When Nur al-Din died in 1174, Saladin headed north and took Damascus, gradually expanding his empire to embrace much of Iraq and Syria as well as Egypt, but the link between the two territories was today’s Jordan, which was partly controlled by the Crusaders. War with Jerusalem was not just good theology, but good imperial politics too. Saladin preferred Damascus, regarding Egypt as his cash-cow: “Egypt was a whore,” he joked, “who’d tried to part me from my faithful wife [Damascus].”
Saladin was no dictator.c His empire was a patchwork of greedy amirs, rebellious princelings and ambitious brothers, sons and nephews, to whom he doled out fiefdoms in return for loyalty, taxes and warriors. He was always short of cash and soldiers. Only his charisma held it all together. Frequently defeated by the Crusaders, he was not an outstanding general, but “shunning his womenfolk and all his pleasures,” he was tenacious. He spent most of his life fighting other Muslims but now his personal mission, the Holy War to win back Jerusalem, became his ruling passion. “I’ve given up earthly pleasures,” he said. “I’ve had my fill of them.”
Once when walking by the sea during the war, he told his minister Ibn Shaddad, “I have it in my mind that, when God has allowed me to conquer the rest of the coast, I shall divide my lands, make my testament and set sail on this sea to pursue them there until there no longer remain on the face of the earth any who deny God—or die in the attempt.” But he enforced Islam more strictly than the Fatimids. When he heard of a young Islamic heretic preaching in his lands, he had him crucified and left hanging for days.
He was happiest sitting up at night with his entourage of generals and intellectuals, receiving messengers while chatting. He admired scholars and poets, and his court was not complete without Usamah bin Munqidh, now ninety, who recalled how “he sought me out across the land. By his goodwill, from misfortune’s fangs was I snatched. He treats me like family.” Saladin was lame and often ill, cared for by twenty-one doctors—eight Muslim, eight Jewish (including Maimonides) and five Christian. When the sultan rose for prayer or ordered the candles, his courtiers recognized the sign that the evening was over. If he himself was above reproach, his hedonistic and ambitious relatives more than made up for his restraint.
DANCING-GIRLS AND APHRODISIACS:
THE COURT OF SALADIN
The young princes, according to the satirist al-Wahrani, held orgies where the hosts ran naked on all fours howling like dogs and sipped wine from the navels of singing girls while cobwebs took over in the mosques. In Damascus, the Arabs grumbled about Saladin’s rule. The writer Ibn Unain mocked Saladin’s Egyptian officials, particularly the black Sudanese: “If I were black with a head like an elephant, bulky forearms and a huge penis, then you would see to my needs.” Saladin exiled him for this impertinence.
Saladin’s nephew Taki al-Din was his most talented general, but also the most ambitious and debauched of the princes. His hobbies were so notorious that it was said his words were “sweeter than a beating with a prostitute’s slipper.” The satirist Wahrani suggested ironically, “If you resign from the government, you could turn away from repentance and collect the prostitutes of Mosul, the panders of Aleppo and the singing-girls of Iraq.”
Such was Taki’s priapic over-indulgence that he started losing weight, energy and erection. He consulted his Jewish doctor Maimonides, who advised his own community against excessive “eating, drinking and copulation” but treated his princely patients differently. The royal doctor wrote Saladin’s nephew a special work entitled On Sexual Intercourse, prescribing moderation, limited alcohol, women not too old nor too young, a cocktail of oxtongue plant and wine and, finally, a “wondrous secret’ of medieval Viagra: massage the royal penis for two hours before intercourse with oils mixed with saffron-coloured ants. Maimonides promised the erection would last long after the act.
Saladin loved Taki, whom he promoted to viceroy of Egypt, but was then exasperated by his nephew’s attempt to create his own fiefdom. He moved him to rule swathes of Iraq instead. Now this exuberant nephew and most of Saladin’s family arrived to enjoy the liberation of Jerusalem.16
SALADIN’S CITY
Saladin watched the Latin Christians leave Jerusalem forever: the Jerusalemites had to pay a ransom of ten dinars per man, five per woman, one per child. No one could leave without a receipt of payment, but Saladin’s officials made fortunes as bribes were paid and Christians were lowered from the walls in baskets or escaped in disguise. Saladin himself had no interest in money and, though he received 220,000 dinars, much of the cash went astray.
