalled and escorted in safety to the coast. Saladin's brother al-Adil asked for and was given a thousand of the captives to set free; Saladin himself freed the aged, and Balian's lump-sum payment redeemed many more; the Christian sources themselves record that the conqueror released numbers of the poor for whom no ransom could be found, and that he permitted the departing to carry their portable goods with them. The contrast with the conduct of the First Crusade in the same city eighty-eight years before was deliberate, was understood by everyone, and did more than any battlefield victory to fix the image of Saladin in the memory of both faiths. The cross that the Crusaders had raised over the Dome of the Rock was taken down, the Haram sanctuaries were washed with rose water and restored to Muslim worship, and after eighty-eight years the city that stood at the symbolic heart of the entire Crusading enterprise was once more in the hands of Islam.

The Fall of the Coast and the Defiance of Tyre

The recovery of Jerusalem was the summit of Saladin's career, but it did not bring the war to an end, and the months that followed the great victory revealed the one serious strategic error of the 1187 campaign. After Hattin, Saladin had concentrated on gathering in the maximum extent of territory in the minimum of time, an understandable priority while the Crusader kingdom lay prostrate and before Europe could react; but in pursuing breadth he had neglected to make certain of the one place whose retention would matter most. The port city of Tyre, set upon a peninsula and screened from the land by powerful walls, had very nearly surrendered in the panic after Hattin, and a determined Muslim assault in the first weeks would in all probability have carried it. Saladin had passed it by, and by the time he turned his attention back to it the opportunity had gone. Conrad of Montferrat, an Italian nobleman of energy, intelligence, and ruthless ambition, had arrived by sea, taken command, stiffened the defense, and refused every overture. Saladin besieged Tyre in the winter of 1187 to 1188 by land and sea, but the Egyptian fleet was outmaneuvered and the assault failed, and at the end of the year, with his army exhausted by an unbroken season of campaigning, Saladin lifted the siege and dispersed his troops to their winter quarters.

It was a fateful failure. Tyre survived as the single substantial port remaining in Christian hands, and it became precisely what its loss would have prevented: the secure bridgehead, the unfallen gate, through which the great counter-stroke from Europe would pour. Throughout 1188 Saladin continued to reduce the inland castles and the lesser strongholds of the north, and the catalogue of his conquests grew until very little of the once-extensive Crusader territory remained beyond a few isolated fortresses and the stubborn enclave of Tyre. But the war had entered a new phase. The news of the fall of Jerusalem had struck Latin Christendom with the force of a catastrophe; the pope was said to have died of grief at the tidings, and his successor summoned all of Western Europe to a new and far greater Crusade. The contest was no longer between Saladin and the local resources of the Latin East. It was about to become a contest between Saladin and the assembled power of the kings of Europe.

The Third Crusade and the Siege of Acre

The Third Crusade was the most formidable military effort that Latin Christendom ever directed against the Muslim powers of the Levant, and it was led by the three greatest monarchs of the age. Frederick I Barbarossa, the aged and renowned Holy Roman Emperor, took the cross and set out overland at the head of an enormous German army; Philip II Augustus, the cold and calculating king of France, and Richard I of England, called the Lionheart, the most celebrated warrior-king of the European Middle Ages, took the cross together and prepared to come by sea. Saladin, who had long understood that the loss of Jerusalem would provoke exactly such a response, now faced the prospect of a converging assault by the combined strength of the West, and the years from 1189 to 1192 would test his endurance, his diplomacy, and the loyalty of his coalition far more severely than the swift campaign of 1187 had ever done.

Fortune spared him the worst of the threat. Frederick Barbarossa's German army, the largest of the three and the one whose overland approach most alarmed Saladin, disintegrated before it ever reached the Holy Land. In June 1190, while crossing a river in the mountains of Anatolia, the old emperor was drowned, and his leaderless host, struck by disease and demoralization, melted away; only a small remnant struggled through to Syria. The removal of the German danger was an immense and unearned relief to Saladin, and it is a measure of how serious that danger had been judged that its disappearance was received in the Muslim camp as a deliverance.

