Chapter 4
At a time when war not only was, but was accepted as being, commonplace, the ideal of the Holy War offered men a noble motive. The prevailing modern orthodoxy holds war at best to be a disgusting necessity but more usually simply disgusting. It regards the concept of a Holy War with particular contempt. Murder and brutality, it is argued, are neither excused nor elevated because they are committed in the name of the ultimate good. Religious conviction is that much the worse if it leads men to kill one another, and the word ‘fanaticism’, which derives from the Latin meaning ‘divine inspiration’, is used of such apparently warped conviction. Our society does not of course live by these lofty beliefs – witness the fascination with books, magazines and television programmes on war, to say nothing of our massive armaments industries. Neither medieval Christianity nor Islam held them.
For them warfare and violence were not only facts of normal life, as they are with us, they were also legitimate tools of God’s purpose. If we are to understand Saladin, we must live for a time in a world where war can be good and Holy War the highest ideal a man can aim at. It was the fanaticism of the crusaders which inspired the slow swell of sympathy for the Holy War, or jihad, in Syria; by the time of Saladin, it had burgeoned into a powerful popular movement, thanks to a good deal of careful propaganda during the reign of Nur-ad-Din.
At first, only a few men saw the long-term threat that the success of the Crusade posed Islam. Even before Jerusalem fell, a shrewd old imam from Damascus was sizing up the pattern of the future, as it took shape in the hard-fought siege of Antioch. ‘No single town will be strong enough to check the advance of the Infidel but all the Muslims of Syria must come to its aid – and if that be not sufficient the obligation to help will lie on the Muslims of the neighbouring lands.’ But this analysis was far ahead of contemporary thinking.
Rulers lost little time in coming to terms with the Christians where it suited their purposes. Tughtigin of Damascus settled his boundary disputes with the king of Jerusalem with the greatest amicability and to the disadvantage only of the peasants of each side. In 1108 a battle was fought between two armies each of which comprised Christian and Muslim contingents – the outcome was a victory for Ridvan of Aleppo and his ally Tancred of Antioch over the army of the Turk, Chavali of Mosul, and the Frank, Baldwin of Edessa.
Only a few of the imam’s immediate disciples took heed of his warnings. Among them was ‘Ali ibn Takir al-Sularni who determined to awake public opinion to the Christian menace. In 1105 he completed his Book of the Jihad, subtitled A Call to the Holy War, the Duty to Wage It and Its Rules, together with a Eulogy of Syria and the Frontier Territories, and in the spring of that year gave a public reading of the first half in the mosque of a Damascus suburb. It seems to have made some impact, for the reading of the second half, in the autumn, was held at the great mosque of the Umayyads in the centre of the city. The following year al-Sulami died, but eight years later the work was given a second reading in the mosque of the Umayyads and jihad agitation seems to have continued for a time among activist groups of the city’s intellectuals.
Al-Sulami inveighed against the inaction of Syria’s rulers. ‘How can the princes carry on their pursuit of high living after such a catastrophe?’ he demanded. It is for them to unite in a jihad to ‘exterminate these Franks and recover all the territories they have conquered’. Yet far from doing this, he went on, they seemed to be paralysed with fear at the very mention of the name of the Franks. Though it was bitterly resented, the charge of cowardice came near the mark. At their first impact the mailed knights of Europe made a deep and terrifying impression on the Islamic rulers and their armies, so that years later in his Syriac Chronography Bishop Bar Hebraeus reckoned that ‘in those days all the Arabs in Syria trembled before the Franks’.
The evidence of early jihad advocacy in Damascus is of special interest since it was in this town that Saladin spent his formative years. But in Aleppo, too, isolated and sometimes influential voices were raised against the prince’s too easy acceptance of the Frankish presence. The qadi, Abu-l-Hassan used his considerable prestige to force Ridvan to take a tougher line and pressure mounted from other quarters until the prince reluctantly gave permission for a party of pietists to seek aid from the caliph in Baghdad for the Holy War. An army was dispatched from Baghdad; but when it arrived before Aleppo it found the gates locked against it. Ridvan had no intention of admitting a caliphal army to his city where the pietists would be a willing party of revolutionists.