Thousands of Jerusalemites could not afford their ransom. They were led away into slavery and the harem. Balian paid 30,000 dinars to ransom 7,000 poor Jerusalemites, while the Sultan’s brother Safadin asked for a thousand unfortunates and freed them. Saladin gave five hundred each to Balian and to Patriarch Heraclius. The Muslims were shocked to see the latter pay his ten dinars and leave the city laden with carts of gold and carpets. “How many well-guarded women were profaned, nubile girls married, virgins dishonoured, proud women deflowered, lovely women’s red lips kissed, untamed ones tamed,” recalled Saladin’s secretary Imad al-Din with a rather creepy glee. “How many noblemen took them as concubines, how many great ladies sold at low prices!”
Under the eyes of the sultan, the two columns of Christians looked back one last time and wept at the loss of Jerusalem, reflecting, “She who was named the mistress of other cities had become a slave and handmaid.”
On Friday 2 October, Saladin entered Jerusalem and ordered the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, to be cleansed of the infidel. The Cross over the Dome of the Rock was thrown down to cries of “Allahu Akhbar,” dragged through the city and smashed, the Jesus paintings torn out, the cloisters north of the Dome demolished, the cubicles and apartments within the Aqsa removed. Saladin’s sister arrived from Damascus with a camel caravan of rosewater. The sultan himself and his nephew Taki personally scrubbed the courts of the Haram with rosewater, accompanied by a cleaning-party of princes and amirs. Saladin brought Nur al-Din’s carved wooden minbar from Aleppo and set it up in al-Aqsa Mosque where it remained for seven centuries.
The sultan did not so much destroy and rebuild as adapt and embroider, reusing the gorgeous spolia of the Crusaders with their foliate patterns, capitals and wetleaf acanthus; his own architecture is thus constructed with the very symbols of his enemies, which makes it hard to distinguish between the buildings of the Crusaders and Saladin.
Every respected member of the ulema, Muslim clergy and scholars, from Cairo to Baghdad, wanted to preach at Friday prayers, but Saladin chose the Qadi of Aleppo, giving him a black robe to wear: his sermon in al-Aqsa praised the fadail—the merits—of Islamic Jerusalem. Saladin himself had become the “light that shines in every dawn that brings darkness to the believers” by “liberating the brother shrine of Mecca.” Saladin then walked to the Dome to pray in what he called “the jewel of the signet-ring of Islam.” Saladin’s love for Jerusalem was “as great as mountains.” His mission was to create an Islamic Jerusalem and he considered whether to destroy the Dungheap—the Holy Sepulchre. Some of his grandees called for its demolition, but he mused that the place would still remain holy whether or not the Church stood there. Citing Omar the Just, he closed the Church for only three days and then gave it to the Greek Orthodox but bricked-up one entrance to control the movement (and profits) of pilgrims more easily. Overall, he tolerated most churches, but aimed to diminish the Christian Quarter’s non-Islamic character. Church bells were again banned. Instead, for hundreds of years right up until the nineteenth century, the muezzin held the monopoly of sound and the Christians announced prayers with the clack of wooden clappers and the clash of cymbals. He destroyed some churches outside the walls and commandeered many prominent Christian buildings for his own Salahiyya endowments—which still exist today.d
Saladin brought many Muslim scholars and mystics to the city; but Muslims alone could not repopulate Jerusalem,
so he invited back many Armenians, who became a special community that endures today (they call themselves the Kaghakatsi); and many Jews—“the entire race of Ephraim”—from Ashkelon, Yemen and Morocco.17
Saladin was exhausted but he reluctantly left Jerusalem to mop up the last Crusader fortresses. He took the great sea base of Acre. Yet he never finished off the Crusaders: he chivalrously released King Guy and failed to conquer Tyre, which left the Christians with a vital seaport from which to plan a counter-attack. Perhaps he underestimated the reaction of Christendom but the news of Jerusalem’s fall had shocked Europe, from kings and popes to knights and peasants, and mobilized a powerful new Crusade, the Third.