The center of the war, meanwhile, had fixed itself upon the city of Acre, and there it remained for nearly two years in one of the longest and most terrible sieges of the medieval age. The episode had begun with an act of startling audacity on the part of King Guy of Lusignan. Saladin had released the captive king from his imprisonment after Hattin, on Guy's oath that he would never again take up arms, an oath that the Latin clergy promptly declared void on the ground that it had been extracted under duress. Guy, his kingdom reduced to almost nothing and his authority disputed by Conrad of Montferrat at Tyre, gambled everything on a desperate stroke: in August 1189, with a small force, he marched south and laid siege to Acre, the great port that Saladin had taken so easily two years before. The gamble drew Saladin's army down upon him, and there developed the extraordinary spectacle of a double siege, the Crusaders besieging the Muslim garrison within Acre, and Saladin's field army in turn besieging the Crusaders from the surrounding hills, while reinforcements arrived continuously by sea to swell the Christian ranks. For nearly two years the armies lay locked together before the walls of Acre, fighting, starving, and dying of disease in roughly equal measure; the suffering in both camps was frightful, and the long ordeal consumed lives on a scale that no single battle of the war approached.

The stalemate was broken by the arrival of the kings. Philip Augustus of France reached Acre in April 1191, and Richard the Lionheart, who had paused on the voyage to conquer the island of Cyprus from a renegade Byzantine prince, arrived in June. The coming of the western kings, with their fresh troops, their treasure, and above all their great siege engines, tilted the balance decisively. On the twelfth of July 1191 the garrison of Acre, worn beyond endurance and despairing of relief, surrendered on terms negotiated over Saladin's head: the lives of the garrison were to be spared in exchange for a great ransom payment, the release of a stated number of Christian prisoners, and the return of the relic of the True Cross. Saladin, presented with an agreement his own men had made, was bound to honor it, but the execution of its terms broke down in mutual suspicion and recrimination over the schedule of payments and exchanges. Richard, impatient to march south and unwilling to be delayed, concluded that Saladin was deliberately stalling, and in August 1191 he ordered the prisoners of the Acre garrison, some two thousand seven hundred men, to be brought out before the walls and massacred in full view of Saladin's army. It was the single most brutal act of the war on the Christian side, and Saladin retaliated by putting to death the Christian captives in his own hands. The massacre at Acre stands as a permanent stain upon the reputation of Richard the Lionheart, and it throws into sharp relief, by the force of contrast, the restraint that Saladin had shown at Jerusalem four years earlier.

Saladin and Richard the Lionheart

With the fall of Acre, and with the early departure of Philip Augustus, who sailed for France to pursue his own designs and left the Crusade in August 1191, the war settled into a prolonged personal duel between Saladin and Richard the Lionheart, and it is this confrontation, more than any other passage of his life, that fixed Saladin's image in the imagination of the Western world. The two men were a study in contrasts and in unexpected likeness. Richard was the supreme soldier of his age, a commander of tactical brilliance and overwhelming personal courage, impetuous, magnificent, and frequently cruel; Saladin was the elder by a generation, a subtler politician and a less gifted battlefield tactician, patient where Richard was headlong, merciful where Richard was harsh. They were evenly enough matched that neither could destroy the other, and they came, in the course of a year of fighting and negotiating, to a wary mutual respect that contemporaries on both sides found remarkable and that the storytellers of later ages would elaborate into one of the great legends of chivalry.

The military phase of their contest was dominated by Richard's march south from Acre toward Jaffa in the late summer of 1191. Richard handled the march with a masterly discipline, keeping his army in a tight defensive formation along the coast, his infantry and crossbowmen screening the precious knights, his fleet pacing the column offshore with supplies, and refusing to be drawn out of formation by the constant harassment of Saladin's horsemen. Saladin, seeking to break the column before it could reach Jaffa, forced a pitched battle near Arsuf on the seventh of September 1191. The Battle of Arsuf was a genuine victory for Richard: the Crusader formation held under tremendous pressure, the charge of the knights, when at last it was unleashed, broke the Muslim attack, and Saladin was compelled to draw off, having failed to stop the Christian advance. Arsuf demonstrated that Saladin could not defeat Richard in open battle; but the campaign as a whole was to demonstrate, equally, that Richard could not achieve the object for which he had come.