For twenty years or more the cause of the jihad rested with ardent but isolated intellectuals and holy men, until the politicians found themselves gradually forced into the arena. Often enough their motives were self-interested. In 1118 the Turkoman prince Il-Ghazi came to power in Aleppo with popular backing as a supposed champion of the Holy War. But in fact the humiliation of the infidel was the kind of diversion he could well do without, and a peaceful border with the principality of Antioch would have left him conveniently free to extend his power among the squabbling states of Muslim Syria. But successful campaigning by Roger of Antioch threatened to encircle Aleppo entirely.
Even so Il-Ghazi moved carefully and in June 1119 was in the plain of Sarmada awaiting the army of Tughtigin of Damascus rather than risk a single-handed encounter with the Christians. In the event, battle was forced on Il-Ghazi by the impetuosity of Roger and by the urging of his own Turkoman free lances. They were in the business of soldiering to win booty and ransoms and were quite innocent of any ideological commitments, but before the battle started Abu-l-Fadl of Aleppo, one of the moving spirits behind Il-Ghazi’s rise to power there, gained his permission to preach the jihad through the army. His ardour soon infected even these sceptical mercenaries; strong men wept openly, and a force of professional soldiers was transformed into a body of fiery fanatics. The battle was long remembered by the Franks as the Field of Blood. The Turkomans won a rich booty, but the massacre of the prisoners, carried out in the heat of religious fanaticism, robbed them and Il-Ghazi of the huge profits in ransoms and slaves. Antioch was now defenceless, but, as we saw, Il-Ghazi did not follow up his advantage.
The impetus of the jihad faded in Aleppo, but Muslim morale soared. The Field of Blood had been won in the name of the Holy War and was a triumph for the Faith. The death of Roger of Antioch in the battle took on a deep symbolic meaning, for he had been killed at the very foot of the great jewelled cross that had been the Christians’ standard. The victor received a robe of honour and the title of Star of Religion from the caliph and basked in the eulogies of the poets.
‘This Roger,’ sang one of them, ‘has been cast into hell, but thou hast won the eternity of paradise. Thanks to thee the pillars of Infidelity have been shattered and the seat of monotheism has been once more set up its place.’ For a time, the ‘terrifying sound of the Franks’ had been exorcised.
The scholars – once the pioneers of the jihad – were now becoming the agents of princely propaganda. Tughtigin of Damascus, for example, was presented by his chroniclers, not entirely accurately, as a devout champion of Islam. His letters to the caliph were full of talk about the jihad, but in earlier days the atabeg had seemed less inspired by religious zeal. In 1110, threatened by the Franks, the port of Sidon had won his protection only by offering the sizeable fee of 30,000 bezants. When the Sidonese refused to pay up once the danger was passed Tughtigin threatened to call back the Christians. A year later it was the turn of Tyre to face the infidel – it offered to surrender itself to Tughtigin if he saved them. In fact the siege was raised by the Tyrians themselves and the governor refused to submit the town to the rule of Damascus. Tughtigin thought it wiser not to press the point since the town had proved itself too tough for the Christians and they were more skilled in siege warfare than his own forces. Concealing his weakness under a show of virtue, Tughtigin proved himself an expert in the vocabulary of the political jihad. Bridling at the suggestion that he had any designs on the town he protested, ‘I did what I did for the love of God and his Muslims, not in the hope of money or power’, according to Damascus’s historian Ibn al-Qalanisi.
Tughtigin’s sincerity may at times have been in doubt but Damascus was at the heart of the growing movement. Religious fervour reached a peak in 1129 when a determined Christian attack nearly captured the city. The defence, led by Tughtigin’s son, was inspired by the preaching of the Abd-al-Wahhab al-Sirazi who was encouraged to journey to Baghdad to win the caliph’s support.
During the 1130s ardent protestations of loyalty to the Holy War became an important part of a Syrian ruler’s repertoire. The fierce piety of the early days, reinforced by encouragement from the political establishment, was being transformed into a popular movement with a momentum of its own. Leaders often exploited it. The town of Hamah fell to one of Zengi’s armies while its governor was with him and another army supposedly on a jihad campaign. Nevertheless it was Zengi who really put the jihad on the political map with the capture of Edessa. Short of Jerusalem no target held a higher place in Muslim hopes, and in calling up his allies Zengi made explicit appeal to their obligations to wage the Holy War. From the fall of Edessa writer after writer advocated a war to the death against the Franks and their expulsion from the coast of Palestine or ‘Sahil’.