Saladin’s mistakes would cost him dear. In August 1189, King Guy appeared before Acre with a small force and proceeded to besiege the city. Saladin did not take Guy’s brave exploit too seriously but sent a contingent to swat his little army. Instead Guy fought Saladin’s men to a standstill and rallied the Crusader fightback. Saladin besieged Guy but Guy besieged Acre. When Saladin’s Egyptian fleet was defeated, Guy was joined by shiploads of German, English and Italian Crusaders. In Europe, the kings of England and France and the German Emperor took the Cross; fleets were being collected; armies mustered to join the battle for Acre. This was the start of a grindingly bloody two-year struggle, soon joined by the greatest kings of Europe who were determined to win back Jerusalem.
First came the Germans. When Saladin heard that the red-bearded Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was already marching to the Holy Land with a German army, he finally summoned his forces and called for a jihad. But then came better news.
In June 1190, Barbarossa drowned in a Cilician river; his son, Duke Frederick of Swabia, boiled the body and pickled it in vinegar, burying the flesh in Antioch. But he then marched to Acre with his army and his father’s bones which he planned to bury in Jerusalem. Barbarossa’s death played into the eschatalogical legend, that the Emperor of the Last Days was asleep, one day to rise again. The Duke of Swabia himself died of scurvy outside Acre and the German Crusade was broken. But after many months of desperate fighting with thousands killed by the plague (including Heraclius the patriarch and Sibylla, Queen of Jerusalem),e Saladin received the bad news that the outstanding warrior of Christendom was on his way.
a A fictional version of Balian (played by Orlando Bloom) is the hero of the movie Kingdom of Heaven, where he has an affair with Queen Sybilla (Eva Green).
b Saladin was the Crusaders’ shorthand for Salah al-Dunya al-Din (the Goodness of the World and the Faith). Saladin’s brother, known by the Crusaders as Safadin, was born Abu Bakr ibn Ayyub, adopting the honorific Safah al-Din (Sword of the Religion) and later the royal name al-Adil (the Just) by which he is called in most histories. Two of Saladin’s courtiers wrote biographies: Imad ad-Din, his secretary, wrote The Lightning of Syria and then Ciceronian Eloquence on the Conquest of the Holy City, characterized by purple passages. In 1188, Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, an Islamic scholar from Iraq, visited Jerusalem and was appointed by Saladin first as qadi (judge) of the army and then as overseer of Jerusalem. On Saladin’s death he served as chief qadi for two of his sons. His biography, Sultanly Anecdotes and Josephly Virtues (a reference to his first name Yusuf, Joseph), is a rounded portrait of a warlord under pressure.
c In Jerusalem an old man had the temerity to sue the sultan himself over some property. Saladin came down from his throne to be judged equally, and won the case, but then loaded the claimant with gifts.
d Saladin held court sometimes in the Hospital and sometimes in the Patriarch’s Palace, where there was a wooden hut on the roof where he liked to sit up late at night with his entourage. His brother Safadin resided in the Cenacle complex on Mount Zion. Saladin decided to give the Patriarch’s Palace to his own Salahiyya Sufi convent, or khanqah. Today it remains the Salahiyya khanqah (as its inscription declares) and the bedroom with its fine Crusader capitals where Saladin (and the patriarchs) slept is today the bedroom of Sheikh al-Alami, a member of one of Jerusalem’s prominent families. The patriarchs had special entrances from their Palace to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Saladin blocked these though they can still be seen behind the tills of today’s shops. He also took over St. Mary’s Latina for his Salahiyya Hospital and commandeered St. Anne’s as his Salahiyya madrassa, religious school. Now it is a church again but it is still inscribed to Saladin as “Reviver of the Empire of the Commander of the Believers.”
e The new Queen of Jerusalem was Sibylla’s half-sister, Isabella, daughter of King Amaury and Queen Maria. Isabella divorced her husband to marry Conrad of Montferrat. He thus became by marriage the titular king of Jerusalem.
CHAPTER 27
The Third Crusade:
Saladin and Richard
1189–1193
LIONHEART: CHIVALRY AND SLAUGHTER
On 4 July 1190, Richard the Lionheart, King of England, and Philip II Augustus, King of France, set out on the Third Crusade to liberate Jerusalem. The thirty-two-year-old Richard had just inherited his father Henry II’s Angevin empire—England and half of France. Possessed of abundant vitality, red-haired and athletic, he was as brash and extrovert as Saladin was patient and subtle. He was a man of his time, both a writer of saucy troubadour songs and a pious Christian who, overcome with his sinfulness, threw himself naked before his clergy and scourged himself with whips.
