Chapter 1
On Friday, 4 September 1187, the triumphant army of Saladin stood before the gates of Ascalon. It was the major port of southern Palestine which for forty years had been in Christian hands. Now it was to be handed back to Islam. It was the last in a series of capitulations which had followed a massive Muslim victory at Hattin two months previously. On that fateful field the power of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem had been broken and its morale entirely shattered. As the Saracen soldiers watched the defeated garrison file out on their way to captivity, they could look back on eight weeks of knife-through-butter conquest. Towns and fortresses throughout the kingdom had opened their gates with barely a struggle. Only Jerusalem and a scattering of castles now remained to the enemy. Defeat was closing in on the Christian cause in Palestine and, ominous of disasters still in store, an eclipse of the sun darkened the sky over Ascalon as Muslim banners broke out on her battlements.
The general of this victorious army, Salah-ad-Din Yusuf ibn-Aiyub, was fifty years of age. He was a shortish man, his round face coming to a trim, now grizzled beard, but the hair beneath the turban was still black. Black too were the eyes, keen and alert. For so great a potentate his clothes were simple and unostentatious, but he sat his horse with the ease of thirty years of soldiering in the saddle and the stylishness of a polo champion. As the eclipse slowly darkened the sun’s glare an official approached and announced the arrival of Frankish envoys, summoned from Jerusalem to discuss terms for the surrender of that city.
It was clear to Saladin, as it must surely have been to the defenders of that capital now without a kingdom, that the city’s position was hopeless. The nearest Christian forces of any strength were a hundred miles away to the north in the coastal city of Tyre. Behind its walls the shaken survivors from the field of Hattin, together with thousands of refugees from the surrounding countryside, drew what comfort they could from the fact that the Muslim army had abandoned its siege for the time being. But, for the moment, they could be discounted as a military threat.
While Ascalon had held there had been some glimmer of a future for the capital. But now Ascalon had fallen and the Gaza garrison, some twenty miles to the south of it, was also on the verge of capitulation. The Frankish troops in Jerusalem held an island in a hostile Muslim sea and even within the walls there were enemies. Thousands of Eastern Orthodox Syrian Christians looked to a Muslim conquest as a liberation from the rites of the Church of Rome. In fact the citizenry could reasonably hope for clemency. In the lightning campaign that had followed Hattin, town after town had been spared and Saladin’s advance had seemed more like the progress of a king through his dominions than the bloody triumph march of a conqueror.
As he faced the Christian embassy the sultan saw the prize of a lifetime within his grasp. For years his declared aim had been the liberation of Islam from the infidel and above all the restoration of Jerusalem, holy city of three religions, to Muslim rule. He wanted a peaceful surrender. This city was not just a prize of war to be plundered and made desolate. ‘I believe,’ he told the envoys, ‘that the city is God’s abode, as you believe. It would be much against my will to lay siege to the house of God or to put it to the assault.’
To the Christian leaders the case was somewhat different. They remembered that their predecessors had won back the Holy City for Christendom and that they were now its guardians. They had come at Saladin’s command but they had no intention of surrendering the city without a fight. To his offer of terms their reply was brave and uncompromising. ‘Our honour lies here and our salvation with the salvation of the city. If we abandon her we shall surely and justly be branded with shame and contempt for here is the place of our Saviour’s crucifixion.... We shall die in the defence of our Lord’s sepulchre, for how could we do otherwise.’
Our reporter for this interview is Imad-ad-Din of Isfahan, Saladin’s personal secretary. His style is florid and his commitment to his master complete, but the words he puts into the mouths of the Christian embassy ring true and behind his account lies respect for men who, however misguided, were fighting like him in what they believed to be a Holy War. Saladin had offered generous terms to the beleaguered city ‘to obtain it in peace and amity’, but now that diplomacy had failed he swore a solemn oath to take the place by the sword, and prepared to march from Ascalon immediately.