Yet if the capture of Edessa opened up a rich vein of rhetoric, it did not herald the massive and unrelenting drive against the Christians that ardent devotees looked for. When Zengi died his lands were parcelled out between his sons, the elder, Saif-ad-Din, taking Mosul and its territories, while Aleppo and the Syrian domains went to Nur-ad-Din. This arrangement cut the younger brother off from al-Jazirah, the great region between the upper waters of the Euphrates and Tigris, dominated by Mosul and a valuable reservoir of manpower to his father. But it also freed him from the in-fighting of Iraqi politics that had so often distracted Zengi from his Syrian ambitions.
Furthermore, the fall of Edessa eliminated Aleppo’s chief northern rival and left Nur-ad-Din able to conduct an orderly expansionist policy: first against the neighbouring Christian state of Antioch and then southwards to Damascus. The prize of Jerusalem, which was later to seem so important, was left to a future in which the Zengid house should have completed its destiny and become master of Muslim Syria. When Nur-ad-Din died, Christian princes still ruled at Antioch and Tripoli; the great fortress of Krak des Chevaliers still held the armies of Islam at bay; in the south, al-Karak and ash-Shaubak (Montreal) still plundered the rich caravans which led up from the Red Sea port of al-Aqaba to Damascus; the Holy City was still held by unbelievers, its sacred al-Aqsa mosque still defiled by their rites.
As the years passed, a few isolated voices began to question whether the champion of Syria might not have lost sight of his priorities. The same criticisms were to be levelled at Saladin, with much greater force, by adherents of the old régime outraged that this Kurdish upstart should have entered on the Zengid inheritance and overthrown a Turkish mastery that had lasted a hundred years. Why did he not turn his might against the Christians? Why did he desert the sacred cause of jihad proclaimed by Nur-ad-Din? The answers should emerge in a later chapter. Here, because Saladin was to model himself so closely on his great predecessor, we must take a look at the actual record of Nur-ad-Din.
He was a fine soldier and won many a brilliant victory against the Christians. Yet no single feat could equal the taking of Edessa or Saladin’s triumph at Jerusalem. After fending off an attempt by the Christians to reclaim Edessa, he set about the methodical elimination of the whole county from the political map. Next, turning to Antioch, he launched a series of sieges which stripped it of half its strong points and pushed the frontiers back to the Orontes river, reducing the once immense principality to a coastal strip. In 1149, at the glorious battle of Inab, Raymond of Antioch was defeated and slain and his skull, encrusted in silver, dispatched to the caliph – a publicity exercise well calculated to appeal to contemporaries and ornately boost the prestige of the conqueror. A year later, Joscelin, titular count of Edessa, was captured, blinded and sent to end his days in captivity. Yet another year had barely passed when the city of Turbessel was snatched from the hands of the emperor at Constantinople.
It was a brilliant commencement to the reign and the chancellery at Aleppo ensured that its master’s victories were the talk of Islam, by a stream of proclamations dispatched throughout Syria and beyond. Yet in a way these Christian defeats were merely the gratifying and prestigious by-products of a policy directed first and foremost to the expansion of Aleppan power along the natural lines determined by the strategic geography of its position. They were followed not by the proclamation of jihad against the great city of Antioch herself but by a dogged three-year manoeuvre to overthrow the ruler of Muslim Damascus. There were good reasons no doubt. The city showed an unfortunate readiness to ally with the Christians to preserve its independence from Aleppo. Though one might observe in passing that had Nur-ad-Din concentrated on the common enemy Damascus might not have felt the need for its unnatural friendship. The fact was that the logic of Aleppan expansion pointed south, and in pursuing it Nur-ad-Din was only realising an ambition that had directed his father’s policy.
If proof were needed that Nur-ad-Din placed the requirements of his evolving Syrian hegemony before the strategy of the jihad, it came in 1164. In that year, at the battle of Artah, he won a crushing victory which laid Antioch wide open to his armies. Bohemond, its prince, Raymond, count of Tripoli, Hugh of Lusignan, and a procession of other Christian notables were led in chains to Aleppo, while Nur-ad-Din found himself surrounded by a council urging him to deliver the coup de grâce. The capitulation of Antioch would have been a Muslim triumph to match Edessa, and its skeleton garrison girded itself for an heroic defence. Yet the blow did not fall. The city was still viewed from Constantinople as an imperial dominion, and the 1160s were a time of great Byzantine strength. Nur-ad-Din calculated that to hold Antioch against imperial counter-attack might well stretch his resources to their limits, and he had no wish to give the Byzantines cause to interfere in his affairs. So long as it could be contained against the coast, as it undoubtedly could be, the state of Antioch posed no immediate threat. Whatever the expectations of the jihad enthusiasts, the Destroyer of the Infidels and Polytheists now directed his power not against the Franks but against the heretic caliphs who ruled the rich and strategically important land of Egypt.