That object was Jerusalem, and twice in the months that followed, in the winter of 1191 and again in the summer of 1192, Richard advanced his army into the Judean hills to within a short distance of the holy city, and twice he turned back without attempting the siege. The decision, bitterly disappointing to the rank and file of the Crusade who had crossed a continent to pray at the Holy Sepulchre, rested on a hard strategic logic that Richard, to his credit, was clear-sighted enough to accept. Even if Jerusalem could be taken, an inland city could not be held: once the Crusade dispersed and the kings and their armies sailed home, a Christian Jerusalem would be left isolated, its supply lines running back through hostile country to the coast, certain to be retaken by the Muslim powers the moment the western armies were gone. To besiege the city would be to spend the whole strength of the Crusade upon a prize that could not be kept. Richard understood this, and so the two armies, each unable to inflict a decisive defeat upon the other, drifted toward the negotiating table.

The negotiations, which ran in parallel with the fighting for the better part of a year, were among the most remarkable diplomatic exchanges of the medieval era, and they were conducted on the Muslim side very largely through the agency of Saladin's brother al-Adil, a statesman of great ability whom the Crusaders called Saphadin and whom Richard came to know and to like. The proposals canvassed in these talks ranged from the practical to the fantastical; the most famous of them was Richard's suggestion that his own sister Joan, the widowed queen of Sicily, should be married to al-Adil, and that the couple should rule Jerusalem jointly as the seat of a reconciled Christian and Muslim condominium, a scheme that foundered, predictably, upon the impossibility of either a Christian princess or a Muslim prince accepting the change of religion the union would have required. What gave the negotiations their lasting fame, however, was less their content than the tone of courtesy, even of warmth, that grew up between the two camps. The chroniclers, and Saladin's own intimates who recorded his sayings, preserved a series of celebrated exchanges of chivalry: when Richard's horse was killed beneath him in the fighting around Jaffa, Saladin, unwilling that so great a king should fight on foot, sent him two fine horses as a gift across the lines; when Richard fell ill with fever, Saladin sent him fruit and the snow of Mount Hermon to cool his drink, and offered the services of his own physicians. The two men, by every reliable account, never met face to face. Yet the legend of their meeting, of their friendship, of a mutual recognition between two paragons of opposing faiths, took root almost at once and grew through the centuries, and it was the kindness of Saladin toward an enemy, far more than any feat of arms, that the Western imagination chose to remember.

The Treaty of Jaffa and the End of the War

The war was brought to its close in the late summer of 1192 by exhaustion on both sides and by the pressure of events far from the Holy Land. Richard had received increasingly alarming news from his own dominions: his brother John was intriguing for the English throne in his absence, and Philip Augustus, returned to France, was moving against the English possessions on the continent. The Lionheart could not remain in Palestine indefinitely. Saladin, for his part, presided over an army and a coalition near the limit of their endurance; his emirs, many of them holding lands far to the east, had been kept in the field for campaign after campaign, year upon year, and longed to return home, and Saladin himself, prematurely aged by the unrelenting strain of two decades of war, was a tired and failing man. One last convulsion of fighting, Saladin's surprise attack upon Jaffa and Richard's astonishing relief of the town with a tiny force in August 1192, demonstrated once more that neither side could overcome the other, and both at last accepted that the war must end in compromise.

