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The city of Jeddah. Its merchants’ houses reflected the city’s wealth and the fact that it was, and is, the gateway to Islam’s holiest cities

The hour of one’s death is not brought nearer by exposing oneself to danger nor delayed by being overcautious …

The twelfth-century soldier Usama Ibn Munqidh, on fate and God’s will.

Byzantium had been crippled by the disaster of the Battle of Myriokephalon in September 1176 during the Empire’s final, unsuccessful attempt to recover the interior of Anatolia and 1180 saw the conclusion of a truce between Saladin and the new Byzantine emperor, Alexius II. Alexius was in fact the puppet of Andronicus Comnenus, and he initiated his reign with a massacre of Latins in Constantinople.

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In August 1182 Saladin attempted a combined land and sea siege of Beirut. Possession of a port on the coast was vital to the retaking of Syria and the conquest of Beirut would severely hamper communications between the northern and southern states of Outremer. Thirty galleys were committed to the siege, but Saladin’s land forces retired after the failure of an amphibious landing and the arrival of thirty-three Latin galleys. The sultan had failed but it was obvious to the Crusaders that they were being boxed in. It may have been this that decided Reynald of Châtillon, the lord of Karak, to move from targeting caravans that travelled between Syria and Arabia to launching a flotilla of vessels on the Red Sea. He besieged Ayla, and he sank sixteen Muslim vessels and captured two more. The Muslim chroniclers tell us that he wanted to strike at Mecca via Jeddah. He was defeated in his ambitions by the Egyptian fleet, as ships were taken overland from Cairo and launched in the Red Sea.

Saladin wrote to the caliph complaining that while he had been defending Jeddah, Medina and Mecca, Aleppo remained rebellious against the leader of the jihad. The city, however, finally fell to him in 1183, after some deft negotiation with the Sultan Kilij Arslan II, which isolated it from all Anatolian Turcoman support, and some highly adept propaganda that linked the submission of its only source of succour, Mosul, to the greater project of expelling the Franks from the Holy Land:

This little Jazira is the lever which will set in motion the great Jazira; it is the point of division and centre of resistance, and once it is set in its place in the chain of alliances, the whole armed might of Islam will be co-ordinated to engage the forces of unbelief …

All around Aleppo Turkish emirs began to come to Saladin to proclaim their loyalty and soon the city was bereft of allies. Saladin invested it on 21 May 1183 but was reluctant to fight the old guard of Nur al-Din. He attempted to woo them with fine words about how they were, ‘the soldiers of the jihad, who had in the past done great services for Islam … whose gallantry and courage had gained his admiration’. The Nuriya were, however, determined to have their day of battle and the sultan was unable to restrain his Mamluks, who wanted to show that they were the new corps d’élite. Saladin’s brother, Taj al-Muluk, was killed in a fierce clash between the two sides, but this did at least finally bring the two sides to the negotiating table. The sultan completed his work in the north, by concluding a peace treaty and Muslim prisoner release with Bohemond III of Antioch, and then he went to war with Jerusalem.

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