It was, of course, virtually impossible for any ruler to give the single-minded devotion to the Holy War looked for by the extreme pietists. The whole concept had been born in simpler days when the stormtroopers of Islam were fanatical, military adventurers with fortunes to make in the vast Christian heathendom north and west of Arabia. By the twelfth century the territories conquered by the early caliphs had settled into a pattern of long-established, wealthy and sophisticated states where the strident idealism of earlier times inevitably jarred against complex political reality. In any case, the Zengids, as the self-proclaimed agents of Baghdad, were the heirs of a traditional policy that antedated the revived enthusiasm for the Holy War. Long before Christians had arrived in Palestine, Turkish sultans had been viewing Syria as the power base from which to oust the heretical Fatimids from Cairo. The force of history, as well as the pricks of ambition, drove Nur-ad-Din and then Saladin to look first for mastery in the Muslim world before turning their might on the Christians. To charge them with carving out great personal dominion at the expense of co-religionists is right in a way which is quite irrelevant.
Good Muslims themselves, both men wanted to see the extirpation of the Franks; as strategists they fully recognised the threat that could come from their beach-head kingdom and its principalities. But as hard-headed politicians they also recognised that the enemy, perennially short of men and funds, at odds with the native population, repetitively quarrelling amongst themselves, and with their wealthy ports controlled by Italians who would as lief deal with Muslims as Christians for profit, was the least of their worries. While Syrian power continued in full and confident spate, the Christians seemed almost a side-show contingent, to be contained on the defensive and dealt with at leisure.
The French scholar Emanuel Sivan develops the convincing thesis that Nur-ad-Din encouraged the preaching of the jihad as a tool of propaganda. The aim was to force unity on Syria, Iraq and then Egypt, so that their massive resources could be combined against the Unbelievers. But there were to be emirs and others who learnt that this military evangelism could be used equally well to subvert their authority over their own subjects who might be urged to transfer allegiance to Nur-ad-Din in the common effort against the Christians.
The revival of jihad teachings began in the work of isolated pietists and enthusiastic scholars and the leaders of the orthodox religious establishment had little interest in it at first. They were more concerned with the struggle against heresy and the triumph of Sunni Islam. But the twelfth century also saw a notable revival in popular religious feeling and it was this which, harnessed to the idea of the jihad by Nur-ad-Din and his propagandists, changed an esoteric enthusiasm into a popular mass movement.
An important factor in Nur-ad-Din’s success was his personal religiosity. His enemy, Kilij Arslan of Konya, accused him of hypocrisy, though he could not fault his meticulous observance of the faith. Even at this distance in time one is willing to refute the charge of hypocrisy and to accept as something more than flattery the words of a courtier that ‘he led a double jihad, against the infidel and against his own soul, to deliver himself from the snares of evil.’ His austerity impressed contemporaries. Unlike most Muslim rulers of his day he strictly observed the injunction against drink and imposed almost puritanical regulations both against it and against all frivolous entertainments. He founded innumerable colleges for orthodox scholarship, he abolished the non-canonical taxes that others, less scrupulous than he, had levied, while his ardent campaign against heresy, which for an orthodox Sunni at that time meant principally Shi‘ism, won him the title of Subduer of Heretics.
Yet, in thirty years, his actual achievements against the Franks were neither so numerous nor so overwhelming as might have been expected. His court eulogists, who dubbed him ‘Guardian and Clarion of the Muslims’, also urged him, ‘in the name of God do not expose yourself to danger. Were you overcome in battle not a man in all Islam but will go in peril of the sword.’ But such protestations were a necessary part of the image presented by the court of Aleppo to the world at large. We know the names of eleven poets who wrote elaborate eulogies of the ruler and also tracts and treatises on the Holy War, one of which was commissioned by Nur-ad-Din himself. While the chancellery dispatched its news of triumphs and its exhortations to others to shoulder their responsibilities, the encomiums of the poets were given publicity throughout Syria. And when, at last, his lieutenant Saladin overthrew the Fatimid caliphate, Nur-ad-Din sent a proud embassy to Baghdad with instructions to read the proclamation of the great event in the towns and villages on the road.