The Treaty of Jaffa was concluded on the second of September 1192. Its terms were a frank recognition of the military stalemate. A truce of three years and eight months was established. Jerusalem would remain in Muslim hands, the central fact that Saladin had fought to secure and would not yield; but Christian pilgrims were guaranteed free, safe, and unmolested access to the holy places of the city, so that the religious objective of the ordinary Crusader, the right to pray at the Holy Sepulchre, was substantially met even though the political objective was not. The Crusaders retained a coastal strip, a narrow band of territory running from Tyre in the north down to Jaffa in the south, the truncated remnant from which the Latin states of the coast would carry on a diminished existence for another hundred years. The fortifications of Ascalon, the strongpoint that commanded the road between Egypt and Syria and that both sides regarded as too dangerous to leave in the other's hands, were to be demolished, a compromise that denied the place to both. It was a settlement that gave neither side what it had most wanted, and that is the surest sign that it was a fair reflection of the strength of each. Richard the Lionheart sailed from the Holy Land in October 1192. He had not entered Jerusalem; legend holds that when the chance was offered him to visit the city as a pilgrim, under the safe-conduct that the treaty guaranteed to all Christians, he declined, unwilling to receive as a favor the city he had been unable to win by the sword. Saladin had kept Jerusalem, and the great Crusade summoned by all of Europe to recover it had failed in its central purpose.

The Final Months and Death

With the Treaty of Jaffa concluded and the western kings departed, Saladin at last laid down the burden of war that he had carried without a true respite for the better part of twenty years. He saw to the resettlement of the frontier, dispersed the emirs of his coalition to their distant lands with his thanks, and in the closing weeks of 1192 made his way back to Damascus, the city of his youth and the place he loved above all others. He was not an old man by the count of years, being in his middle fifties, but the unrelenting exertion of decades of campaigning, the recurrent fevers and illnesses that had dogged him for years, and the sheer accumulated weariness of a life spent in the saddle and the council tent had worn him out. Those close to him observed that he seemed spent, that the old vigor was gone, and that he spoke increasingly of his desire, never to be fulfilled, to lay down the cares of government and at last to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca that the obligations of war had so long denied him.

He was not granted the time. In the third week of February 1193, not many weeks after his return to Damascus, Saladin was struck by a fever, and from the first the illness took a grave course. For nearly a fortnight he declined, attended by his physicians and by the small circle of intimates who had served him longest, among them his devoted biographer Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, who has left a moving account of the sultan's last days. On the fourth of March 1193, Saladin died in Damascus, in the citadel of the city, at the age of about fifty-six. As he lay dying, the sources record, a holy man recited the Quran at his bedside, and when the reader reached the verse that proclaims that there is no god but God, and that in Him alone is the believer's trust, a faint smile was seen to pass across the dying man's face, and so he died.

The most famous fact about the death of Saladin concerns not the manner of it but its material circumstances, and it is a fact attested by the men who settled his affairs and had no motive to invent it. Saladin, who had ruled an empire stretching from the Nile to the Tigris, who had commanded the revenues of Egypt and Syria, who had handled in the course of his life sums of money beyond ordinary reckoning, died possessed, in his personal treasury, of a single gold dinar and a few dozen pieces of silver, and of nothing else whatever. There was not enough money in the estate of the master of the Near East to pay for his own funeral, and the cost of his grave had to be met by a loan. He had given it all away, in charity to the poor, in gifts to scholars and soldiers and petitioners, in the endowment of mosques and colleges and hospitals, in the open-handed generosity that those who knew him agreed was less a policy than an incurable disposition of his nature. He left no hoarded wealth because he had never been able to keep any. He was buried in Damascus, and a domed mausoleum was raised over his grave beside the great Umayyad Mosque, where his tomb may be visited to this day. The empire he left behind was divided, in the manner of the Turkish and Kurdish dynasties, among his sons and his kinsmen, with Damascus, Cairo, and Aleppo passing to different heirs; the resulting quarrels were in time composed by his able brother al-Adil, who gathered the Ayyubid lands into his own hand and passed them to his descendants, and the dynasty that Saladin had founded would rule Egypt and much of Syria until the middle of the thirteenth century.

