Saladin

Anyone asking who was Saladin should begin not in Cairo or Damascus but in Tikrit, a fortress town on the Tigris in what is now Iraq. He was born there in 1138 to a Kurdish family in military service, and his given name was Yusuf; the honorific by which the world knows him, Salah al-Din, means "righteousness of the faith" ^[1]. His father, Najm al-Din Ayyub, commanded the castle of Tikrit for the Seljuk authorities, while his uncle Shirkuh was already building a soldier's reputation. According to a story preserved by his biographers, the family left Tikrit on the very night of the boy's birth after Shirkuh killed a man in a dispute, an inauspicious start that Ayyub was said to have shrugged off ^[2].

The family found employment with Imad al-Din Zengi, the atabeg of Mosul, and later with his son Nur al-Din, ruler of Aleppo and then Damascus. Yusuf spent his formative years in Baalbek, where his father served as governor, and in Damascus itself ^[1]. The Damascus of his youth was a center of religious learning, and the sources agree that he received the conventional education of a young man of the military class: Quran, Arabic grammar and poetry, genealogy, and horsemanship. Later chroniclers noted his lasting fondness for hadith study and for polo ^[2].

Nothing in these early years marked him for greatness. He was one son among several in a capable but second-tier military household, and by his mid twenties he held only modest administrative posts, including a stint as deputy to the military governor of Damascus ^[3]. The turn in his fortunes came from Egypt.

In the 1160s the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt was collapsing from within, and its feuding viziers invited outside powers to intervene. Nur al-Din dispatched Shirkuh on three expeditions to Egypt between 1164 and 1169, and Shirkuh took his reluctant nephew along. Yusuf distinguished himself in the fighting, notably in holding Alexandria under siege against a combined Frankish and Egyptian force in 1167 ^[3].

The third expedition succeeded. In January 1169 Shirkuh entered Cairo and was named vizier to the Fatimid caliph, only to die suddenly two months later. The Fatimid court chose Yusuf as his successor, reportedly calculating that the young Kurd would be the weakest and most manageable of the candidates ^[1]. It was a serious miscalculation. As vizier he methodically replaced Fatimid regiments with troops loyal to himself, suppressed a revolt of the caliph's Black African infantry in 1169, and brought his father and brothers to Egypt to anchor the new order ^[3].

In September 1171, acting on Nur al-Din's instructions but very much to his own advantage, Saladin abolished the Fatimid Caliphate and had the Friday sermon in Cairo read in the name of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, restoring Egypt to Sunni allegiance after two centuries of Ismaili Shia rule ^[4]. The last Fatimid caliph, al-Adid, died days later. Egypt's wealth now underwrote Saladin's ambitions, and his relationship with his nominal overlord Nur al-Din grew tense; the two were arguably drifting toward open conflict when Nur al-Din died in May 1174 ^[2].

Any account of Saladin achievements has to reckon first with a decade of wars against fellow Muslims. After Nur al-Din's death, Saladin moved to claim his inheritance, occupying Damascus in 1174 and presenting himself as guardian of the Zengid line even as he displaced it. Aleppo held out until 1183 and Mosul submitted to his overlordship in 1186, campaigns punctuated by two assassination attempts against him by the Nizari Ismailis, the so-called Assassins ^[3]. In 1175 the Abbasid caliph formally invested him as sultan over Egypt and Syria, legitimizing the Ayyubid dynasty he founded ^[1].

With the Muslim Near East consolidated from the Nile to the Tigris, he turned the full weight of his coalition against the crusader states. The decisive moment came on July 4, 1187, at the Battle of Hattin, near the Sea of Galilee, where his army destroyed the field forces of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, captured King Guy of Lusignan, and seized the relic of the True Cross ^[4]. Saladin personally executed Reynald of Chatillon, the lord of Kerak whose attacks on Muslim caravans had broken a truce, but spared the king, remarking, according to his companion and biographer Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, that kings do not kill kings ^[2].

