Saladin (Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub)
Sultan of Egypt and Syria · Vizier of the Fatimid Caliphate
1137 – 1193
- Born
- 1137
- Died
- 1193
- Reign
- 1174 – 1193
- House
- Ayyubid Dynasty
Biography
Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, known in Europe as Saladin, was born at Tikrit in 1137, the son of the Kurdish officer Najm al-Din Ayyub, and grew up in Baalbek and Damascus within the military elite that served Nur al-Din. Nothing in his early career marked him for greatness; he was a competent young officer with a taste for religious scholarship who joined his uncle Shirkuh's Egyptian expeditions, by his own account, with reluctance. Yet at Alexandria in 1167 he conducted a creditable defense against a Frankish siege, and when Shirkuh died in March 1169, two months after becoming vizier of Fatimid Egypt, the Syrian emirs chose the thirty-one-year-old Yusuf to succeed him.
As vizier, Saladin consolidated power with methodical care: he broke a revolt of the Fatimid palace regiments, installed his own family in key commands, and brought his father to Cairo. In September 1171 he allowed the Fatimid caliphate to lapse on the death of the caliph al-Adid, restoring Egypt to the Abbasid, Sunni allegiance after two centuries of Shia rule. The act, performed without bloodshed, made him master of the richest province of the Islamic world — and an increasingly uneasy subordinate of Nur al-Din. Open conflict was averted only by Nur al-Din's death in 1174, after which Saladin entered Damascus, married Nur al-Din's widow Ismat al-Din Khatun, and spent a decade of campaigns and sieges — Aleppo submitted in 1183, Mosul in 1186 — uniting Egypt and Muslim Syria under his sultanate, legitimized throughout by the proclaimed aim of holy war against the Franks.
That war reached its decision on 4 July 1187, when Saladin annihilated the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem at Hattin, near Tiberias, capturing King Guy and the relic of the True Cross. The crusader cities fell in succession, and on 2 October 1187 Jerusalem itself surrendered on negotiated terms that contrasted pointedly with the massacre of 1099. The catastrophe summoned the Third Crusade, and from 1189 to 1192 Saladin fought a grinding defensive war against it, losing Acre after a two-year siege and suffering defeat at Arsuf at the hands of Richard I of England. Yet Richard could not retake Jerusalem, and the Treaty of Jaffa in September 1192 left Saladin holding the city while granting Christian pilgrims access to its shrines.
Exhausted by three decades of campaigning, Saladin died in Damascus on 4 March 1193, aged fifty-five, leaving a treasury famously too poor to pay for his funeral. Contemporary chroniclers of both faiths recorded his generosity, his fidelity to agreements, and his personal austerity, and his reputation for chivalry passed into European legend. His empire he divided among his sons and kinsmen as appanages — a settlement his brother al-Adil would shortly overturn, but which fixed the confederal character of the dynasty he founded.
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Events
On 4 July 1187 Saladin destroyed the field army of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin, a double hill above the Sea of Galilee. The campaign began when Saladin, having spent a decade uniting Egypt and Muslim Syria under Ayyubid rule, crossed the Jordan with a large army and besieged Tiberias, whose citadel held out under the countess Eschiva of Galilee. The kingdom mustered nearly its full strength, around 1,200 knights and many thousands of foot soldiers and turcopoles, at the springs of Saffuriya. King Guy of Lusignan faced conflicting counsel: Raymond III of Tripoli, whose own wife was besieged in Tiberias, argued against marching across the waterless plateau in high summer, while others pressed for relief. Guy ordered the advance on 3 July. Harassed by mounted archers and cut off from water, the army halted short of the lake and spent the night surrounded; the Muslims fired the dry scrub upwind of the camp. On the following day the thirst-weakened infantry broke from the knights, repeated cavalry charges failed to open a path to the springs, and the army was destroyed where it stood. The relic of the True Cross, carried with the army, was captured. Guy was taken prisoner and treated honorably. Raynald of Châtillon, lord of Kerak, whose attacks on Muslim caravans in violation of truce had been a stated cause of the war, was executed by Saladin personally or on his order; some two hundred captured Templars and Hospitallers were also put to death, while the bulk of prisoners were sold or ransomed. With the kingdom's army gone, its cities and castles fell in rapid succession through the summer and autumn, leaving Jerusalem itself exposed and culminating in its surrender in October.
After Hattin destroyed the field army of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in July 1187, its fortresses and ports fell to Saladin through the summer with little resistance: Acre, Ascalon, and most of the coast were in Ayyubid hands by September. Jerusalem itself filled with refugees and was defended by almost no knights. Balian of Ibelin, one of the few senior barons not killed or captured at Hattin, had been allowed by Saladin to enter the city to evacuate his family; once inside he was pressed by the inhabitants to take charge of the defense, and Saladin released him from his oath to stay only one day. The siege began on 20 September 1187. After initial assaults against the western walls made no progress, Saladin shifted his camp to the north and his engineers brought down a section of wall near the point where the army of the First Crusade had broken in eighty-eight years earlier. With a storming of the city imminent, Balian came to terms. He is reported to have warned that, if denied terms, the defenders would destroy the Muslim holy places and kill their own families before dying in a final sortie. The capitulation, concluded on 2 October, set ransoms of ten dinars for a man, five for a woman, and one for a child; Balian and the city's treasuries bought out thousands of the poor, and Saladin and his brother al-Adil freed many more, though a substantial number who could not pay went into slavery. There was no massacre, a restraint contemporaries on both sides contrasted with the bloodshed of 1099. The Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa were restored to Muslim worship, while native Christians were permitted to remain. The loss of the city set off the call for the Third Crusade in the West.
The destruction of the Latin army at Hattin and the surrender of Jerusalem in 1187 prompted the largest Western military response since the First Crusade. The papal call was answered by the three leading monarchs of Latin Europe: the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who drowned crossing a river in Anatolia in June 1190, leaving his great army to disintegrate; Philip II of France; and Richard I of England, who had taken the cross as count of Poitou and inherited the Plantagenet dominions in 1189. Richard's journey east included the conquest of Cyprus from its Byzantine ruler in 1191, an acquisition that anchored Latin power in the eastern Mediterranean for centuries. The two kings joined the long siege of Acre, which had been invested by Guy of Lusignan since 1189 while Saladin's army in turn surrounded the besiegers. The city fell in July 1191. Philip, ill and at odds with Richard, returned to France soon afterward, where his maneuvering against Plantagenet lands shaped the rest of the war. Richard marched south along the coast, defeating Saladin's attack at Arsuf in September 1191 and refortifying Jaffa and Ascalon, but twice advanced toward Jerusalem and twice withdrew, judging that the city could not be held even if taken while Saladin's field army survived. Negotiations ran alongside the fighting, conducted largely through Saladin's brother al-Adil, and included proposals, never realized, for a marriage settlement involving Richard's sister. After Richard's relief of Jaffa in August 1192, both exhausted sides concluded the Treaty of Jaffa in September: a three-year truce confirming Latin control of the coast from Tyre to Jaffa, with Ascalon demolished, and guaranteeing Christian pilgrims access to Jerusalem, which remained under Ayyubid rule. Richard sailed for home and was captured in Austria; Saladin died in Damascus in March 1193.
Also there: Richard I, Philip II Augustus, Al-Adil I (Sayf al-Din Abu Bakr)
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