The Ayyubid State and the Art of Government

Saladin is remembered above all as a warrior, but the war against the Crusaders rested upon a foundation of government, of administration, of finance, and of religious and cultural patronage, and the state that he constructed was as much a part of his achievement as the victories that the state made possible. The Ayyubid realm was not a centralized monarchy of the kind that a later age would recognize; it was, rather, a confederation held together by the prestige and the personality of its founder, a family enterprise in which Saladin's brothers, sons, nephews, and trusted emirs governed the provinces and the great cities as semi-autonomous princes, bound to the head of the house by ties of kinship, of oath, of shared interest, and of personal loyalty. Such a structure had obvious weaknesses, and they became visible the moment Saladin was dead and the unifying personality was gone; but during his lifetime the system worked, because the man at its center commanded a degree of trust and affection that held the loose federation together far more effectively than any apparatus of coercion could have done.

The wealth that sustained the whole edifice came overwhelmingly from Egypt, whose agricultural abundance and whose command of the trade routes between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean made it the richest single prize in the Near East, and Saladin governed Egypt with a shrewd appreciation of where its prosperity lay. He encouraged commerce, including a vigorous and profitable trade with the very Italian maritime republics, Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, whose ships also carried Crusaders and supplies to his enemies, for Saladin understood that the customs revenues of that trade were worth more to his treasury than the satisfaction of cutting it off. He maintained the irrigation works on which Egyptian agriculture depended, and he organized the military land grants, the system by which the revenues of estates were assigned to soldiers in return for service, that financed his cavalry armies. In all of this he relied upon a remarkable group of administrators and counsellors whose talents he had the wisdom to recognize and the generosity to reward: above all al-Qadi al-Fadil, the brilliant chief secretary and confidential adviser whose mastery of finance and of the chancery was indispensable to the regime, and Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, the learned secretary and historian whose ornate writings preserve much of what is known of the reign.

The most visible and lasting of Saladin's works of government, however, lay in the sphere of religion, for he had risen as the champion of a Sunni revival, and he used the power of the state to carry that revival forward. In Egypt, where two centuries of Fatimid rule had entrenched the Ismaili form of Shia Islam, he set about a deliberate and thorough restoration of Sunni orthodoxy, founding madrasas, the colleges in which the law and theology of the Sunni schools were taught, endowing them richly, and staffing them with scholars whom he drew to Cairo from across the Muslim world. He patronized the Sufi orders, building lodges for the mystics whose devotional life he revered; he founded hospitals; he endowed charitable trusts for every kind of pious and public purpose. He undertook great works of fortification, most famously the Citadel of Cairo, the mighty fortress upon the Muqattam hills that was begun under his direction and that would dominate the city for centuries, and he strengthened the walls of Cairo, of Jerusalem, and of other cities of the realm. The Jerusalem that he had recovered he was at particular pains to restore as a Muslim sanctuary and a center of Sunni learning, founding colleges and hospitals within its walls and re-establishing the religious institutions that the Crusader occupation had displaced. The state that Saladin built was, in its essential character, an instrument for the defense and the propagation of Sunni Islam, and the consistency with which he bent the resources of government to that end was one of the deepest sources of the moral authority that allowed him to lead the disparate Muslims of the Near East in a common cause.

The Personal Character and Piety of Saladin

Of few medieval rulers do we possess so intimate and so consistent a portrait as we do of Saladin, for he was surrounded in his later years by men of letters who recorded his sayings, his habits, and his temper in close detail, and the most valuable of these witnesses, Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, the judge of the army who served at Saladin's side through the years of the Third Crusade, set down a biography that is one of the small number of medieval lives written by a man who genuinely knew his subject. What is most striking about the resulting portrait is that it is corroborated, in its essentials, by sources that had every reason to be hostile, by the chroniclers of the rival Zangid dynasty and by the Latin Christians against whom Saladin waged war, so that the figure who emerges is not the invention of flatterers but a personality attested from many sides.

