Saladin is one of those rare figures in the long history of confrontation between the Christian West and the world of Islam who earned the respect of his enemies. This alone would make his life worth investigating. For the English-speaking world at least his name is firmly bracketed with that of Richard I the Lionheart, in a context of romantic clichés which form one of the great images of the medieval world of chivalry. The identification began during the lives of the two men and has continued down to the present. Of the two we know very much more about the Muslim hero than about his Christian rival, thanks to the eulogising biographies of his secretary Imad-ad-Din al-Isfahani and his loyal minister Baha’-ad-Din, the numerous but more critical references to him in theHistorical Compendium of Ibn-al-Athir (1160–1233), the greatest historian of his time, and detailed treatment of aspects of his career in other contemporary Muslim sources. Of these three, the first two began their careers in the service of Selchük Turkish princes who represented the ruling establishment that Saladin was to displace, while the third, although he remained loyal to the Selchük dynasty of Zengi and regarded Saladin as a usurper, was too honest and objective a man to deny his great qualities.
And this brings us to the second fascinating focus of Saladin’s career. His father, Aiyub, rose high in the service of Zengi and then of his son Nur-ad-Din, but as a Kurd in a Syrian world then ruled by Turkish dynasties he could hardly hope to win the supreme power. The fact that his son did so is one of the greatest tributes to his abilities and was an unforgivable act of presumption in the eyes of the old-school Turkish officials. After the death of Nur-ad-Din in the year 1174 Saladin was to force his claim to suzerainty throughout Turkish Syria, from Mosul to Damascus, and in his last years was the acknowledged arbiter of the rivalries among the descendants of the great Zengi. For die-hards it was bitter proof of the decadence of the world, epitomised in a story told to Ibn-al-Athir by one of his friends. In the autumn of 1191 the Zengid prince Moizz-ad-Din had come to Saladin to beg his mediation in a family land dispute. When the young man came to take his leave of the great king, he got down from his horse. ‘Saladin did the same to say his farewells. But when he prepared to mount his horse again, Moizz-ad-Din helped him and held the stirrup for him. It was Ala-ad-Din Khorrem Shah, son of Izz-ad-Din prince of Mosul (another Zengid), who arranged the robes of the sultan. I was astonished.’ Then Ibn-al-Athir’s friend concluded his horrified account with an invocation. ‘Oh son of Aiyub, you will rest easy whatever manner of death you may die. You for whom the son of a Selchük king held the stirrup.’
To hold the stirrup was one of the most potent symbols of submission throughout the contemporary world, Christian West as well as Muslim. Admiring contemporaries noted when a pope was powerful enough to exact such tribute from an emperor. Yet it is surely remarkable that after a decade in which he had ruled from Aleppo to Cairo and had led the armies of Islam in the Holy War against the Infidel, Saladin’s Kurdish ancestry and his triumph over the disunited Zengids still rankled with his opponents. When the great ruler died his doctor noted that in his experience it was the first time a king had been truly mourned by his subjects. His justice and gentleness were recognised by all those who came into contact with him, but his success was jealously watched by the caliphs of Baghdad, nominal heads of the Islamic community, and dourly resisted by the Zengid rulers he eventually overcame. Seen from the West Saladin was the great champion of the jihad in succession to Nur-ad-Din; to his opponents in Syria his espousal of the Holy War seemed an impertinent usurpation. The Third Crusade, which came so close to recovering Jerusalem for Christendom, drew its contingents from France, Germany and England – to oppose it Saladin had only troops from the territories he had forced to acknowledge him.
But despite the jealousy and opposition he provoked in the Islamic community there were few, even among his enemies, who denied Saladin’s generosity, religious conviction and evenness of temper. There were those who accused him of assumed piety for political reasons, but then both Zengi and Nur-ad-Din had had such charges levelled against them. It may be that Saladin’s strict observance of orthodox Sunnite Islam was in part caused by the wish to emulate the dour and extreme religiosity of Nur-ad-Din. His treatment of his Jewish subjects offers a good illustration of his meticulous adherence to the letter of Islamic law. Before he came to power in Egypt as vizir in 1169 the Shi‘ite caliphs of Cairo (considered heretics by Baghdad) had often used Jewish and Christian advisers in preference to their Sunnite Muslim subjects. In consequence they had relaxed some of the restrictions on non-believers. Saladin reimposed many of these regulations, such as the one that forbade Jews from riding horses. But he scrupulously upheld their right to present petitions for the redress of wrongs under the law and their right to have disputes between Jews tried by Jewish judges ‘as in former times’.
Saladin’s genuine if legalistic tolerance in religious matters is confirmed by the German Dominican Burkhard, who visited Egypt in 1175 and observed that people there seemed free to follow their religious persuasions. To the Jews indeed Saladin’s later career seemed to foreshadow great things. The 1170s and 1180s were a period of strong Messianic hopes and Saladin’s crushing victory over the Christians at the battle of Hattin in 1187 seemed to herald marvellous things to come. A modern biographer of the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides even suggested that his digest of the law, the Mishna Torah, may have been written as the constitution of the new Jewish state then being predicted. When Saladin proclaimed the right of Jews to return to Jerusalem and settle there after his conquest of the city at least one observer, Y’hudahal-Harizi, compared the decree to the reestablishment of Jewish Jerusalem by the Persian emperor, Cyrus the Great.