At the beginning of the reign this kind of propaganda had been used to good effect against Damascus. There the ruler’s policy of shifty friendship with the Christians was already being viewed by a growing section of the populace as a shameful expedient when, in 1148, by a decision of incredible folly, the Christians threw the atabeg’s overtures back in his teeth.
The European armies that had descended on Palestine in response to the preaching of the Second Crusade understood nothing of the subtleties of local politics. Their uncomplicated creed was to fight the Infidel wherever he might be found, and amongst the lords of the crusader states there were those who looked enviously towards the rich lands of Damascus. Nur-ad-Din had not yet fully established himself, but it could already have been clear to thoughtful men that he was the greatest threat to the Christian cause. By politic alliance with Damascus they stood the chance of strangling the growing power of Aleppo at birth. Instead, the Christians marched against Damascus and forced it to appeal to the man it most feared.
The siege was a fiasco which spelt the end of the Crusade, but in the city it fired a fresh surge of enthusiasm for the jihad that was to be a vital help to Nur-ad-Din in the years ahead. The Damascenes fought off attack after attack, rejoicing to play their part in the sacred war. Heroic episodes in the defence were circulating generations after. ‘Among the soldiers was the aged lawyer, al-Findalawi. When the general saw him marching on foot he went to meet him and said: “Sir, your age is a sufficient dispensation from this battle. I will concern myself with the defence of Islam,” and he begged the virtuous old man to retire. But he refused, saying: “I have offered myself for sale and God has bought me; I have not asked that the contract be annulled.” By this he was alluding to the words [in the Koran] “God has bought the faithful, both them and their possessions and has given them paradise in exchange.” He went on to fight the Franks and was killed not far from the walls of the city.’
This kind of thing became part of the popular folklore of Damascus, and the sacrifices of the people in the day of their trial by the Infidel were recounted with increasing bitterness as their ruler relapsed into his old policy of alliance with them. Moreover the Christians had withdrawn from the siege when news of Nur-ad-Din’s approach reached them and the average Damascene was convinced that the lord of Aleppo had been their true saviour even though he had not joined battle. For the next six years Nur-ad-Din was constantly on the lookout for his chance. His agents trumpeted his victories through the streets of Damascus and his ministers reproved its ruler, protesting that their master had no thought of conquest but wished only for an alliance to drive out the Franks once and for all. Usamah, the secretary of Nur-ad-Din, reproached Unur of Damascus with the charge that he wished ‘only to please the Franks, those who anger God with their acts’. While Ibn-Munir, the poet, lamented: ‘Ah, Damascus, Damascus, is it not high time that Jerusalem was freed?’
Duly publicised, such exhortations had their intended effect and the rift between ruler and people widened. Discontent in the city reached a climax when, in 1154, Mujir-ad-Din Abak, the new atabeg, agreed to a yearly tribute to Jerusalem. The ground had been laboriously prepared for the idea of a change in régime and now opened a calculated manoeuvre which combined high moral talk with political chicanery.
The misery of the citizens had been increased for some weeks past by food shortages and Nur-ad-Din seized the opportunity. He halted the relief convoys coming down from the north while his agents in the town spread the rumour that the approaching famine was the direct outcome of the ruler’s irreligious policies. Other fifth columnists persuaded Mujir-ad-Din that a group of his own nobles were plotting to overthrow him (at least one, Aiyub, former governor of Baalbek, and now in high command in the Damascene army, probably was). The panic measures the distracted atabeg took against them isolated him from his few remaining supporters. The army of Nur-ad-Din approached slowly to allow disaffection to do its work and on 25 April, thanks to treachery, his troops entered the city to jubilant demonstrations. The take-over was bloodless. Looting was forbidden and when the delayed food convoys arrived admiration for Nur-ad-Din the Deliverer was, at least among the more naive sections of the population, boundless.
Aleppan propaganda had described the Damascus-Jerusalem entente as the one remaining bar to a conquest of the Franks. And yet Nur-ad-Din’s first act was to reaffirm the truce and then to pay a further instalment of the tribute money. When he died, twenty years later, the balance in Syria between Franks and Muslims was hardly altered. Though during that time Zengid power had won a further massive extension with the conquest of Egypt.