Some two weeks later, his army appeared before the walls of Jerusalem. Marching up from Ascalon along the coast road and then striking inland, it had come on the city from the west and, on 20 September, the troops began to deploy against the western walls, expecting to overrun them easily after a barrage of stones and fire canisters laid down by the siege artillery. In general, before launching an attack, Saladin made a meticulous inspection of the lie of the land but, on this occasion, underestimating perhaps the strength and determination of the opposition, he opened operations against the nearest sector. It was a mistake. Sorties from the garrison were able to harass the Saracen engineers as they tried to bring the mangonels into action; missile throwers on the great towers of Tancred and David commanded the western approaches and swept the Muslim ranks. Until the early afternoon each day the attackers were blinded and dazzled by the sun rising slowly up the eastern sky behind the bowmen and the artillery on the battlements.
After five days Saladin called off the action. On the evening of 25 September, the defenders saw the army strike camp and begin to move off northward. That night the sounds of the distant chanting and the wooden prayer clappers of the Christians could be heard across the hillsides. The churches of Jerusalem were filled with worshippers giving thanks for this round-one victory; some apparently even thought that the Saracens had withdrawn entirely.
But Saladin had merely shifted the point of the attack. Seeing that the strong westward defences could hold him to a protracted and costly battle he had personally inspected the rest of the perimeter. On the morning of 26 September the citizens awoke to find that Muslim banners were now on Mount Olivet and that the mangonels were already in position for an attack on the weaker northern and eastern walls.
Given conditions within the city, the defence of Jerusalem was surprisingly tough. In addition to the citizens, the supplies had to feed thousands of refugees, few of them able-bodied men. When the city was preparing for the siege, it had been found that there were only two knights in the garrison. In the twelfth century the knight was the best equipped as well as the most thoroughly trained of all fighting men, not simply a member of a socially privileged group. The new commander knighted all the men of the garrison above the age of sixteen; the gesture may have raised morale but it did little to improve the fighting quality of the force.
In fact the city only had an experienced commander thanks to the generosity of Saladin. He was Balian of Ibelin, one of the finest soldiers in the Christian army. After Hattin he had taken refuge with the remnant of that army at Tyre, but his wife, the Byzantine princess Maria Comnena, and his family were still at Jerusalem; Balian begged a safe conduct from Saladin to travel to the capital and arrange their journey to Tyre. This was granted on condition that Balian stayed only a single night and that he swore never again to bear arms against Saladin. Balian took the solemn oath. Yet when he arrived in Jerusalem the pleas of the people and the pressure of the patriarch persuaded him to stay. A man of honour, he protested he had given his oath, but the patriarch, with the bland disregard for commitments made to the infidel that most Christian clerics shared, absolved the knight from this obligation with the words ‘I absolve you from your sin and from your oath which it were a greater sin in you to keep than break’.
For Balian it was a real conflict of loyalties. Knightly honour required that he observe his oath pledged to a noble antagonist; Christian devotion and loyalty to his own people made it virtually impossible for him to refuse the pleas of the citizens. But his family was still not out of danger and he needed the goodwill of Saladin. He wrote to him protesting that he had been forced to break his oath and begging that his loved ones be given protection. Saladin not only did not reproach him but even detached fifty of his finest troops to escort the lady of Ibelin and her children northwards to Tyre.
So it was that when Saladin’s army began its siege, Jerusalem was led by a determined and capable general. But under the new attack on the northern walls there was little the defenders could do. In the words of an Arab historian, the arrows were as tooth-picks to the walls, plucking defenders out of the embrasures like unwanted pieces of meat. With the missiles and canisters of Greek fire hurled by the siege engines they forced the defenders back from the battlements. Ten thousand horsemen, drawn up just out of bow-shot of the city walls, watched the gates of Jehoshaphat and St Stephen, dashing in to contain and drive back any attempt at a sortie from the garrison.