Few figures in the whole history of the Middle East have earned the admiration of Jews, Christians and Muslims, and it is, of course, because of his association with this ancient and historic zone of conflict that Saladin has special interest for a modern writer. For all but one of twenty years he ruled Egypt and Damascene Syria as provinces of a single empire; for much of that time he was also overlord of the western seaboard of Arabia, northern Syria, with its capital at Aleppo, and the North African coast as far west as Tunisia, while his authority was recognised in the distant north-east at Mosul. For these critical decades then Saladin achieved a united Islamic state fleetingly paralleled in our time by the United Arab Republic. The last six years of his arduous and ambitious career harnessed the combined resources of these wide territories in a campaign which shattered the Christian Latin states established in Palestine in the wake of the First Crusade. Most dramatic of all he recovered the holy city of Jerusalem for Islam.
Because of this great victory and because of the heady rhetoric of the Holy War which so obsessed Christian and Islamic thinking during the later part of the twelfth century, it was often supposed at the time and has been supposed since that the conquest of Jerusalem was the only objective of Saladin’s career. His biographers have too often ignored the realities of power in the region and the pressures they put on him. Saladin came at the end of a period in the history of the Middle East during which the Sunnite caliphs of Baghdad had been working unrelentingly but with slight success to establish their supremacy in the heretical Shi‘ite capital of Cairo; and he operated in a world where the crucial centres of power were the cities of Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul and, to a lesser extent, Baghdad. These were the formative factors behind his own slow yet inexorable drive against Christian Palestine.
The first edition of this book was one of just two biographies of its subject in the English language for many decades; new research and a number of new biographical studies since are outlined in the revised bibliography. I have corrected errors in the first edition. I retain the word ‘Saracen’ as a useful general term used in the West for the various peoples, Arab, Turk, Turkoman etc., recruited to his armies by Saladin. Conventions on the transliteration of Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages have changed over the years; usage has also changed from ‘Moslem’ to ‘Muslim’ and ‘Qur’an’ is increasingly common for ‘Koran’.
By and large, however, the book has stood the test of time fairly well – in particular, its contention that in 1188 Saladin did right to concentrate his energies on the threat posed by the advancing German army of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa rather than on the capture of the city of Tyre. The collapse of the German crusade could not have been foreseen, while Tyre had never been significant in previous European campaigns. My analysis of Saladin’s strategy to lure the Christian army into the campaign that ended in its defeat at Hattin is now generally accepted.
I presented the book as part of a survey I had in mind of the encounter of religious cultures in the twelfth century Middle East: Sunni Islam, Shia Islam, Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholic Christianity. I was invited to prepare an outline for a projected part-work publication on the world cultural importance of Islam in its early centuries. In the 1970s, such ‘multi-cultural studies’ were ahead of their time. Teaching a course in European civilization at the University of Le Havre in the 1990s I devoted an element to the contribution made by the Islamic world to the medieval West – in the context of the upsurge of ‘Islamism’ at that time very topical in Franco-Algerian relations. Events of recent years have brought such studies a higher profile in the Western world.
Saladin should be central to an understanding of Islamic religious attitudes of his time, being a man of honour and integrity who, even if able to respect his Christian enemies, was implacably hostile to them as agents of irreligion – a man for whom jihad was very much an armed struggle against the ‘infidels’ (al-Kuffar). In the twenty-first century, this term jihad has powerful resonance outside the Islamic world. Although the word is not found in the Qur’an, it was in use from a very early date and the concept evolved in the work of Islamic legalists. Two types are distinguished: ‘the greater’, al jihad al-akbar, which is the struggle against the self to establish the way of Islam in one’s own life; and ‘the lesser’ al-asghar, which is struggle or warfare in the way of God.
In a famous personal testament, Saladin set out his dedication to the jihad and summed up all his early achievements as means for the recovery of Jerusalem, i.e. al-Quds. In the view of some historians, he took power in Egypt (Chapter 6) to provide himself with a purely dynastic power base. It certainly served that purpose, but he himself pointed out that as soon as he was established there he began regular incursions against the infidels, recovering from them strongholds lost to Islam. Among these he lists the fortress at Aila (Eilat, modern Israel) on the Gulf of Aqaba, built by Baldwin I of Jerusalem back in 1116, giving the Crusader kingdom a strategic base against the roads from Damascus to Egypt and against Mecca and Medina.
Critics have accused Saladin of conducting wars of self aggrandisement as he battled against Muslim rivals simply to build a personal empire: from this point of view the recapture of Jerusalem was, apparently, more a lucky break than the outcome of a careful strategy to bring the army of the kingdom to its knees. But Saladin’s claim that his campaigns were essential to the consolidation of Muslim strength for that conquest was utterly justified. Thereafter it was, reports his secretary, adviser and biographer, Ibn Shaddad Baha-ad-Din, his heart’s desire to fight the infidels until there was not one left upon the face of the earth.
For generations of admirers, Saladin has represented the intriguing paradox of a man of personal humility, honest purpose and warm humanity who nevertheless won and held great political power and who died an ornament to his religion, loved by his friends and admired by his enemies. His career significantly shifted the balance of power against the enemies of Islam in the Holy Land of three religions. But in his own estimation, he left this world with the work of Allah barely begun.
Peterborough, June 2006