Saladin

By Laura Whitfield

He is the only figure whom both the Muslim world and the Christian West remember as a hero. In the Islamic tradition he is Salah al-Din, the restorer of Jerusalem; in the Western imagination he is the chivalrous Saracen of the Crusades, the enemy Richard the Lionheart respected. Both memories are true, and both were earned.

Saladin — Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub — was born in 1137 at Tikrit, in what is now Iraq, into a Kurdish military family. His father Ayyub and uncle Shirkuh served Nur al-Din, the Zengid ruler of Syria, in the long struggle against the Crusader states. Saladin went to Egypt with Shirkuh's expeditions, and in 1169, at thirty-one, became vizier to the Fatimid caliph — a Sunni Kurd running a Shia caliphate for a Syrian master. Within two years he had abolished the Fatimid caliphate altogether, restored Sunni orthodoxy in Egypt, and founded his own Ayyubid dynasty. After Nur al-Din's death in 1174 he spent a decade doing the unglamorous work of unification: absorbing Syria, taking Aleppo and Mosul into his orbit, building the single Muslim power that could face the Crusaders.

In 1187 the recklessness of the Crusader leadership gave him his opening. At the Horns of Hattin in July, his army trapped the Crusader host — cut off from water in the summer heat — and destroyed it, capturing King Guy of Jerusalem. In October he took Jerusalem itself. What he did next made his legend: where the Crusaders in 1099 had massacred the city's Muslims and Jews, Saladin permitted the Christians to ransom themselves and leave in peace, protecting churches and allowing pilgrims. The Third Crusade followed — Richard the Lionheart arrived in 1191, retook Acre and Jaffa, and the two men fought each other to a standstill with mutual, almost courtly respect; the stories of Saladin sending Richard fresh horses and fruit during his illness may be legend, but the respect was real. The Treaty of Jaffa in 1192 left Jerusalem in Muslim hands, the coast to the Crusaders, and pilgrims free to visit the holy places.

Saladin died at Damascus in 1193, aged fifty-six, and was found to have given away nearly all his wealth — his treasury held a single gold piece. Dante, writing a century later, placed him among the virtuous pagans in Limbo, the only Muslim of the age so honored by Christendom. The Kurd who retook Jerusalem had become something rarer than a conqueror: a standard of honor both sides could claim.

Impact on civilization

Saladin's recapture of Jerusalem in 1187 ended eighty-eight years of Crusader rule over the holy city and reunited the Muslim Near East under the Ayyubid dynasty, shifting the balance of the Crusades permanently. His conduct — clemency at Jerusalem, chivalrous treatment of Richard the Lionheart — created the enduring Western ideal of the noble Saracen, influencing European literature from the medieval romances to Walter Scott's The Talisman. In the Islamic world he became the archetype of the just Muslim ruler and the symbol of Jerusalem's liberation, invoked by leaders from Nasser to Saddam Hussein. His settlement with Richard established the framework — Muslim Jerusalem, Christian pilgrimage rights — that governed the holy city's status for centuries. His dynasty, the Ayyubids, ruled Egypt and Syria for generations, and his recapture of Jerusalem set the terms of Christian-Muslim relations in the Levant for the rest of the Middle Ages. That a Kurd from Tikrit became the most admired Muslim of the medieval West — praised by Dante, romanticized by Scott — shows how completely his personal code transcended the war he fought.