In these circumstances, it comes as no surprise to find a vizir of Egypt questioning Nur-ad-Din’s motives. ‘Say to your lord,’ he wrote to Usamah the secretary, ‘how many more times will you delay the fulfilment of your promises to religion! Attack Jerusalem.’ The vizir, Tala’i-ibn-Ruzzayak, was well aware of Nur-ad-Din’s designs on Egypt and hoped to defuse them by using the kind of propaganda that so far had been the monopoly of Aleppo. In 1160 he even went so far as to appeal to Aleppo and distant Konya to sink their differences and join him in a communal enterprise against the Franks. ‘Does neither of you fear the one God? Is there none among your subjects who is a true Muslim? Perhaps God will lend a hand in this matter if we three take up arms together.’ It was a daring manoeuvre to upstage Nur-ad-Din, the vaunted champion of Islam, but it drew only vague generalities in reply and the following year the vizir died.
Ibn-Ruzzayak’s allusion to Jerusalem was neatly ironical since it seems to have been largely Aleppan propaganda that had brought the city to the focus of jihad thought. Before the conquest of Edessa in 1144, when Muslims tended to think of the war against the Franks in defensive terms, al-Sulami’s had been the only influential voice to call for the liberation of Jerusalem. Afterwards, it began to be realised that much of the impetus of the Crusading movement had derived from the Franks’ devotion to the Holy City. Under Nur-ad-Din’s patronage more and more writers began to stress the important place the city held in Islamic belief as a counterbalance to its Christian reputation.
The orthodox men of religion proved powerful agents of Aleppo jihad doctrines, especially in al-Jazirah. In 1164, the year of Artah and of the capture of the city of Banyas, Nur-ad-Din imperiously commanded the cities of al-Jazirah to send him troops. Appeals to religious zeal alone were reinforced by more persuasive pressure which decided at least one emir, the lord of Hisn Kaifa, to answer the summons. At first he had refused, but second thoughts led to a change of policy which he explained to his council with a certain wry bitterness:
It is likely that if I do not support the jihad proclaimed by the lord of Aleppo he will relieve me of my realm. For he has written to the holy men of our country asking their help in prayer and urging them to fire the Muslims with enthusiasm for the Holy War. Each one of these divines is, at this moment, surrounded by his disciples and a host of followers reading the letters of Nur-ad-Din, weeping tears of devotion and ranting against me. I greatly fear that if I did not accede to the request for troops these men of religion would unite to excommunicate me from the community of Islam.
During the 1160s, all but Nur-ad-Din’s most fervid admirers began to observe that his actions did not completely square with his protestations. In 1159 he found it expedient to sign another truce with a Christian, this time Manuel of Byzantium. In 1162, when Baldwin III of Jerusalem died, he held back, despite advice that the opportunity was ideal for an attack on the mourning kingdom. He was unwilling, he said, to go to war on a people lamenting so great a king. Unquestionably it was chivalrous, but not in the spirit of the jihad, and we have already seen the equally puzzling decision not to attack Antioch after the victory of Artah.
Yet if his policy against the Christians lacked incisiveness the sixties did witness a series of determined campaigns which culminated in the mastery of Egypt. When the long-promised assault on Jerusalem still held fire, even loyal admirers became restive. Just after the Egyptian triumph, ‘Imad-ad-Din urged his master to ‘purify Jerusalem of the ordure of the cross … now that you have won Syria and Egypt for the glory of Islam.’ From one who as a client of the court depended on its patronage, this mild remonstrance was a sign of real dissatisfaction. Ibn-Asakir of Damascus, a man of independent means and exalted rank, was forthright to the verge of bluntness. ‘There can be no excuse,’ he wrote, ‘for you to neglect the jihad, now that you rule from Egypt to Aleppo and now that even the sovereigns of Mosul obey your orders.’
But Nur-ad-Din was once again consolidating his position. This time against the threat he suspected of an independent Egypt under the young Saladin. Once more the well-tried plea went out for reinforcements for the Holy War and Ibn-al-Athir, a chronicler generally sympathetic, tartly observed that though ‘he wrote to Mosul, Diyar-Bakr and to al-Jazirah, demanding troops for the Holy War, his true design was quite different.’ The task was left to Saladin. Criticised by the caliph for being dilatory when he finally did take Jerusalem, Saladin would protest: ‘For nearly a hundred years … the desire for its reconquest did not come to any sovereign, until … God called me.’ Imad-ad-Din, Saladin’s secretary who penned this letter, had served Nur-ad-Din; no doubt, he too had become dubious as to his sincerity of purpose.