Chapter 7
The period from May 1174 to September 1176 was a decisive one. It opened with the deaths of Nur-ad-Din, his suspicious and menacing overlord, and King Amalric, Islam’s last dangerous competitor on the throne of Jerusalem. It closed on the distant battlefield of Myriocephalum where the sultan of Konya destroyed the military capability of the Byzantine empire. During the two and a half years that lay between, Saladin, against difficult and shifting odds, made himself master of southern Syria; after that he could turn against his remaining rivals in the Muslim world knowing that the coastline kingdom of the Christians could expect no more help from the north.
At the beginning of 1174 the future had looked gloomy. The threatened domestic rebellion had been crushed but during the spring Egypt and her ruler were facing up to almost certain invasion from Syria. Nur-ad-Din’s suspicions of Saladin, fed by his leading advisers who had come to hate and fear the Kurdish upstart, had come to a head. The king’s nephew, the ruler of Mosul, had been ordered to bring an army to the war and in April was already on the move. On 6 May, Nur-ad-Din moved south to Damascus from his chief capital at Aleppo to plan the final details of the expedition against Egypt. Although in his sixtieth year he was still vigorous, the undisputed lord of Syria, and determined to bring Egypt under his direct rule. He had threatened intervention before, but this time the threat was to be implemented.
A man of deep though conventional piety, Nur-ad-Din was given to philosophising, and one May morning, riding through the orchards about Damascus with his entourage, he might have been heard debating the uncertainty of life and human ambitions. Soon it was to seem a prophetic episode, for within days the king was brought to his sick bed with an acute infection of the throat. A suppurating ulcer made his breathing painful and brought on a fever, of which, on 15 May, he died. He had been a good Muslim and a great and just ruler. His reputation, won in earlier days, as the terror of the infidels, and his austere piety had won the respect of his subjects and his love of justice their gratitude. More important still, the king’s firm and shrewd management of men and events had brought a generation of orderly stable and centralised government to an area that had been divided for centuries. The quadrilateral of power was at last firmly based. Nur-ad-Din had enjoyed the recognition and blessing of Baghdad; he was the ruler of Aleppo and Damascus and had installed his nephew at Mosul. Thanks almost entirely to him, the great prize of Muslim unity seemed to have been won and the days of the Infidel to be numbered. To his admirers his death was a body blow to Islam. But, as will be argued, it came just in time to save the community of the faithful from a new period of destructive civil war.
For all his wisdom and experience Nur-ad-Din was never able to establish a trusting modus vivendi with Saladin, his most brilliant and powerful subordinate. The ambitions of the younger man were obvious enough, and there was, perhaps, some justice in the charge that he had not remitted as large a tribute as Aleppo had a right to expect from the rich province he governed. And yet he had brought Egypt back to Sunnite obedience, the age-old objective of the strategists of Baghdad, and this had decisively tilted the power balance in the Holy War. The ambitions that Nur-ad-Din so much feared had been turned to the reconquest of territories in Africa and Arabia that Egypt could legitimately claim, and so had further strengthened the southern state without encroaching on Syria’s sphere of interest. Saladin was too clearheaded to risk a trial of strength with Nur-ad-Din, even had he wished to, and there is nothing to suggest that he did.
In 1171 Saladin’s father had advised him against open defiance. At that time, outside the Aiyubid family even the most loyal of Saladin’s commanders would probably have deserted him if the king of Syria had come in person to Cairo, while the numerous displaced members of the Fatimid régime would willingly have abetted his overthrow. Had Nur-ad-Din acted then on his first impulse he could no doubt have put an end to Saladin’s career and with it what he and his advisers increasingly regarded as a threat to the dynasty. Three years on, however, Saladin had won success and acclaim in Egypt, he had strengthened his resources and secured his authority. The time had passed for a Syrian walk-over; invasion now would almost certainly have sparked off a war to shatter the unity of Islam in the Middle East for generations.
Throughout this book we find the geography and politics of power clouded by a rhetoric of the Holy War, so eagerly employed by the chief contestants that it has coloured the view of historians as it did that of contemporaries. When Nur-ad-Din or Saladin pursued policies to extend and consolidate their own power – the traditional concern of rulers – they were accused by opponents of betraying the cause of Islam. Nur-ad-Din’s projected campaign against Egypt was just such a project, but, given his suspicions of Saladin and his obligation to his dynasty, it is hard to see what alternative was open to him. So long as he lived, Egypt and Syria were certain to be at odds, and as his son, eleven in 1174, grew into manhood and inherited the quarrel, the rift in Islam would widen. Paradoxically, for Nur-ad-Din to die when he did was to the long-term disadvantage of the Christians. It offered Saladin a chance to combine Syria with Egypt under his rule while Aleppo and Damascus were distracted by the power struggle around the boy heir.
