Within months of assuming the vizierate, Saladin needed the support of these trusted allies as he faced a series of assaults on his position. He also revealed a capacity for nuanced political operation in dealing with these threats–one that would prove a signal characteristic of his career. When necessary, Saladin could act with pitiless determination, but he was also able to employ caution and diplomacy. In the early summer of 1169, Mutamin, the leading eunuch within the caliph’s palace, sought to engineer a coup against Saladin, opening channels of negotiation with the kingdom of Jerusalem in the hope of prompting yet another Frankish invasion of Egypt to topple the Ayyubids. A secret envoy was dispatched from Cairo, disguised as a beggar, but passing near Bilbais a Syrian Turk spotted that he was wearing new sandals whose fine quality jarred with his otherwise ragged appearance. With suspicions aroused, the agent was arrested and letters to the Franks discovered, sewn into the lining of his shoes, revealing the plot. Saladin curtailed the independence of the Fatimid court, executing the eunuch Mutamin in August and replacing him with Qaragush, who from this point forward presided over all palace affairs.29
Saladin’s severe intervention elicited an outbreak of unrest among Cairo’s military garrison. The city was packed with some 50,000 black Sudanese troops, whose loyalty to the caliph made them a dangerous counter to Ayyubid authority. For two days they rioted through the streets, marching on Saladin’s position in the vizier’s palace. Abu’l Haija the Fat was sent to stem their advance, but Saladin knew that he lacked the manpower to prevail in open combat and soon adopted less direct tactics. Most of the Sudanese lived with their families in the al-Mansura quarter of Cairo. Saladin ordered that the entire area be set alight, according to one Muslim contemporary leaving it ‘to burn down around [the rebelling troops’] possessions, children and women’. With their morale shattered by this callous atrocity, the Sudanese agreed a truce, the terms of which were supposed to provide for safe passage up the Nile. But once out of the city and travelling south in smaller, disorganised groups, they fell victim to treacherous counter-attacks from Turan-Shah and were virtually annihilated.
Saladin continued to use cold-blooded retaliation when he thought the situation demanded it, but often he adopted more subtle, piecemeal methods to deal with his opponents. Once in office as Fatimid vizier, Saladin faced repeated pressure from the caliph in Baghdad, and from Nur al-Din in Damascus, to depose Egypt’s Shi‘ite caliph, a heretic in the eyes of Sunni orthodoxy. But Saladin resisted, making no incautious move to topple al-Adid, cultivating instead a mutually beneficial alliance with the young ruler–one that may even have been shaded by a degree of real friendship. Saladin’s position in the Nile region was far too precarious to risk direct dynastic revolution. To endure as vizier he recognised that, to begin with at least, he needed the measure of stability, and, even more importantly, the bounteous financial benefaction attendant upon caliphal support.
This policy proved its worth in late summer 1169. Still smarting from the humiliation of his retreat from Egypt the preceding winter, King Amalric of Jerusalem chose this moment to launch another assault, this time targeting the port of Damietta, in the eastern reaches of the Nile Delta, with the assistance of a massive Byzantine fleet. This attack posed a grave threat to Saladin, yet he proved more than capable of meeting the challenge. He raised and equipped a huge army, funded by a truly colossal grant of 1,000,000 gold dinars from al-Adid’s treasury. Rather than command the relief of Damietta in person, leaving Cairo prey to revolt, Saladin wisely deputised his nephew, Taqi al-Din, while he remained in the capital. When this force linked up with Syrian troops sent by Nur al-Din, Amalric found himself outnumbered and, unable adequately to coordinate Latin–Greek military operations, his offensive collapsed. This Muslim victory effectively brought to an end the contest for control of Egypt, waged against the Latins throughout the 1160s. The Franks continued to dream of the Nile’s conquest, but for now that region remained in the grasp of Islam, and Saladin.30
Having withstood the early challenges of his first year as vizier, Saladin–echoing Nur al-Din’s approach to the exercise of power–initiated programmes of civil and religious rejuvenation. Alexandria’s fortifications were strengthened, while in Cairo and its southern suburb of Fustat new centres of Sunni Islamic law were erected. Saladin later abolished non-Koranic taxation of trade in Egypt (although he did hike up other forms of levy in order to make up for the shortfall in state income). In November 1170 he also appeared to take up the mantle of mujahid, leading his first invasion of Frankish Palestine. At the head of a sizeable army, Saladin overran the small Latin fortress of Darum, just south of Gaza, and skirmished with King Amalric’s hastily assembled relief force before marching to the shores of the Red Sea to occupy the port of Aqaba. While blows were evidently struck against the Christians during this campaign, Saladin’s primary objective may have been to shore up the land route between the Nile region and Damascus, and it would probably be wrong to regard this venture as the first blossoming of his dedication to the holy war.