At the center of that personality lay a religious faith that was, by every account, entirely sincere and wholly unaffected. Saladin was punctilious in the five daily prayers, performing them in their proper times even in illness and on campaign, and he disliked to pray except in congregation; he kept the fast of Ramadan and grieved over the fasts that the demands of war had forced him to miss; he longed throughout his life to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca and never, to his lasting sorrow, found the leisure to do so. He loved to hear the Quran recited and the traditions of the Prophet expounded, and he would summon scholars to read to him even when he was ill or weary. His devotion to the jihad, the holy war for the defense and recovery of the lands of Islam, was the organizing passion of his mature life, and he understood it not as a pretext for conquest but as a religious duty that gave his career its meaning. This piety was not severe or forbidding; it was joined to a gentleness of manner, a patience under provocation, and a readiness of sympathy that those around him remembered with affection.

The quality that contemporaries dwelt upon most often, with a mixture of admiration and something close to exasperation, was his generosity, which passed all reasonable bounds. Saladin appears to have been constitutionally incapable of refusing a request or of retaining money in his possession; he gave away provinces, treasures, and revenues with a freedom that alarmed his more prudent advisers, and the famous poverty of his estate at death was the simple arithmetic consequence of a lifetime of such giving. To this open hand was joined a clemency and a good faith in dealing with enemies that were rare in any age and that did more than anything else to build his reputation. He kept his word; he spared the defeated; he was merciful where mercy was possible, and his severities, the execution of Reynald of Chatillon and of the captured Templars and Hospitallers, were exceptions deliberately chosen, acts of policy or of sworn obligation directed at men he judged irreconcilable, not expressions of a cruel temper. Indeed his intimates record that he was sometimes criticized for an excess of leniency, for releasing enemies who would fight him again and for forgiving offenses that a harder ruler would have punished. He was accessible to the humble, sitting in person to hear petitions and to dispense justice; he bore the loss of those he loved, and the reverses of war, with a composure rooted in religious resignation; he was a devoted husband and an affectionate father to his many children. He was not without faults, and the sources do not conceal them: he could be hesitant at moments that called for ruthless decision, his very generosity could shade into improvidence, and his leniency, as his critics charged, sometimes served his enemies better than himself. But the overall impression, sustained across friendly and hostile testimony alike, is of a man whose private character was genuinely and unusually noble, and it is the rare and fortunate convergence of the legend with the documented record that has allowed the reputation of Saladin to survive eight centuries of scrutiny so nearly intact.

The Legacy in the Islamic World

The afterlife of Saladin's memory in the Islamic world followed a path far more winding and far less straightforward than the steady glow of his Western reputation might lead one to expect. In the immediate aftermath of his death he was honored as the recoverer of Jerusalem and the great champion of the faith, but the medieval Muslim world did not single him out for the unique veneration that later ages would accord him. The Ayyubid dynasty that he founded proved relatively short-lived, supplanted in Egypt within sixty years of his death by the Mamluks, the dynasty of slave-soldiers; and it was a Mamluk sultan, Baybars, and his successors who completed the work that Saladin had begun, expelling the Crusaders from their last coastal strongholds and extinguishing the Latin states altogether in 1291. In the long memory of the medieval Islamic Near East, Saladin was one hero of the jihad among several, and not invariably the most celebrated.

His elevation to the supreme rank in the modern Muslim and Arab imagination is, in fact, a phenomenon of the last two centuries, and it owes a great deal, by a curious irony, to European interest in him. The Western romantic literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had made Saladin a famous and admired figure in Europe long before the modern Arab world rediscovered him, and a striking episode of 1898 dramatized the process: the German emperor Wilhelm II, visiting Damascus, made a ceremonial pilgrimage to Saladin's tomb, delivered a speech praising him as one of the most chivalrous rulers of history, and paid for the restoration of the mausoleum and the provision of a new marble sarcophagus. The spectacle of a great European monarch honoring the medieval sultan helped to focus the attention of a Muslim world then living under the pressure of European colonial power upon the figure of the ruler who had once united the region and driven a Western invasion back.