The young king of Syria was the focus of that struggle, but the real issue was the traditional contest for Syrian supremacy between the two great cities. Six days before his unexpected death, Nur-ad-Din had given a boost to the prestige of Damascus when he held the ceremony of his son’s circumcision there and had him proclaimed heir in the traditional way, walking before the boy as he rode through the streets and bearing before him the ghasiyah, the banner of office. A week later the young heir was proclaimed king and the star of Damascus was clearly in the ascendant. The régime there appointed the regent, Ibn-al-Muqaddam, who also became commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The news of the old king’s death was sent to Aleppo by pigeon post where the governor of the citadel swore the emirs to the new allegiance, and it seemed that Aleppo was going to accept the lead which Damascus had assumed.
As described by the Aleppan historian, Kamal-ad-Din, the swearing of the new allegiance was deftly handled by the citadel governor, Jamal-ad-Din. The news of Nur-ad-Din’s proclamation of his heir in Damascus had only just arrived and had not yet been officially announced in Aleppo. Realising the turmoil that might follow the announcement of the king’s death, Jamal-ad-Din accordingly preceded it with a proclamation of the succession ceremony. ‘He immediately ordered that the drums be beaten and the cymbals and trumpets sounded; he convened the superior officers and the notables at Aleppo, the men of law and the emirs, and said to them: “Our master has just circumcised his son and installed him as his heir….” All expressed their joy at the news and addressed their praise to god most high. Then the commander said: “Take the oath to the son of our master … as … he ordained….” Then the different classes of people took the oath.’ The way was prepared for a smooth transfer of power in the city to the powerful family of Ibn-ad-Dayah, formerly one of Nur-ad-Din’s chief advisers. The eldest son, Shams-ad-Din, assumed the position of governor of the city and took up his residence with Jamal-ad-Din in the citadel; his brother, Badr-ad-Din Hassan Ibn-ad-Dayah, was named chief of police. Meanwhile Shihab-ad-Din Ibn-al-Ajami, formerly an official of the treasury, was named the new vizir to the young king. Damascus’s claims on the regency were not to go unchallenged. But nor were the ambitions of the Dayah family.
It is reported that as he lay dying Nur-ad-Din said: ‘Only one thing causes me unhappiness, the thought of what will befall my family at the hands of Yusuf, son of Aiyub.’ Shortly after his kingdom was indeed being plundered, but the aggressor was his own nephew. Saif-ad-Din of Mosul was marching with his army commander, Gümüshtigin, to join his uncle’s Egyptian expedition when the news of his death reached him. The army at once divided, a detachment under Gümüshtigin, pushing on to Aleppo to win control of affairs there for Mosul while Saif-ad-Din turned away from the remote prospect of Egypt to the congenial business of conquest in the now leaderless lands of northern Syria. Sweeping westward, he took Nisibin, Edessa and ar-Raqqa. At Aleppo Gümüshtigin soon established himself among the ruling clique and in June he was made the leader of the delegation to Damascus to bring as-Salih back to Aleppo.
From the moment they had secured themselves the Dayah family had been determined to recover the young king. Shams-ad-Din had written to him, urging him to return to the capital, to supervise the operations against his cousin in al-Jazirah. It seems that the boy, prompted by his mother, favoured the move. Damascus was obliged to recognise Shams-ad-Din as regent and to surrender the heir. In the escort, headed by Gümüshtigin, which took him to Aleppo, were numerous Aleppan nobles who had feared to return before, expecting reprisals from the régime of the Dayah clan. They had no need to worry. Once back with the king firmly in his keeping, Gümüshtigin promptly had the brothers thrown into the city’s dungeons. The new régime at Aleppo began to look menacing to Damascus, and the city’s rulers looked about for new allies.
At first they, like Nur-ad-Din, had considered Saladin the chief threat to the Zengid establishment. Before evening fell on 15 May a messenger was riding post to Cairo to demand that Saladin recognise as-Salih as suzerain in Egypt as well as in Syria. Whereas the Zengid, Saif-ad-Din, had renounced his allegiance, Saladin ordered that the name of as-Salih be invoked in all the mosques of Egypt and the North African provinces. These loyal formalities were followed by an embassy to Damascus to do homage to the new king. As a telling earnest of the Egyptian ruler’s sincerity, it took with it coinage newly minted in Cairo, bearing the inscription of as-Salih.