LIEUTENANT OR COMMANDER
As Saladin’s control of Egypt solidified, his continued lack of independence came ever more sharply into focus. He was a Sunni warlord, possessed of growing power and resources, yet still only second in command to a Shi‘ite caliph and bound by ties of subservience to Nur al-Din. Caution had served Saladin well to this point, but by late summer 1171, with his hold over Cairo secured, he was ready to oust the Fatimids. Even now, however, he moved with marked restraint, largely forsaking the traditional aberrations of Egyptian politics–bloody coup d’état and wholesale murder. This approach was, in part, made possible by the young Caliph al-Adid’s failing health. Around the end of August he contracted a severe illness and, though barely twenty years old, was soon at death’s door.31
On Friday 10 September 1171, Saladin took his first guarded step towards autonomy. For centuries, the name of the Shi‘ite caliph had echoed through Egypt’s mosques during Friday prayer, recited in honorific recognition of Fatimid authority. On this day, however, in Fustat, al-Adid’s name was replaced with that of the Sunni Abbasid caliph of Baghdad. Saladin was testing the water, gauging whether open rebellion would follow, before showing his hand in Cairo itself, but no uprising ensued. The next day he presided over an imposing military parade in the capital, as virtually the entire might of his armies marched through the streets, prompting his secretary al-Fadil to record that ‘no king of Islam had ever possessed an army to match this’. For his Egyptian subjects, and the Latin and Greek ambassadors who happened to be visiting Cairo at that point, the message was unambiguous. Saladin was now lord of Egypt. News of these events reached the dying al-Adid and he implored Saladin, still nominally his vizier, to come to his bedside, hoping to beg for the lives of his family. Fearing a plot, Saladin refused–although it was said that he later regretted this hard-hearted decision–and the caliph died on 13 September. Saladin made a great show of accompanying his body to its burial and took no steps to eliminate his offspring. Instead they were housed and cared for within the caliphal palace, but forbidden from having children so that their line would die out. Regardless of its piecemeal nature, the consequences of this revolution were dramatic. The days of the Fatimids were at an end; the religious and political schism that had divided Egypt from the rest of the Muslim Near East since the tenth century receded, leaving Saladin to pose as a champion of Sunni orthodoxy.
Given the caliph’s near-legendary reputation for fabulous wealth, one of the immediate benefits of al-Adid’s death for Saladin should have been a massive influx of hard cash. But upon occupying the Fatimid palace Saladin found a surprisingly small store of money, much of the reserves having been used to fund the late Vizier Shawar’s exorbitant tributes to Jerusalem and Damascus, and Saladin’s own defence of Damietta in 1169. What treasures he did find–a ‘mountain’ of rubies, a huge emerald and an assortment of giant pearls–were quickly auctioned off.
Saladin’s abolition of the F
atimid caliphate and subjection of Egypt in 1171 were, at least in theory, not merely personal victories; they were also a triumph for his overlord, Nur al-Din, whose realm could now be said to stretch from Egypt to Syria and beyond. Certainly, both men were sent splendid ceremonial robes of victory by the caliph of Baghdad that autumn. But behind the façade of Sunni unity and ascendancy, signs of strain between the lord and his ever more powerful lieutenant were becoming apparent. With the unification of Aleppo, Damascus and Cairo and the resultant encirclement of the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem, Nur al-Din might have expected to draw upon the Nile’s wealth and resources, and Saladin’s military support, to launch an all-out offensive on Palestine. From autumn 1171, however, as the new lord of Egypt, Saladin began to act as a sovereign ruler in his own right. Since the days of Shirkuh’s North African adventures, Ayyubid involvement in the region had always been gilded with a self-serving edge and, ultimately, Egypt’s conquest had depended above all upon Saladin’s own qualities: his acute political and military vision; his patience, guile and mercilessness. Now he might arguably claim to be Nur al-Din’s equal and ally rather than his servant.