Eleanor of Aquitaine’s favourite son showed little interest in women, but the nineteenth-century claim that he was homosexual has been discredited. War was his real love and he ruthlessly squeezed the English to pay for his Crusade, joking, “I’d have sold London if there’d been a buyer.” As England vibrated with Crusader revivalism,a the Jews were targeted in the cull that culminated in the mass-suicide of York, the English Masada. By then, Richard had departed. He sailed for Jerusalem and wherever he landed he presented himself as the personification of the royal warrior. He always wore scarlet, the colour of war, and brandished a sword that he claimed was Excalibur. In Sicily, he rescued his sister, the widowed Queen Joanna, from the new king, and sacked Messina. When he reached Cyprus, ruled by a Byzantine prince, he simply conquered the island and then sailed for Acre with twenty-five galleys.
On 8 June 1191, Richard landed and joined the King of France at the siege, where bouts of fighting alternated with interludes of fraternizing between the camps. Saladin and his courtiers watched his arrival and were impressed with the “great pomp” of “this mighty warrior” and with his “passion for war.”
The battlefield had become a plague-ridden shanty encampment of royal marquees, filthy huts, soup kitchens, markets, bathhouses and brothels. That the prostitutes fascinated the Muslims is evident from the account of Imad, Saladin’s secretary, who visited Richard’s camp and exhausted even his reservoir of pornographic metaphors as he ogled these “singers and coquettes, tinted and painted, blue-eyed with fleshy thighs,” who “plied a brisk trade, brought their silver anklets up to touch their golden earrings, invited swords to sheath, made javelins rise toward shields, gave birds a place to peck with their beaks, caught lizard after lizard in their holes, [and] guided pens to inkwells.”
If even Imad admitted that “a few foolish mamluks slipped away” to sample these Frankish coquettes, many must have done so. Richard’s energy changed the nature of the war. Saladin was already ill; soon both the European kings fell sick too, but even on his sickbed Richard brandished a crossbow, firing bolts at the enemy camp while fleet after fleet delivered the cream of European knighthood.
Saladin, like “a bereft mother, on horseback urging people to perform their jihad duty” was outmanned and outfought. After the early departure of the jealous Philip Augustus, Richard took command—“I rule and nobody rules me”—but his forces too were suffering. He opened negotiations, Saladin sending his worldly but more aloof brother Safadin as his envoy, though these pragmatists were still shadow-boxing with everything to play for. They were evenly matched, each fielding 20,000 men, both struggling t
o impose their will on their insubordinate, troublesome grandees and polyglot armies.
Meanwhile Acre could hold out no longer and its governor started to negotiate surrender. “More affected than a distracted lovesick girl,” Saladin had little choice but to acquiesce in Acre’s capitulation, promising the return of the True Cross and the release of 1,500 prisoners. But his priority was to defend Jerusalem. He dragged his feet on the terms in order to encourage divisions among the Crusaders, save money and delay their campaign. But Lionheart meant business and called Saladin’s bluff.
On 20 August, he shepherded 3,000 bound Muslim prisoners onto the plain in view of Saladin’s army and then butchered the men, women and children. So much for the legend of chivalry. The horrified Saladin sent in his cavalry, but it was too late. Afterwards, he beheaded all Frankish prisoners who fell into his hands.
Five days later, Richard marched down the coast towards Jaffa, the port of Jerusalem, his army chanting “Sanctum Sepulchrum adjuva! Help us, Holy Sepulchre!” On 7 September, Lionheart found Saladin and his army blocking the way at Arsuf. Richard’s challenge was to use massed infantry to exhaust Saladin’s waves of charging, curveting cavaliers and horse-archers until he could unleash the thundering power of his knights. Richard held back until a Hospitaller galloped forward. Then he led the full charge that smashed into the Muslims. Saladin desperately threw in his royal guard of mamluks—known as the Ring. Faced with a “complete rout,” the sultan withdrew just in time, his army “conserved for the protection of Jerusalem.” At one point, he was guarded by just seventeen men. Afterwards he was wrung out and too downhearted even to eat.
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