As Saladin’s embassy was being prepared, the rulers of Damascus were reverting to traditional policy and negotiating with the Franks. Immediately the news of Nur-ad-Din’s death had reached Jerusalem, King Amalric had seized his chance to march on Banyas, the frontier fortress between the kingdom and Damascus. Ibn-al-Muqaddam hastened to meet the invaders and offered to buy them off handsomely and to release all Frankish prisoners in Damascus. He also pointed out the danger which Egypt could pose to both Syria and Jerusalem and proposed an alliance. The terms suited Amalric’s strategy – it seems likely that the campaign had been primarily intended to extract danegeld rather than conquer Damascus – they also suited his inclinations. He was a desperately sick man, dying on 11 July of dysentery, at the age of thirty-eight. Thus by mid-summer, barely two months after the death of the great king of Syria, his dominions were reverting to their constituent parts. Mosul was plundering the territories of Aleppo; Aleppo was preparing to force subjection on Damascus; Damascus was in alliance with the infidels. The death of Amalric, almost miraculously opportune, freed Saladin of the fear of Christian intervention as he prepared to intervene in the crumbling situation in Syria. The interest of Islam required that he put a stop to the opening rivalries; his own interests required that he establish himself before those rivalries should be settled. The rulers of Mosul, Aleppo and Damascus, members of the traditional Turkish ruling class, were agreed on one thing, if on nothing else: that the inheritance of Zengi and Nur-ad-Din should never fall to a mere Kurd, if they could prevent it. As things turned out, their divisions and suspicions were too deep, but to take advantage of their disunity Saladin had to take the initiative on every possible occasion.
When news reached him of Saif-ad-Din’s northern conquests he wrote immediately to Damascus demanding to know why he had not been officially informed and his help asked for. He also wrote to ‘Imad-ad-Din Zengi, who was the brother of the ruler of Mosul and whom Nur-ad-Din had placed in charge of the neighbouring city of Sinjar. Playing on the young man’s jealousy of his brother’s conquests, Saladin was able to open a split in the ranks of the Zengid family, which was to prove highly advantageous. In letters to other Syrian towns Saladin deplored the alliance struck between Damascus and Amalric, protesting his own total commitment to the Holy War. It was a propaganda line which had been well used by Nur-ad-Din; few people in Syria would have been unfamiliar with it, and the more cynical must have wondered how long it would last this time. Saladin’s jihad propaganda was a development of themes first sketched out by Nur-ad-Din’s apologists, but they were to be used to greater effect.
In a letter to Damascus he legitimately claimed the right to act as regent. There was no arguing with this – in five years he had proved himself a master in war and politics and was now the greatest figure in the Muslim world. But when he went on to speak of the relations between himself and his overlord, he strained credulity: ‘… if Nur-ad-Din had thought any of you capable of taking my place, or being trusted as he trusted me, he would have appointed that man governor of Egypt, the most important of all his possessions.’ But it was precisely Nur-ad-Din’s dilemma that although his trust in Saladin had sunk steadily since he became vizir, the king could think of no way of displacing him short of an armed expedition. Still more impudently, the letter continues, ‘if death had not prevented him he would have bequeathed to me alone the guardianship and bringing up of his son’. The one thing that death had indisputably prevented Nur-ad-Din doing was to lead an army into Egypt to try conclusions with the man now claiming calmly to have been his most trusted lieutenant and the natural choice for the guardianship. But at this stage in the devolution of Nur-ad-Din’s power the focus was the young successor. Isolated still in Egypt by domestic uncertainties, and generally distrusted by the powerful men in Syria, Saladin could do little more for the moment than write letters and protest his loyalty to the Zengid dynasty. Though even now he felt he could risk a few dark hints. ‘I perceive that to my hurt you have arrogated to yourselves the care of my master and the son of my master. Assuredly I will come to do him homage and repay the benefits I have received from his father by service which shall be remembered for ever; and I shall deal with each of you according to his work.’
By the end of the summer the rulers of Damascus recognised that the fiery vizir would soon be coming to Syria not just to demonstrate his loyalty to his new king but with the full authority of Nur-ad-Din. Ibnal-Muqaddam appealed rather desperately to Mosul, but Saif-ad-Din was still pleasantly occupied in securing the provinces he had recently detached from the Syrian kingdom. So, making virtue of necessity, Ibnal-Muqaddam wrote a formal invitation to Saladin to come to Damascus, and even sent his agents through the city during the preceding weeks to stir up enthusiasm among the populace. This indicates how far out of touch with popular feeling the ruling clique had become, for Saladin’s stock stood high with the citizenry at large.