Open conflict was, in part, averted by Nur al-Din’s preoccupations elsewhere in his realm. Syria and Palestine were struck yet again by a series of damaging earthquakes in the early 1170s, forcing the diversion of resources into extensive rebuilding programmes. In Iraq, the death of his brother, followed by the Abbasid caliph’s demise, prompted Nur al-Din once more to involve himself in Mesopotamian affairs, while in the Jazira and Anatolia, new opportunities for territorial expansion similarly commanded his attention. Then, in 1172, a dispute with the Franks over trading rights along the Syrian coast triggered a number of punitive raids against Antioch and the county of Tripoli.
In spite of these distractions, Nur al-Din did seek Saladin’s support in one crucial theatre of conflict, the Latin-held desert area east of the River Jordan known as Transjordan. This region was certainly a valuable prize: annexed in the early twelfth century by the construction of Frankish castles at Montreal and Kerak, it gave the Latins at least partial control over the main land route from Damascus to either Egypt or to Mecca and Medina, the sacred cities of the Arabian Peninsula. Saladin has been accused, both by some medieval chroniclers and a number of modern scholars, of failing to cooperate fully in two attempts to conquer this frontier zone in the early 1170s. This ‘treachery’ supposedly revealed that Saladin was driven by self-serving ambition rather than a desire to promote the wider interests of Islam. But did he really turn his back on Nur al-Din, wrecking an opportunity to triumph in the war for the Holy Land?
In late September 1171, soon after the Fatimid caliphate’s abolition, Saladin marched into Transjordan with the apparent intention of launching a joint operation with Nur al-Din. As the latter came south from Damascus, Saladin laid siege to Montreal, but after a short period he suddenly decided to retreat to Egypt, and the two Muslim armies never combined. The Mosuli historian Ibn al-Athir, who supported Nur al-Din’s Zangid dynasty, saw in these events a definitive moment of division between Saladin and his overlord, asserting that a ‘deep difference’ emerged between them. He maintained that, having reached Montreal, Saladin was warned by his advisers about the real strategic and political consequences of Transjordan’s conquest. Counselled that the opening of a secure route from Damascus to Egypt would lead to Nur al-Din’s seizure of the Nile region and cautioned that ‘if Nur al-Din comes to you here, you will have to meet him and then he will exercise his authority over you as he wishes’, Saladin fled.
The problem with Ibn al-Athir’s account is that it relies upon the notion of Saladin as a naïve commander, devoid of foresight. Yet, on the evidence of his striking successes in Egypt, Saladin was no innocent, but a far-sighted and astute operator. He would surely have recognised in advance the wider ramifications of the Transjordan enterprise, long before actually arriving at Montreal itself. Frustratingly, the other surviving sources shed little additional light upon events: according to one account, Saladin excused himself by arguing that rebellion was brewing in Egypt, while another contemporary Arabic writer simply observed that ‘something happened’ to cause his precipitous return to Cairo.
Ibn al-Athir went on to accuse Saladin of abandoning a second joint venture before Nur al-Din could arrive, this time against Kerak in early summer 1173. While Saladin certainly did besiege that fortress at this point, he was probably acting independently of Damascus, as Nur al-Din was busy with the affairs of northern Syria and in no position to lead troops into Transjordan.32
The evidence against Saladin for the period between 1171 and 1173 is, on balance, inconclusive. He cannot be said categorically to have betrayed Nur al-Din, nor was he solely culpable for the failure to prevail in the jihad. Publicly at least Saladin affirmed his continued subservience to the Zangid dynasty after the end of Fatimid rule in 1171–Nur al-Din was included in the Friday prayer and Egyptian coins were minted bearing his name alongside that of the Abbasid caliph.