Imad-ad-Din describes with obvious relish the fearful havoc wrought by the engines of war, and behind the clangour and the screams of the combatants in his narrative we hear the crack and whirr of the wood and ropes as the clumsy machines crash out their murderous missiles. Still more disturbing for the garrison was the ring of iron on stone coming from the base of the walls. There, protected by the covering fire from their army and by a roof of the shields of their comrades, a group of sappers were steadily working on the lower courses of the masonry, others excavated the foundations, propping them with wood as the work progressed. Within forty-eight hours nearly a hundred feet of wall had been undermined, the masonry weakened and the wooden pit props under the foundations surrounded with brushwood and other combustibles.
Even before the wall fell, those within the city were preparing for defeat. The churches were crowded with penitents seeking forgiveness for their sins; the priests made solemn procession through the streets; mothers shaved their daughters’ heads hoping to make them so ugly that they would be ignored in the pillage and rape they feared could follow the capture. Saladin had sworn to take the place by sword and there were many in both armies who had heard reports and memories of the days of blood that had followed the terrible Frankish conquest of the city, eighty-eight years before.
On 29 September the props under the foundations were fired, the weakened wall fell, and a great breach was opened up. The hard-pressed garrison had to man it unaided since the citizen militiamen, who had been prepared to fight from behind the comparative safety of the ramparts, refused to defend the suicidally exposed position on the crumbling stone-work. Public opinion began to clamour for surrender and an appeal to the mercy of Saladin. But the new knights of the garrison were eager for a last glorious sortie, to sell their lives as dearly as possible and to win martyrs’ crowns for themselves. The result would have been a disaster for Jerusalem. The laws of war permitted unrestrained rights of pillage to an army that took a city by storm. In fact the plunder from such operations was one of the more valuable profits of war-making for the average soldier and no commander could hope to control his men in the heat and blood of battle. Whatever Saladin might have wished, the outcome of a heroic last-ditch stand by the Franks would have meant slaughter and destruction.
Inside the city, the patriarch Heraclius fully realised the potential threats in the situation, not only to life but also to the priceless treasures and the holy relics in the city’s churches. He persuaded the knights to reconsider their decision, pointing out that while the heroes might find themselves in paradise at the end of the day, their wives and children would, in all probability, be brutalised, tortured and enslaved. Balian himself apparently came to share this view, and the following day he led a deputation to Saladin’s headquarters in the valley of the Brook Kedron to discuss terms.
The battle raged over the breach in the walls even as the pourparlers went forward, and in the midst of the negotiations Saladin pointed out to Balian that Muslim standards were already fluttering on the battlements. ‘Does a victor grant terms to a conquered city?’ he drily enquired. Soon after, a desperate counter-attack from the garrison pushed the invaders back, but the fall of Jerusalem was only a matter of days, perhaps hours, away, and it is difficult at first sight to see what the Christians could hope for.
Saladin’s first instinct was to harden his heart against mercy. ‘We shall deal with you just as you dealt with the people of Jerusalem when you conquered the city with murder, enslavement and atrocities.’ But there were other factors. Despite his oath, Saladin still preferred that the city return to Islam spared the worst disfigurements of war. His emirs and advisers could see other advantages in a negotiated surrender. In the mayhem of a sack much wealth would be destroyed and more be looted by the common soldiery. But in an orderly transfer of ransom money, supervised of course by officers and gentlemen, a perfectly satisfactory percentage could be creamed off on its way to the official coffers. Their advice was to negotiate from the premise that the enemy were already prisoners and to agree the terms of the ransoms.