Towards the end of October Saladin set out from Cairo with just 700 picked cavalry, his brother Tughtigin and chancellor al-Fadil. The Franks made no attempt to harass his rapid march through their lands of Transjordan and he was joined on his way by various desert shaikhs and local garrison commanders. Among these were his cousin Nasir-ad-Din, son of Shirkuh, and Sadiq-ibn-Jaulah, master of Busra, who was astonished at the small force the vizir had with him and how little treasure he had brought to bribe the city’s officials. But Saladin was travelling light, determined to get to the theatre of action as fast as possible after months of enforced delay. The fact that he was also riding at the direct invitation of the governor of the city was an advantage that he could hardly have hoped for. In these circumstances speed was more important than security, and in any case Saladin was confident of a popular reception. His arrival on 28 October was something of a love feast, with popular demonstrations of welcome beginning while he was still miles from the city walls.
Perhaps the citizens had not forgotten that the vizir’s father, Aiyub, had been their governor. Saladin had no intention that they should: the first night he spent in his father’s old house. The next day Ibn-al-Muqaddam ordered the gates of the citadel opened. He was removed from his post in favour of Saladin’s brother Tughtigin but assured of a profitable appointment in the future. Tughtigin was installed as governor of the city in the name of the young king as-Salih, and during a whirlwind ten-day visit Saladin found time to win the good graces of the city fathers with a more practical and pointed gesture when he abolished the non-canonical taxes, forbidden during the reign of Nur-ad-Din but reimposed by the régime which had claimed so insistently the right to the guardianship of his son. He also received an embassy from Aleppo.
Saladin had sent envoys ahead to Aleppo with a letter protesting his loyalty to as-Salih. ‘I come from Egypt in service to you and to fulfil an obligation to my dead master. I beg you to take no notice of the advisers who surround you at the moment; they do not show you the respect due your status and wield your authority for their own ends.’ It is difficult to see what, if anything, Saladin hoped to gain by this. The court at Aleppo included numerous powerful and long-standing enemies of his, and the young king seems to have chosen their protection willingly. He certainly had little to gain by putting himself under Saladin’s tutelage. The most powerful man in Syria was unlikely to surrender the absolute authority when the time came to end the minority. Aleppo rejected his protestations of loyalty with calculated contempt. The embassy was led by one of the generals who had left Egypt years before in protest at Saladin’s appointment as vizir. After he had delivered the king’s formal rejection of Saladin’s claim to the regency the ambassador launched into a tirade of insults and invective. Accusing Saladin of having come into Syria to usurp the kingdom outright, he went on: ‘The swords that once captured Egypt for you are still in our hands and the spears with which you seized the castles of the Fatimids are ready on our shoulders and the men who once resigned your service will now force you to quit Syria. For your arrogance has overreached itself. You! – You are but one of Nur-ad-Din’s boys; who needs people like you to protect his son?’ They were words to strain the conventions of diplomatic immunity to breaking point, and the ambassador had perhaps Saladin’s renowned chivalry to thank that he escaped with his life.
Within days of this explosive interview the Egyptian and Damascene forces were on the road to Aleppo. On 9 December Saladin took the town of Homs, leaving a detachment of troops to contain the garrison of the citadel. From there he marched on to Hamah. The town’s governor had played an important role in setting up the new Aleppan régime during the summer, but now he decided to accept Saladin’s claims of loyalty to the young king and agreed to go and put his case at Aleppo. If the régime there refused an accommodation he would surrender Hamah. He was arrested on arrival at Aleppo and his brother, left in charge at Hamah, handed the place over to Saladin. By 30 December Saladin was before the walls of Aleppo, prepared for an extended siege. In desperation Gümüshtigin called for help not only from the Franks but also from Sinan, the leader of the heretical Assassin sect based at castle Masyaf in the mountains to the south and west of his beleaguered city.
Gümüshtigin’s appeal to Sinan and the latter’s agreement are just one more instance of how politics overrode principles and expediency cancelled tradition in twelfth-century Syria. Saladin was soon to make propaganda out of the fact that the rulers of Aleppo who claimed the right to advise the son of Nur-ad-Din did not scruple to ally with his great enemy. But for the time being Saladin’s life was endangered by the alliance. One day during the first week of January 1175 a murder gang made its way to the heart of his camp outside Aleppo. Their disguise was not pierced until the last moment and one of them was cut down at the very entrance to the vizir’s tent.
Aleppo made a surprisingly determined resistance to Saladin. The ruling clique paraded the young king through the streets to beg the support of the people; with tears in his eyes he implored them to protect him from his father’s rebellious servant who had come to rob him of his inheritance. Aleppans were proud to be loyal to the memory and the heir of Nur-ad-Din, whatever they might think of the men who had succeeded to government, and they fought stubbornly. However, when Gümüshtigin relaxed the restrictions on the Shi‘ite sect in the city their loyalty was strained. The revised regulations were no doubt part of the price that had to be paid for the alliance with Sinan, and they did guarantee the support of the communal effort by a religious minority, but they did nothing to improve the popularity of the heretical sect. Having appealed to heretics outside the city and placated heretics inside the walls Gümüshtigin prepared to force Saladin to raise his siege by allying with the infidels.