In reality, any hostility brewing between Damascus and Cairo in the early 1170s was probably not primarily related to the issue of unified military action, but, rather, connected to the question of hard cash. Above all else, Nur al-Din wanted to tap into Egypt’s riches and began demanding an annual tribute from the region. To this end he sent an official from Damascus to carry out a full audit of Egypt’s revenue at the end of 1173. As the financial investigation proceeded apace in Egypt during the first months of 1174, tension mounted. Both Nur al-Din and Saladin mobilised troops, although it is not certain whether this was in preparation for a direct confrontation or a renewed attempt at collaboration. In all likelihood, both men were making a show of strength as a precursor to intense diplomatic wrangling, aware that this might in time escalate into open conflict. Discord was certainly in the air, as even Saladin himself later admitted to his biographer: ‘We had heard that Nur al-Din would perhaps attack us in Egypt. Several of our comrades advised that he should be openly resisted and his authority rejected and that his army should be met in battle to repel it if his hostile move became a reality.’ He apparently added, somewhat less convincingly, ‘I alone disagreed with them, urging that it was not right to say anything of the sort.’33
Fate intervened to prevent what potentially would have been a hugely damaging Sunni civil war. While waiting for his auditor to report from Cairo, Nur al-Din fell ill in late spring 1174. Playing polo outside Damascus on 6 May, he was seized by some form of fit and, by the time he returned to the citadel, was clearly unwell. Suffering with what may have been angina, at first he stubbornly refused to call physicians. By the time his court doctor, al-Rahbi, arrived, Nur al-Din was huddled in a small prayer room, deep within the citadel, ‘close to death…his voice barely audible’. When it was suggested that he be treated with bleeding, Nur al-Din bluntly refused, saying, ‘you do not bleed a man of sixty’, and in the face of this great ruler no one argued.
On 15 May 1174 Nur al-Din died, his body later being interred in one of the religious schools he had had built in Damascus. Even among his enemies the Franks, Nur al-Din was revered as ‘a mighty persecutor of the Christian name and faith…a just and valiant prince’. He was the first Muslim leader since the advent of the crusades to unite Aleppo and Damascus. His vision and quickening sense of devotion had ushered in a new era of religious rejuvenation within the Sunni world, resuscitating the notion of jihad against Islam’s enemies as an emblematic and imperative cause. And yet, at his death, the Franks remained unconquered, and the hallowed city of Jerusalem still lay in Christendom’s grasp.34
10
HEIR OR USURPER
Nur al-Din’s death in May 1174 appeared to furnish Saladin with a perfect opportunity to emerge from the shadow of Zangid Syrian overlordship, allowing the lieutenant to become leader, assert his right to fully independent rule and assume the mantle of champion in Islam’s holy war against the Franks. It is only too easy to imagine the history of twelfth-century Nea
r Eastern Islam as an era of linear progression; one in which a swelling tide of jihadi resurgence gathered pace under Zangi, Nur al-Din and, finally, Saladin–with the torch of leadership passing smoothly, and almost inevitably, from one Muslim ‘hero’ to another. This was certainly the impression fostered and energetically promoted by some Islamic contemporaries.
The central flaw in this admittedly alluring illusion is that Saladin was not proclaimed Nur al-Din’s heir in 1174. Instead, Nur al-Din left behind an eleven-year-old son, al-Salih, who he hoped would take up the reins of power. The great Syrian lord was also survived by an assortment of other blood relations who might seek to protect and perpetuate Zangid ascendancy in the Near and Middle East. As such there was, in reality, no natural or immediate path to advancement open to Saladin in 1174. Instead he was presented with choices: to prioritise his hold over the Nile region, constructing a largely self-contained Egyptian realm; or to seek to emulate, or even eclipse, Nur al-Din’s achievements, to become the premier Muslim leader in the Levant.
A HERO FOR ISLAM
Saladin embraced this latter objective with singular dedication and vigour. The fundamental question–similar to that asked of Nur al-Din–was why? Did Saladin seek power, forging a despotic, pan-Levantine Islamic Empire, to fulfil his own self-serving, personal ambition? Or was he driven by a higher cause, pursuing Muslim unification as a means to an end–the necessary precursor to success in the jihad against the Christian Franks? Some attempt to understand Saladin’s motives and mentality has to be made, not least because of his profound importance as a historical figure, particularly in Islamic culture. In the modern world, Saladin has come to be regarded as the supreme Muslim champion of the crusading age; an extraordinarily powerful talisman of the Islamic past, viewed by many as a revered hero. The task of stripping away the layers of legend, propaganda and bias to explore the reality of his career is thus particularly sensitive and demands scrupulous and assiduous care.
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land Page 29