But it was Balian who provided the clinching argument. The Frankish garrison had agreed to forgo the glory of martyrdom to save their families – if now the enemy refused terms, their desperation and fanaticism could be relied on to make a shambles of Jerusalem and the shrines it contained. Moreover there were 5,000 Muslim prisoners and slaves within the walls whom Balian now used as hostages. According to the chronicler Ibn-al-Athir, he addressed Saladin in the following words: ‘Many of the people in the city are fighting half-heartedly in the hope that you will grant them mercy as you have to other cities – such people fear death and desire life. But for ourselves as soldiers, when we see that death must needs be, by God we will slaughter our sons and women, we will burn our wealth and possessions and leave you neither dinar nor drachma for plunder, nor man nor woman to enslave. When we have finished that, we will destroy the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque and the other holy places and we will slay the Muslim slaves who are in our hands. Then we will sally out to fight against you; each man amongst us will take his equal down to death with him so that we shall die gloriously or conquer with honour.’
Whether in fact Balian and his men would have been able to hold the perimeter long enough to complete this scenario of destruction is doubtful. But the possibility was there and neither Saladin nor his emirs wanted to put the issue to the test. There remained the question of the sultan’s oath. His religious advisers proposed a formula. If the garrison would make a formal surrender at discretion, this would be considered as the equivalent of conquest by the sword and the oath would be fulfilled.
The terms of the ransom were not over liberal nor were they impossibly harsh. More to the point, once the fighting had stopped, not a single Christian was harmed by the victorious troops. Emirs and officers patrolled the streets to prevent outrages against property or person. As we shall shortly see, they made the administration of the ransom pay, but the fact remains that when the Muslim reconquered Jerasalem the handover was civilised and orderly. The contrast with the First Crusade could hardly have been more complete. It is not surprising that Christian chroniclers and citizens alike blessed the name of Saladin for their lives.
Each man was to be ransomed for ten gold pieces, each woman for five and each child for a single gold piece. Because there were thousands of poor who could not hope to raise this kind of money, Saladin released 7,000 people for 30,000 bezants – raised incidentally from the balance left from the treasure presented to the Hospital some years before by King Henry II of England. The ransoming of so vast a population – estimates range from 60,000 to 100,000 – was clearly going to take time. Forty days were allowed; anyone who after that time had still not found the money should be sold into slavery – the normal fate of a defeated population. In fact many Syrian Christians preferred to stay and pay the Muslim tax for the right to practise their own religion.
Payments and releases were controlled as closely as possible. The great gates of the city were closed and at the posterns of each gate stood a Muslim official collecting the ransom money from each head of family as he left. Those freed were to carry with them as much of their personal belongings as they could. This applied from the lowest to the highest. The Muslim camp was furious that the Patriarch Heraclius, though he paid only the standard capitation fee for his personal liberty, left the city accompanied by pack animals and porters carrying off the treasures of the city’s churches, the gold plate from the Holy Sepulchre and a vast hoard of his own wealth. Urged by his emirs to stop this flagrant breach of the treaty spirit Saladin refused to ‘break faith with them’ even though they might take advantage of him at the expense of their own honour.
Many Christians too were outraged at the patriarch’s behaviour. After the 7,000 poor had been released for the 30,000 bezants there were still thousands hardly able to ransom themselves, while they could easily have been bought with the Church’s wealth. As it was they sold their few possessions at rock-bottom prices to the enemy soldiery to raise the price of their bare freedom and left the city destitute. Below them came thousands of beggars and labourers. Yet many of these found mercy at the hands of the conquerors. Saladin’s brother, al-Adil, touched by the misery of the refugees and the plight of those left inside the city, begged a gift of a thousand slaves from Saladin in return for his service in the wars. When they were made over to him he freed them at once. The patriarch, seeing the chance of cheap altruism, asked a similar boon and was granted 500 to release, while Balian begged the freedom of a similar number. When these arrangements were completed Saladin said to his courtiers: ‘My brother has made his alms and the patriarch and Balian have made theirs; now would I fain make mine.’ And he then ordered that all the old and infirm and poor still left in the city should be liberated. In the words of the Christian chronicler Ernoul, ‘they came forth from the rising of the sun until night fell. Such was the charity of which Saladin did to poor people without number.’