Like the Syrians, the Christians were in the throes of a royal minority, however the regent, Raymond of Tripoli, enjoyed general support in the kingdom and was a competent ruler and administrator. Following the spirit of the alliance that Amalric had agreed with Ibn-al-Muqaddam of Damascus, he now marched against the city of Homs and, in alliance with the garrison of the citadel which still held for Aleppo, opened a diversionary front to relieve the pressure on Aleppo. The force that Saladin had left at Homs could not hope to hold out against the Christian army and the garrison, and rather than lose the city for the sake of an uncertain siege Saladin hurried south. Raymond immediately withdrew from Homs and in mid-March Saladin forced the citadel as well as the city into submission. He then marched on Baalbek, which also capitulated. By April 1175 Saladin was master of Syria from Hamah southwards, and the worst fears of the Zengid ministers in Aleppo were confirmed.
By this time the Egyptian successes were being taken seriously even at Mosul. In the previous year, Saif-ad-Din had refused appeals from Aleppo and Damascus. He did not trust the régimes and was determined to consolidate his hold on the territories he had taken from Aleppo. But now he realised that the future of the whole dynasty was in jeopardy and sent his brother, ‘Izz-ad-Din, with a large force to join the western armies. At the same time he marched with the remainder of his army against Sinjar, where his other brother, ‘Imad-ad-Din, had gone over to Saladin. The carefully laid alliance with Sinjar was now paying its dividends by diverting part of the Mosul war effort away from the attack on Saladin. But when the allied forces of Aleppo and Mosul made contact with him at Hamah, where he was waiting anxiously for reinforcements from Egypt, it was obvious that he was far outnumbered.
Despite their advantage, however, the allied commanders decided on negotiations. The concessions he at first offered showed just how conscious Saladin was of his weakness, but his enemies also had some difficult calculations to make. Over the thirty years of Nur-ad-Din’s reign Aleppo had reversed the traditional supremacy of Mosul and Gümüshtigin had no intention of crushing Saladin only to find himself once again the subordinate of Saif-ad-Din. If he could persuade the Egyptian ruler to renounce his recent conquests without a fight then the army of Mosul would have served its purpose, without winning the initiative in Syria. At first negotiation seemed to promise a quite dazzling success for Aleppo. Saladin agreed to recognise her supremacy, to restore Homs, Hamah and Baalbek, to retain Damascus only as governor for as-Salih, and even to make restitution for the money he had distributed from the royal treasury there to the populace of the city. It looked like a walk-over, always assuming that the Egyptian vizir would have held to the terms once he felt strong enough to challenge them. But the allies pushed their advantage too far when they insisted on one further condition and demanded the cession of Rahba. This town had been among the holdings of Shirkuh that Nurad-Din had confiscated. Saladin had restored it to Shirkuh’s son, Nasir-ad-Din, and to surrender it now would not only be a complete acceptance of as-Salih’s royal prerogatives but, more importantly, would undermine Saladin’s position as the head of the Aiyubid dynasty. He had been spinning out the negotiations and using bribery among the enemy commanders to win time for his own reinforcements, led by his nephews Farrukh-Shah and Taqi-ad-Din, to arrive. But with this last demand the negotiations had to break down.
The battle was fought on 13 April. Occupying a twin-peaked hill known locally as the Horns of Hamah, Saladin had the advantage of terrain, but even so he was hard pressed until the reinforcements came up in the nick of time. The enemy were utterly routed and a massacre was only averted by the orders of Saladin, who rode into the thick of the battle to stop the killing. Now it was his turn to dictate terms, and they were surprisingly moderate. All political prisoners in Aleppo were to be released and the Aleppan army was to march under Saladin against the Franks on request, but the young king was to stay at Aleppo under the guardianship of its rulers. Despite his decisive victory in the field Saladin had neither the time nor the resources for the protracted siege that would have been needed to conquer Aleppo. In any case events were flowing in his favour. As-Salih might still be king in Aleppo but his advisers had been forced to recognise Saladin’s independent authority in his own territories. He formally renounced his allegiance to the Zengid house and assumed the title of sovereign in his new Syrian lands – the title was soon to be confirmed by the caliph.