In the twentieth century, as Arab nationalism rose and the struggle against colonial domination intensified, Saladin was taken up as a potent and resonant symbol. He was the man who had unified a fragmented Arab and Muslim Near East, who had overcome the divisions among its rulers, and who had defeated and rolled back a Western military occupation of the region, and every one of those themes spoke directly to the political aspirations of the modern age. His image was invoked by nationalist leaders and movements across the Arab world; the heraldic device known as the Eagle of Saladin was adopted as a national emblem by several Arab states; and political figures of the later twentieth century were eager to associate themselves with his memory, a tendency carried to its furthest point by an Iraqi ruler who, born in the same town of Tikrit that had witnessed Saladin's birth more than eight centuries before, made the identification with the medieval hero a deliberate theme of his own self-presentation. There is, in all of this, a measure of historical irony, for Saladin was a Kurd, not an Arab, and the Kurdish people have with equal justice claimed him as the greatest figure their nation has produced; and a man whose deepest loyalties were religious rather than national has been pressed into service as the emblem of a nationalism that did not exist in his own day. But the persistence and the intensity of his modern reputation are themselves a historical fact of the first importance, and they testify to the enduring power of the achievement, the unification of a divided people and the recovery of a holy city, with which his name will always be linked.

The Legacy in the Western Imagination

If the Muslim memory of Saladin was slow to crystallize, the Western memory formed with astonishing speed, and it took, from the very beginning, a form that the historian must regard as remarkable: the figure who had inflicted upon Latin Christendom the greatest disaster of the entire Crusading era, the loss of Jerusalem, became almost at once an object of admiration in the literature of the civilization he had defeated. The Christian chroniclers who recorded the campaigns against him, even as they lamented his victories, wrote of Saladin's courtesy, his generosity, and his good faith, and within a generation or two of his death these qualities had been worked up by the storytellers of Europe into a full-blown legend of the noble Saracen, the perfect knight who happened to profess the wrong religion.

The legend grew luxuriantly through the later Middle Ages. Tales were invented in which Saladin was secretly knighted by a Christian, or was discovered to be of partly Christian descent, or made a pilgrimage in disguise to the courts of the West; the Italian storyteller Boccaccio gave him a place in the Decameron, both as the courteous prince of a tale of friendship and as the ruler to whom is addressed the famous parable of the three rings, the story that teaches that no one of the three great monotheistic faiths can prove itself the sole possessor of divine truth. The most extraordinary single tribute came from the greatest poet of the Middle Ages: when Dante, in the Divine Comedy, peopled the noble castle of Limbo with the virtuous souls of the great pagans and non-Christians, the philosophers and heroes of antiquity who through no fault of their own had lived outside the Christian dispensation, he placed among them, a solitary modern figure amid the worthies of the ancient world, the soul of Saladin. To be set by Dante in such company was an honor accorded to almost no other figure of the medieval era, and it measures the height to which Saladin's reputation had already climbed in the Christian imagination within little more than a century of his death.

In the modern era the legend was renewed and given its lasting shape. The Enlightenment found in Saladin the perfect vehicle for its ideal of religious toleration: the German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in his play Nathan the Wise of 1779, made Saladin one of the central figures of a great plea for mutual respect among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and set in the sultan's court the telling of the parable of the three rings. A generation later the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, in The Talisman of 1825, set the chivalrous, generous, and clear-sighted Saladin against a more flawed and impetuous Richard the Lionheart, and Scott's enormously popular romance did more than any other single work to fix in the mind of the English-speaking world the image of Saladin as the gentle and magnanimous Saracen, the courteous foe whose nobility shamed his Christian adversaries. That image has proved durable; it has carried forward into the cinema of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in the Egyptian epic film that made Saladin a hero of pan-Arab aspiration and in the Hollywood treatments of the Crusades that continue to present him as the embodiment of a dignity and a tolerance set against the fanaticism of his enemies. The Western Saladin is, to be sure, partly a creation of Western needs, a mirror in which successive ages have seen reflected their own ideals of chivalry, of tolerance, and of the noble adversary; but the legend was able to take root and to flourish only because the historical Saladin had, in fact, given the men of his own time, friend and enemy alike, real and abundant grounds for it.