When the great exodus was complete, it was found that there were still some 15,000 able-bodied poor men and women who were divided as slaves among the conquerors or sent into their harems. Saladin’s war chest had received, it was calculated, 100,000 dinars, and his reputation an invaluable lift. But while all the chroniclers, friend and foe alike, sang the generosity of the high command in their dealing with the defeated city, some Arab commentators described in bitter terms the fraud that was practised by many of the emirs in charge of the ransoms. Imad-ad-Din describes just how one of the tricks was worked.
Saladin had set up offices which issued receipts for full ransom payments. These receipts were valid at the exit points in lieu of cash payments, but a clerk working in one of the offices, ‘a person whose word I do not doubt’, told Imad-ad-Din just how things were done there: ‘often they would write a receipt for someone whose money went into their own pockets and their deceit went undiscovered’. Those outside the civil service, unable to conduct their fraud in the privacy of their own office, developed other techniques. A favourite one was to smuggle a Christian out of the city disguised as a Muslim and then take him for all he had under threat of reporting him to the authorities for evading the ransom collection. This kind of petty fraud was overshadowed by the manoeuvres of the big operators. Emirs claimed hundreds of the inhabitants by right as escaped slaves – there were many refugees in Jerusalem from the surrounding districts and claims like these would have been difficult to check. They then liberated these slaves with apparent generosity, though in fact at the standard ransom rate, or more, which went straight into their own pockets.
Self-interest no doubt prompted the emirs to agree with Saladin’s plans for ransoming the city and speculation played a large part in their carrying out of those plans. However there is no indication that Saladin himself had any ulterior motives and much to show that his behaviour was as uncomplicated and honourable as it appears. Ernoul, the Frankish chronicler in Balian’s entourage, had no doubt at all about the nobility of the Muslim general. He concludes his account of the surrender with an example of the ‘great courtesy which Saladin showed to the wives and daughters of the knights who had to flee Jerusalem when their lords were killed or made prisoners in battle’. They were naturally able to find their ransom money of five gold pieces a head, but the Muslim reconquest of the lands formerly held by their menfolk meant they were now disinherited. They had ransomed themselves from slavery – were they now to become paupers? They begged the conqueror to ‘counsel and to help them’. Those whose men were still alive as prisoners piteously begged to be told where they were. Saladin promised to trace as many of the prisoners as he could and return them to their families. In addition, and from his own treasury, he distributed cash grants calculated according to each lady’s status. ‘They gave praise to God’ and ‘published abroad the kindness and honour he had done them’. This could of course be construed as some kind of public relations exercise. Certainly the towns of the Frankish kingdom had capitulated easily to Saladin because of his reputation for clemency. But this generosity was on an unheard-of scale; the enemy was virtually finished and in any case it is difficult to see just what advantage Saladin hoped to buy. The fact is that accounts of his career, whether by friend or enemy, described acts both generous and honourable which it is hard to discount. The possibility must be entertained that Saladin was a good, honest and humane man, although in a position of great power.
Whatever his motives, Jerusalem had been spared the destruction and misery proper to war and the celebrations on her return to Islam were not marred by memories of any brutality. But there remained the job of cleansing the city and the Holy Places of Islam of all traces of the Christian defilement. Even while the forty-day process of the ransom was going on, the golden cross over the Dome of the Rock had been brought down and broken up. Christian church furniture was unceremoniously cleared out of the building as well as from the al-Aqsa mosque. The Rock itself, from which Muslims believe Muhammad made his mystical ascent to heaven, had been built over with a Christian chapel, and on the place where the prophet’s foot was believed to have rested there now stood a shrine embellished with marble to honour it as a place where Christ had stood before his Passion. The Rock had been sheathed in marble slabs which seem to have been put in place to protect it from relic hunters. It appears that portions had been cut from it and sold by its Christian guardians to be housed in the altars of newly dedicated churches in Europe. Saladin ordered that the marble be removed and the sacred site be once more exposed to the view of the faithful. The mihrab in the al-Aqsa mosque had been covered over and this too was laid bare. The outside of the mosque was obscured by living quarters, a granary and even a latrine built by the Templars who had been the custodians of the place. All these buildings were demolished and the interior of the mosque richly carpeted, in place of the rush-matting that the Christians had used; magnificent candelabra were hung from the roof and illuminated texts from the Koran hung in places of honour round the walls. Finally Saladin had brought from Aleppo an exquisitely carved pulpit which had been commissioned by Nur-ad-Din twenty years before for the Mosque of Umar at Jerusalem when he himself was planning the conquest of the city.