The first round in Syria had been won. It was a victory for the interests of Islam as well as for Saladin himself. Of course the Zengid establishment accused him of self-interested arrivisme. Appealing to the people of Aleppo, as-Salih had pilloried him as ‘this unjust man who aims to relieve me of my town; who repudiates the benefits which my father showered upon him; who has respect for the rights neither of God nor of Man’. Dispatches from the army of Mosul before its defeat at Hamah referred contemptuously to ‘this mad dog barking at his master’. In Aleppo the rulers claimed: ‘We have lost only the bodily manifestation of Nur-ad-Din, but his spirit is still with us and the All High God will guard his dynasty.’ In reply Saladin poured scorn on Damascus and Aleppo, who had bought the friendship of the Franks: ‘the treasure of Allah, meant for his cause and the interests of Islam, has been wickedly dissipated, to the anger of God and of all pious Muslims’. The wealth of Aleppo had been given to the infidels and bought lances to pierce Muslim breasts, men who acted like this had ostracised themselves from the community of the faithful. Still worse was their betrayal of the principles of the Faith itself. In Mosul Saif-ad-Din had repealed Nur-ad-Din’s prohibition on wine, while in Aleppo even heretics found favour with the authorities. ‘What an astonishing difference there is between those who carry on the struggle against the infidels and those who prefer the friendship of the impious to true believers and who hand over to them their most precious treasures.’
Saladin was able to turn the most unlikely material to propaganda advantage; but what he had to say rang true to many in Aleppo and Damascus who had been disillusioned by the compromising policies of their rulers. So long as the Zengids ruled in Syria and Saladin in Egypt the chances of a common front against the Christians were remote. Saladin claimed that the only reason for his expedition to Syria was to unite Islam and ‘put an end to the calamities inflicted by her enemies.’ ‘… if this war against the Franks did not necessitate unity it would not matter to me how many princes ruled in Islam’. There were plenty to contest this claim at the time and many who have done so since, but there can be no question that had Saladin not won control of the whole of Nur-ad-Din’s inheritance the war against the Franks would have been crippled.
Having now won a de facto authority in Syria Saladin needed it confirmed. He had written to Baghdad to request a diploma recognising his conquests and conferring the title of king, and in the letter set out his credentials as a champion of Islam. He listed his mastery of Egypt and its return to Sunnite allegiance, his victories over the Franks and the recovery of the Yemen and North African territories to the Abbasid allegiance. He claimed that he had entered Syria in the name of the young king as-Salih for ‘under her present government Syria would never find order. She needs a man able to lead her to the conquest of Jerusalem.’ He concluded with a request for a diploma of investiture with the lands he had conquered and promised that all his future conquests should be in the name of the caliph of Baghdad. This was something that Nur-ad-Din had never guaranteed, and it is interesting to see how important Saladin, regarded by the Turkish establishment as a usurper, rated the approval of the nominal head of the Muslim world. The respect was, with reason, reciprocated. With such a servant as Saladin, acknowledging only the caliphal authority and making no appeal to the Turkish sultanate, the caliph’s prestige was immensely strengthened. Saladin phrased his application diplomatically and chose as ambassador Muhammad-al-Baalbekki, reputedly the first man to make the Sunnite invocation in Cairo. In May an official delegation came to him in Hamah bearing the confirmation of his authority in Egypt and his conquests in Syria, and the diplomas, the honorific robes and the black banners of the Abbasid court which confirmed also his royal title. The same year his name was invoked in the mosques of Egypt and Syria and he had the Cairo mint issue coins with the proud inscription, ‘al-Malik al-Nasir Yusuf ibn-Aiyub, ala ghaya,’ – ‘The king, the bringer of victory, Yusuf son of Aiyub, lift high the banner!’
By the end of May Saladin was back in Damascus. His victories had secured him a breathing space to organise his new territories and ensure control of events in Egypt. The Muslims of the north were licking their wounds, and to give himself time to manoeuvre Saladin agreed a truce with the kingdom of Jerusalem. The mediator was Humphrey II of Toron, the revered elder statesman of the kingdom, respected by Saladin since their friendship of eight years before. Sporadic Christian raiding continued, but nothing serious enough to distract Saladin’s reorganisation at home.
New governors had to be appointed and the most important posts went to members of the family. Damascus to Taqi-ad-Din, Homs to Nasir-ad-Din, and Hamah to one of Saladin’s uncles; the important command at Baalbek, where Aiyub had once laid the fortunes of the family, was given to Ibn-al-Muqaddam, who had been promised a senior post when he surrendered the citadel of Damascus to Saladin the previous year. Affairs in Egypt needed a strong and loyal hand. Saladin dispatched his secretary al-Fadil with the Egyptian expeditionary force back to Cairo and ‘Imad-ad-Din took over his duties at Damascus.