The crusader cities fell in rapid succession that summer, and on October 2, 1187, Jerusalem surrendered after a short siege. In pointed contrast to the massacre that had accompanied the crusader conquest of 1099, Saladin allowed the Frankish population to ransom themselves and depart, and he freed many who could not pay ^[4]. The loss of Jerusalem provoked the Third Crusade (1189 to 1192), which brought Richard I of England to the Levant. Richard retook Acre in 1191 and defeated Saladin's army at Arsuf, but he could not recover Jerusalem. The Treaty of Jaffa in September 1192 left the holy city in Muslim hands while guaranteeing Christian pilgrims access to its shrines ^[5].

The private man is better documented than most medieval rulers because two members of his inner circle, Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad and the secretary Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, wrote detailed accounts of him. Ibn Shaddad, who served as army judge from 1188, portrays a ruler of plain habits: attentive to the five daily prayers, fond of listening to hadith recitation even on campaign, patient with petitioners, and prone to weeping at accounts of suffering ^[2].

Saladin married Ismat al-Din Khatun, the widow of Nur al-Din, in 1176, a union that joined his rule to the prestige of his former master's house. He is credited with seventeen sons and at least one daughter by various wives and concubines ^[3]. Family was also the framework of his state: brothers, nephews, and sons governed Egypt, Yemen, Damascus, Aleppo, and the Jazira as members of a loose Ayyubid confederation rather than servants of a centralized bureaucracy ^[1].

His generosity was proverbial and, to his treasurers, alarming. Contemporaries recorded that at his death his personal estate amounted to one dinar and a small quantity of silver, not enough, it was said, to pay for his own funeral ^[2]. He founded colleges of law and Sufi lodges in Cairo and Damascus, and he ordered the construction of the Citadel of Cairo, begun in 1176 and still dominating the city's skyline ^[6].

The Third Crusade consumed Saladin's final strength. The two-year siege of Acre (1189 to 1191) ended in defeat, and the surrender of the garrison was followed by Richard's execution of some 2,700 Muslim prisoners when ransom negotiations stalled ^[5]. Saladin's field army, exhausted and increasingly reluctant, could harass but not stop the crusader advance down the coast. Twice Richard marched within sight of Jerusalem, and twice he withdrew, judging the city impossible to hold ^[4].

Negotiation, conducted largely through Saladin's brother al-Adil, proved more durable than battle. The 1192 truce ended five years of continuous war. The two commanders never met face to face, despite the meetings that later romance invented for them, yet each expressed open respect for the other, and Richard even floated a marriage alliance between his sister Joan and al-Adil ^[5].

After Richard sailed for home in October 1192, Saladin returned to Damascus, visibly worn. He fell ill with a fever in late February 1193 and died on March 4, aged about 55 ^[1]. He was buried beside the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, where his mausoleum still receives visitors. The empire passed to his quarrelsome sons, though real power soon consolidated under al-Adil ^[3].

Among the durable Saladin facts is the oddity that his most extravagant admirers were his enemies. Within decades of his death, European writers were inventing flattering legends about him: that he had been knighted, that he had a Christian mother, that he toured Europe in disguise. Dante placed him in Limbo among the virtuous non-Christians, and Walter Scott's 1825 novel The Talisman fixed his image in the modern West as the pattern of chivalry ^[7]. The word most attached to him in this tradition, generosity toward the defeated, rests on genuine incidents, above all the bloodless surrender of Jerusalem in 1187 ^[4].

In the Islamic world his memory faded for centuries, overshadowed by the Mamluk sultan Baybars, then revived powerfully in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as anti-colonial movements sought a hero who had expelled Western invaders. Kaiser Wilhelm II paid for a new marble tomb beside Saladin's grave during his 1898 visit to Damascus. Later, rulers from Nasser to Saddam Hussein (who publicized their shared birthplace region of Tikrit) invoked his name for their own purposes ^[7].

Modern historians offer a more measured portrait. Malcolm Cameron Lyons and D. E. P. Jackson, in the standard scholarly Saladin biography, emphasize the political calculation behind the piety, noting how effectively the language of jihad served his dynastic ambitions ^[3]. Yet even skeptical scholarship concedes the core: he unified a fractured region, reversed nearly a century of crusader expansion, and did so while keeping, by the standards of any age of war, remarkably clean hands. Few medieval rulers are honored in both the tradition they defended and the one they defeated ^[1].