Jerusalem capitulated on Friday 2 October / 27 Rajab, by Tradition the anniversary of the Prophet’s mystic ascent to heaven from the Sacred Rock. In the ensuing days religious sites were cleansed of defilement and rededicated for the ceremony of thanksgiving that took place at the Friday prayers on 9 October in the al-Aqsa mosque. At the completion of the formal prayers the vast congregation heard a sermon preached by the chief qadi of Aleppo. His sermon was a nice blend of veneration for the holy city and eulogy of the son of Aiyub who had returned it to Islam. ‘With God’s help you have brought this strayed camel back from the profane hands of the Infidel. It was the home of our father Abraham, and the spot whence the Prophet Muhammad, God’s blessings on him, ascended into heaven. It was the qibla to which men turned to pray in the early days of Islam and the place where all mankind will gather on the Day of Resurrection and of Judgement.’
On the day that the capitulation of Jerusalem had been assured, the scribes and clerks in the sultan’s chancellery had worked into the small hours writing dispatches to every part of the Muslim world. Imad-ad-Din had written no fewer than seventy to various emirs and city governors before he turned in that night. When the news reached Baghdad the rejoicing was spontaneous and exuberant and the caliph was to send the victorious hero rich gifts and signs of his favour. The whole Muslim world rang with the praises of the noble Saladin, and even opponents who had long been suspicious of his ambitions grudgingly conceded that it was a magnificent achievement. Ibn-al-Athir, loyal to the Zengid dynasty which Saladin had replaced, comments simply, at the end of his account of the fall of Jerusalem, ‘This noble act of conquest was achieved by no one after Omar but Saladin, sufficient title to glory and honour.’ After nearly ninety years of Christian occupation the recovery of the holy city of Jerusalem seemed to most Muslims an historic achievement of self-evident importance. But this had not always been the view, and it is time to leave Saladin with his triumph and to investigate a little why he came to be in Jerusalem, and the developments in middle eastern history that had led to its becoming his talisman of success. What was the exact importance of the city to Islam? How long had it been revered?
Jerusalem can make many claims to veneration by the Muslims. First as the capital of David and Solomon, respected by Muslims as well as Jews. Second as the home of prophets of the Old Testament and the scene of Christ’s death – all regarded as the predecessors of Muhammad. It was the first qibla or direction of prayer for the faithful and even when it had been replaced in that honour by Mecca it was still revered as the second house of God upon earth after the Kaaba at Mecca. The Prophet had also named it as one of the three directions of prayer in which the horseman should face before mounting. Anyone who passed through the Gate of Mercy (known to Christians as the Golden Gate) in the Temple precincts was assured of an eternity in Paradise. It was also believed by many that Jerusalem would be the site of the Last Judgement. But more important than all else it was here that the Prophet had made his mysterious ascent into heaven. For the Koran tells that while praying in the mosque at Mecca Muhammad was transported in spirit to Jerusalem and there, mounting the charger Buraq on the Rock, had been carried to the regions beyond the tomb.