Historical Assessment and Conclusion

Any sober assessment of Saladin must begin by setting aside the burnished perfection of the legend and acknowledging the genuine limits of his record. He was not, measured strictly as a tactician, a great captain in the class of a Richard the Lionheart; his battlefield record was uneven, and it included in the rout at Montgisard one of the more complete disasters suffered by any commander of the age. His strategic judgment, though usually sound, produced at least one error of lasting consequence in the failure to make sure of Tyre in the autumn of 1187, a lapse that preserved the bridgehead through which the Third Crusade poured and that arguably cost the Muslim cause the chance of expelling the Crusaders from the Levant altogether. His very virtues had a reverse side that contemporaries noted: a generosity that shaded into improvidence, a clemency that his own advisers thought released enemies better left confined, a hesitancy that sometimes surfaced at moments demanding ruthless resolution. Saladin was a great man, but he was not a flawless one, and the historian does him no service by pretending otherwise.

His true greatness lay in a combination of gifts that was political and moral rather than narrowly military. The supreme achievement of his career was the unification of the Muslim Near East, the welding together of Egypt, Syria, and the lands of the Jazira, long divided among quarrelling dynasties and city-states, into a single coalition capable of bringing concentrated force to bear against the Crusader kingdom. That work of unification was, in the cold light of analysis, the indispensable precondition of everything else; without it, Hattin and the recovery of Jerusalem would have been impossible, and it was accomplished through a decade of patient campaigning, shrewd diplomacy, and, above all, the rare capacity to reconcile defeated rivals and to bind former enemies to his cause by generosity and good faith rather than by terror. Saladin understood, as the more brutal conquerors of history have not, that an empire of willing allies is stronger than an empire of cowed subjects, and the loyalty he was able to command across a coalition of proud and independent emirs was itself a kind of genius. To this he joined a mastery of the moral dimension of leadership: he made himself the visible embodiment of the cause for which he asked other men to fight and die, and his sincere piety, his personal austerity, his open-handedness, and his clemency were not merely private virtues but the very instruments of his statecraft, the means by which he earned the moral authority to lead.

The concrete results of his life endured. The Crusader states were not destroyed in his lifetime, and they would survive, reduced to their coastal strip, for another century until the Mamluks completed their extinction in 1291; but the strategic balance of the long contest had been permanently altered. Jerusalem, recovered in 1187, would remain under Muslim rule, with only the briefest of interruptions, until the twentieth century. The Ayyubid dynasty that Saladin founded governed Egypt and Syria for two generations and presided over a notable flourishing of Sunni religious and intellectual life, and the Egypt that he had wrested from Fatimid Shiism and restored to Sunni orthodoxy has remained a Sunni land ever since. And beyond these tangible consequences there was the intangible but immense legacy of his example and his memory, the model of the just and merciful ruler that he bequeathed to the political imagination of both the civilizations that claimed him.

For that, in the end, is the most unusual feature of Saladin's place in history: he belongs to two traditions at once, and is honored in both. He is the hero of Islam who recovered its third holiest city and turned back the armies of the West, and he is at the same time the noble Saracen of the Western romances, the courteous and generous adversary whom Dante set among the virtuous souls and whom Lessing and Scott held up as the very pattern of tolerance and chivalry. Few figures in the history of the world have been embraced so warmly by the descendants of those they defeated. That double inheritance was possible because Saladin, almost uniquely among the conquerors of history, was remembered not chiefly for what he had destroyed but for the manner in which he had conducted himself, for the mercy at Jerusalem that answered the massacre of 1099, for the snow sent across the lines to a sick enemy king, for the empire governed and given away by a man who died with a single gold coin to his name. Eight centuries after his death in Damascus, Saladin remains one of the most admired figures of the medieval world, a Kurdish soldier from an obscure Mesopotamian fortress who rose to unite an empire, to recover a holy city, and to leave behind him, in the memory of friend and foe alike, the enduring image of power joined to mercy and of greatness joined to faith.