Meanwhile, new trouble was brewing to the north. Saif-ad-Din, furious at the disaster of Hamah, was negotiating again with Aleppo to reopen hostilities. The same ambassador was also instructed to go on to Damascus, after fixing an arrangement with Aleppo, to assure Saladin that Mosul would respect the armistice between the two Syrian capitals. According to one source the ambassador, in his official audience with Saladin, handed over not the document intended for the king but Aleppo’s reply to the proposed alliance with Mosul. Saladin certainly heard of the coming attack somehow, in time to call up reserves from Egypt.
To prepare for the coming campaign, Gümüshtigin decided to ensure Christian goodwill by releasing Raynald of Chatillon and Joscelin of Courtenay who had been prisoners in Aleppo for the past fifteen years. He next attended a formal reconciliation with Saif-ad-Din of Mosul. As their armies moved south, Saladin moved up to meet them. The two forces made contact on 21 April, about twenty miles to the north-east of Hamah, while Saladin’s troops were watering their horses. His enemy scattered and taken totally unawares Saif-ad-Din had victory in the palm of his hand, but he threw it away. With absurd over-confidence, he rejected his staff’s advice for an immediate attack. ‘Why should we inconvenience ourselves over the destruction of this upstart? Tomorrow will be soon enough.’ Saladin was left to occupy the rising ground of Tall as-Sultan at his leisure. At first the battle on the following day went against him, despite the advantage of terrain. His left wing was being pushed back by the troops of Irbil until a counter-charge led by Saladin himself put a stop to the retreat. Then, at the head of his bodyguard, he went over to the attack in that segment of the front and routed the enemy, unprepared for this reversal. Saif-ad-Din barely got off the field and most of his officers were captured. The camp, as Saladin drily observed, was more like a common tavern. His officers recruited the singing girls to their harems while his soldiers drank themselves stupid on the vast stores of wine. Saladin took only a collection of cage birds. They were sent on to the retreating Saif-ad-Din with the recommendation that in future he confine himself to such amusements and retire from the business of war.
Saladin pushed his advantage. Four days after the battle he was again outside the walls of Aleppo, but this time he had no intention of besieging the place. Instead he aimed to isolate it, and marched northeast to the city of Manbij. Its commander was an old enemy but surrendered the town without a fight on the sole condition that he be given a safe conduct for himself and his treasure to Mosul. When he had left there was still an estimated two millions in bullion and treasure left in the city. Generally Saladin kept little booty for himself, preferring to supplement his soldiers’ pay with the proceeds, but on this occasion his fancy seems to have been tickled by the fact that some of the plate bore his name, Yusuf, also the name of the governor’s favourite son. It seemed to the conqueror too good a joke to miss. ‘Yusuf?’ he queried. ‘That’s me, I will take as my share of the plunder all the pieces that appear to have been reserved for me.’
From Manbij he moved west to Azaz. By 21 June it too was in his hands. Aleppo was now menaced to north and west; and now Saladin moved against the capital itself. It looks as though Gümüshtigin had expected his enemy to complete the encirclement of Aleppo by attacking Harim, twenty-five miles to the west of it, for he himself had taken over the command of the garrison there. In fact this may well have been Saladin’s original intention, changed only when he learnt that Gümüshtigin was not in his capital. He opened negotiations almost at once, and within four days, on 29 July, a treaty was signed whereby Aleppo finally acknowledged Saladin’s title of king in his conquests. Saladin had won all he could reasonably have looked for. The heir of Nur-ad-Din had been forced to concede regal honours to his father’s lieutenant. This, with the confirmation of those honours which Baghdad had already granted, meant that of the crucial quadrilateral of power only Mosul remained in opposition. It was the next objective, but for the time being it could wait.
Saladin concluded his campaign in Aleppan territory with a characteristically courtly gesture. When the treaty negotiations were finished a young girl came to the court to beg a favour of the new king in Syria. She was the sister of as-Salih and she had come to beg for the castle of Azaz so recently conquered. On the far side of Aleppo from Damascus, it would have been a remote fortress to garrison, and the lands around it had already been retroceded to Aleppo in the treaties. Saladin granted it to his young petitioner, loaded her with presents and escorted her back to the gates of Aleppo with his full staff. He would have been within his rights to have held this citadel, even though the surrounding lands had been returned to the dominion of Aleppo; the fact that he did not do so was not an empty gesture, and the way he honoured the princess swelled his growing reputation for chivalry. By relinquishing his hold on Azaz, and by not pressing a siege of Aleppo where he now had a good chance of final victory, Saladin showed that his objective was not to annihilate his opponents in Islam but to force them to acknowledge his claims.