Naturally enough such beliefs were very much to the fore in the fervour that followed the recapture of the city. Koranic doctors and Muslim divines flocked to Jerusalem to take part in the festival of liberation. Yet in the previous century the claim that it ranked third among the holy cities after Mecca and Medina had been dismissed by some doctors of religion as a mystical error derived from Judaic-Christian perversions. The claim that the dead should be judged there was said to rest on one of the sayings of Muhammad, but it too was discounted by some as an apocryphal tradition ‘invented by the people of Syria, for Allah would resurrect the dead wherever it pleased him’. Even after Saladin’s triumph and the final restoration of the city to the Faith thirteenth- and fourteenth-century writers are found belittling the supposed sanctity of Jerusalem and Palestine. One bluntly accusing the local inhabitants of fabricating any ‘tradition’ that would attract pilgrims.
Modern scholarship adds its own doubts. The French scholar Emanuel Sivan finds the earliest mention of Jerusalem in the context of Holy War exhortations occurring as late as 1144, nearly half a century after the city had fallen. In fact he proposes the view that the whole notion of Jerusalem as specially sacred to Islam was deliberately built up by propagandists as a conscious counterweight to the importance placed on it by the Christians. Yet undoubtedly the city had always had sacred associations for Muslims. It is referred to as the Holy Land even in the Koran and in early Islamic literature, and the mystical sect of Sufism was convinced of its sanctity. In public statements and private comments and in a famous letter to Richard I of England Saladin repeatedly committed himself to the belief in Jerusalem as one of the three great cities of Islam. Of course there was special pleading and much ardent propaganda behind the claims for the city which flowered so strongly in the mid-twelfth century. But the soil from which they grew was fertile, waiting only to be watered.
By the end of the eleventh century religious fervour had waned in the traditional heartlands of Islam. When Jerusalem fell to the First Crusade in 1099, Muslims were more shocked by the massacre which followed in the streets of the Holy City than by the religious implications of its loss. It was to be more than a generation before the rulers of Syria and Palestine were to see the expulsion of the Franks as a priority overriding their own political objectives. Yet, just as the motive power for the First Crusade had been built up by pilgrims’ tales and priestly exhortation in eleventh-century Europe, so gradually, from the early 1100s, the fires of faith began to burn up more brightly in Syria, fuelled by the passion of religious leaders.
The crusaders had won their success through the disunity of the enemy; religion was the only thing that could restore unity to Islam. As it began to do its work, three great leaders were to emerge to use the fire for forging a hammer to smash the invader. The last and most glorious of them was Saladin. His capture of Jerusalem set the seal on a struggle that had for sixty years flowed across the frontiers of religion and rival cultures. To understand his motivation, his achievement, and indeed his personality, we must first investigate a little the world he was born into.
In the 1930s, in his monumental History of the Crusades and the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem, the French historian René Grousset summarised the historical developments in Palestine and the Middle East from the 1090s to the 1290s in his volume titles: Volume I, ‘Muslim anarchy and the Frankish monarchy’; II, ‘Frankish monarchy and Muslim monarchy: the Equilibrium’; III, ‘Muslim Monarchy and Frankish anarchy’.
‘In 1092, that is five years before the preaching of the First Crusade,’ he wrote, ‘virtually the whole of Muslim Asia … still constituted a vast, unitary empire from the frontiers of Afghanistan to the sea of Marmora; from Turkestan to the frontiers of [Abbasid, Shia] Egypt: a Muslim empire in which a Selchük Turkish sultanate was superimposed upon the Arab caliphate, …. to form a united Sunni empire. But in 1092 the great Sultan Malik Shah died and the empire was divided among his family.’ The rivalry that followed was finally to be brought to a new unity by Saladin. Arab historians, Grousset thought, conferred upon him the posthumous title of ‘sultan’ as if looking among the records of earlier Turkish rulers for a title worthy of his stature. In fact, like Alexander the Great, the Kurdish conqueror surpassed all precedents. Like Alexander in his era, Saladin embodied the consequence of cause and effect in his, personifying the irresistible force of the counter-crusade.