A Soldier's Son From Tikrit
Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub was born around 1137 at Tikrit, into a Kurdish family of professional soldiers serving Turkish rulers in a fractured Islamic world. He grew up in Baalbek and Damascus, studied religion and the Arabic sciences, and by his own account preferred books to campaigning. In 1169 he accompanied his uncle Shirkuh on an expedition sent by Nur al-Din to secure Egypt, where the Fatimid caliphate was collapsing. When Shirkuh died weeks after taking power, the young officer inherited the vizierate almost by accident.
He proved a formidable administrator. In 1171 he ended the Shia Fatimid caliphate and returned Egypt to Sunni allegiance, an act of religious politics that also gave him the richest tax base in the region. After Nur al-Din died in 1174 he moved on Damascus and spent more than a decade absorbing the Zengid lands of Syria and northern Iraq, fighting other Muslim rulers, negotiating, and being denounced by rivals as an opportunist who used holy war as a pretext for family empire.
Hattin and Jerusalem
By 1187 he had encircled the crusader states, and the raids of Reynald of Chatillon on Muslim caravans and pilgrim routes gave him both cause and opportunity. In July he drew the combined army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem away from water into the dry hills near Hattin, set fire to the scrub, and destroyed it in a day of thirst and smoke. He treated King Guy courteously and personally killed Reynald, whom he had sworn to kill, and he ordered the execution of the captured Templar and Hospitaller knights.
Jerusalem surrendered in October after a short siege. Instead of the general slaughter that had followed the crusader capture in 1099, Saladin agreed to ransom terms negotiated by Balian of Ibelin: a fixed price per head, with thousands released free or paid for from his own treasury and that of his brother. It was genuine restraint by the standards of the age, and it was not liberation. Those who could not pay, perhaps fifteen thousand people, were enslaved, and the accounting of who went free is disputed in the sources.
The Reputation and the Man
The Third Crusade brought Richard I of England, who beat him at Arsuf and twice came within a day's march of Jerusalem without attacking. Neither could finish the other. The truce of 1192 left the coast in crusader hands and Jerusalem in Muslim hands with pilgrimage guaranteed, and Saladin died at Damascus in March 1193, reportedly leaving too little money for his own funeral because he had given it away. His empire was divided among relatives and quarrelled itself into weakness within a generation.
His chivalric fame was largely built by his enemies. European writers made him the noble Saracen, Dante placed him among the virtuous pagans rather than the damned, and Walter Scott turned him into a romantic hero for the nineteenth century. Arab historians remembered him more soberly, and modern nationalist movements have claimed him for causes he would not recognize. What the record supports is narrower and still remarkable: a patient, politically ruthless commander who could also choose mercy when massacre was expected.