After his triumph at Aleppo he returned to Damascus in late August. In a twelve-day stay there he appointed his elder brother, Turan-Shah, as the new governor and also celebrated his own marriage to one of the great ladies of the city, Asimat-ad-Din. About the same age as the king himself, she had been one of the wives of Nur-ad-Din. The marriage put the seal on Saladin’s two-year military and political campaign to win the inheritance of Nur-ad-Din. On 22 September 1176, to a tumultuous welcome, he made his triumphal entry to Cairo.
Five days before, Kilij Arslan of Konya had won a crushing victory over the Byzantine emperor, Manuel. The emperor had aimed to make the roads of Anatolia safe for Christian armies and if he had won on the field of Myriocephalum he would have been the greatest power in northern Syria and the kingdom of Jerusalem could have contemplated a major offensive. As things turned out, one of the greatest armies Constantinople had ever mustered was destroyed and the military machine of the empire set back a generation. The emperor himself compared the disaster to that of Manzikert 105 years before.
Before we leave the account of these two and a half years, so critical in Saladin’s career, there is one strange episode still to be dealt with. Chance had removed some of the most serious obstacles to his rise, his own political sense or military prowess had disposed of others, but how the hostility of the sinister Assassins was also neutralised remains something of a mystery. During the siege of Azaz on 22 May Saladin had barely escaped with his life from a second attempt. He had been resting, not in his own tent but that of one of his staff officers, when his first assailant broke in and struck at his head with a knife. The blow glanced off the cap of mail the king wore under his turban; a second blow to the neck cut through the collar of the thick riding tunic he was wearing but was stopped by the mail shirt underneath. Within seconds the king’s personal attendant had courageously grasped the knife by the blade so that it cut his fingers to the bone and then killed the man. But two more attackers followed in a kamikaze-style attempt to complete the mission before the guards could come up. Saladin, shocked to be so vulnerable in the heart of his own camp, and also terrified as he frankly admitted later, rode at top speed for the headquarters compound. The enquiry that followed revealed, unnervingly enough, that the three had been able to enrol in the personal bodyguard of the king without questions asked.
From this time Saladin was to sleep in a specially constructed wooden tower bunk inside his tent. He also determined to rout the Assassins out of their mountain stronghold at Masyaf. He opened the operation with systematic pillaging of the surrounding country and then laid siege to the castle. Sinan himself was away at the time and hurried back when the king’s summons for surrender reached him. He demanded an immediate interview with Saladin and then, with only two companions, retired to the top of a hill overlooking the besieging army and awaited developments. Thinking he at last had the old man in his power, Saladin sent troops and messengers to kill or arrest him, but they returned with frightening tales of powerful magic that made their weapons powerless. The king himself now began to fear whether his enemy was something more than mortal, but took the precaution of surrounding the approaches to his tent with chalk dust and cinders to record the steps of any intruder. A few nights later the king awoke to see a shadowy figure glide out of his tent. Some hot scones baked in a shape characteristic of the sect’s bread were on his pillow and beside them, pinned to it by a poisoned dagger, was a note with a mystical threat to his life. There was no sign of footsteps outside the tent. Saladin was convinced that Sinan had visited him that night and sent to beg him to pardon his former errors and grant him a safe conduct out of his lands. This was granted only when the siege of Masyaf was raised.
Apart from the magical element in this account, which is based on the version of a biographer of Sinan, it is worth noticing that Nur-ad-Din in his attempts to stamp out the Assassins was the prey to a similar nocturnal visit complete with poisoned dagger and warning note. There were orthodox Muslims who believed in the magical powers of Sinan, and the incredible feats of mind over matter still performed by similar sects today easily explain how people came to fear and avoid their medieval predecessors. Saladin did call off the siege of Masyaf, only days after mounting it, for no identifiable military reason, and he never again suffered the attentions of Sinan.
Maybe he knew when to concede a point. Maybe, in the time-honoured cliché of the officer corps, he ‘knew how to handle men’ – opponents as well as friends. The career of Ibn al-Muqaddam is a case in point. As Nur-ad-Din’s governor in Damascus he had at first held the city against Saladin but then yielded the place to him and became his loyal man until death, even though he was removed from his post in favour of Saladin’s nominee. It was to be expected, of course, but clearly the transfer was handled with due concern for the deposed governor’s feelings and he accepted the demotion without resentment. In due course he was given the governorship of Baalbek, Saladin’s childhood home city, and a few years later we find him leading the Damascus Hajj as the proud representative of the liberator of Jerusalem. In fact he died in a skirmish to defend his lord’s prestige against the representative of the caliph. The ability to inspire rather than enforce loyalty is a critical quality of leadership. Few men defected from the service of Saladin once they had made their commitment to him.