by John Man
Also by John Man
Gobi
Atlas of the Year 1000
Alpha Beta
The Gutenberg Revolution
Genghis Khan
Attila
Kublai Khan
The Terracotta Army
The Great Wall
The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan
Xanadu
Samurai
The Mongol Empire
Copyright © 2016 by John Man
Maps by Tom Coulson at Encompass Graphics
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld Publishers. Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies.
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ISBN: 978-0-306-82488-3 (e-book)
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Contents
List of illustrations
Preface: The Once and Future King
1A World in Conflict
2A Teenager in Damascus
3Into Egypt
4Building a Power-base
5Back to Syria, and a Dead-end
6Enter the Villain
7Defeat and Victory: The Tide on the Turn
8Reynald’s Raid
9Build-up to the Show-down
10The Horns of Hattin
11Retaking the Holy City
12The Third Crusade: The Gathering Storm
13Acre
14The End of the Third Crusade
15Death, and Enduring Life
16A Brief History of Leadership
17Legacy: A Glowing Image, a Grim Reality
Bibliography
Photographic acknowledgements
Index
List of Illustrations and Maps
1The Holy Lance: engraving from William Hone’s Everyday Book, 1826
21Clash between crusader and Muslim cavalry: engraving of a twelfth-century crusader window (now destroyed) at St Denis from Bernard de Montfaucon’s Les monuments de la monarchie françoise, 1729
43Pigeon post: fifteenth-century woodcut illustration from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 1481
63Depiction of Saladin after a twelfth-century Arabian codex. Print Collector/Getty Images
77Knight praying before going into battle, redrawn from the Westminster Psalter c. 1250, from Short History of the English People by J. R. Green, 1893. Universal History Archive/Getty Images
89Reynald de Châtillon: drawing after a contemporary seal from The Crusades by T. A. Archer and Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 1894
103Soldiers undermining a city wall: drawing after an illumination in Chroniques de France ou de Saint Denis, 1325–50, British Library, from Dresses and Decorations of the Middle Ages by Henry Shaw, 1843. Print Collector/Getty Images
125Camel train redrawn from the Catalan Atlas of 1375
135Siege machine: drawing after a manuscript illumination from Dresses and Decorations of the Middle Ages by Henry Shaw, 1843. Print Collector/Getty Images
151Balian of Ibelin: drawing after a contemporary seal from The Crusades by T. A. Archer and Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 1894
169Jerusalem: drawing after the reverse of a Templar seal representing the Mosque of Omar or the Templum Domini from The Crusades by T. A. Archer and Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 1894
187Frederick Barbarossa: sixteenth-century engraving
195Richard I: drawing after a contemporary seal from A History of the Art of War by Charles Oman, 1898
209Saladin: sixteenth-century engraving. © Bettmann/Corbis
231Mourning the death of Saladin: coin issued in 1193, the year of his death
237Saladin enthroned: coin issued in 1215-16
249Motif of Saladin’s eagle used on the Egyptian flag
List of maps
14–15The World of Young Saladin c. 1140
157Battle of Hattin 1187
228–9Saladin’s Empire 1190
Preface
The Once and Future King
ASK ANYONE IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN TO NAME their greatest hero and the answer you will get is almost certainly ‘Saladin’. All across Europe and America, if you ask for one Arabic hero, the answer, after a pause for thought, will probably be the same. One in a million might say that, strictly speaking, he wasn’t Arabic but Kurdish. But you get the point. Kurds, Arabs, Iranians, Turks, north Africans, Jews and Europeans of all nationalities, and many Americans with Middle Eastern connections, think Saladin is one of the greatest leaders of all time, with virtues to match his achievements.
History supports them, up to a point. But there is more at work than history. Saladin is a fantasy hero as well as a real one. He embodies dreams and wishes, like Arthur, though rather better because so much more is known of him. Take one theme of his life story, which is like the plot of a good-guy v. bad-guy movie. Saladin himself is, of course, the good guy. Against him is set a baddie with such archetypical faults that he sounds like a caricature. His name was Reynald, and he came to the Holy Land for fame and fortune, which he found by doing terrible things. He caught the eye of a princess and took control of her city. He wrung cash from a prelate by torturing him and leaving him naked in the burning sun to be food for insects. He used that money to invade and ruin a beautiful and peaceful island. A spell in prison made him even more fanatical, greedy and bloodthirsty. By the time Saladin came up against him, Reynald was the grim master of the grimmest of Crusader castles. He ignored truces and insulted those who remonstrated. Saladin was so appalled by his behaviour that he set aside his usual magnanimity and swore he would kill Reynald with his own hands. Finally, after a famous victory, he did so, taking off his head with one blow of his sword. Insult, vengeance, retribution: these are themes that have driven great storylines from the ancient Greeks to Hollywood.
There’s Hollywood in another strand of Saladin’s story too. In the battle following the one in which Saladin slew Reynald, the Crusaders bore aloft their greatest treasure, which they called the True Cross. In fact, it was a wooden fragment set in a gold-and-silver cross. This object had its own back-story, which totally convinced the Crusaders of its authenticity. It was for them what Alfred Hitchcock called the McGuffin, the object of power that everyone wants, and which therefore drives the plot. It may have ‘real’ power (as the Ark does in Raiders of the Lost Ark) or it may not, just as long as it is desired. The True Cross was an object of both desire and power. For Christians, it was more than a symbol of why they were crusading; it was the very reason why. It was, to them, the actual thing upon which Christ was crucified, or part of it. It had the power to work miracles, a talisman that would confound all enemies, confer victory, and keep Jerusalem in Christian hands for ever and ever amen, until Christ returned in glory.
Well, they lost the battle to Saladin, and they lost Jerusalem, and they lost the True Cross – eno
ugh, one might think, to demonize Saladin in their eyes. And yet Christians admired him, not simply because he was in fact admirable, but because his fine qualities were explained and magnified, with a convoluted logic, which ran as follows:
Christians are good, and must prevail in the end because God is on our side. But in this case Saladin prevailed. This must be because we are not good enough Christians, so God is punishing us. Saladin is his instrument. Therefore, in this instance, Saladin is close to God and is to be seen as a closet Christian, and therefore admirable, an embodiment of Christian virtues, the perfect knight.
How to separate out the strands of fact and fantasy is one object of this book. Another is to see why down the centuries Saladin has remained a hero, and remains one still.
The quick answer is that there are many similarities between then and now.
Now, as then, the Muslim world is divided by the great Sunni–Shia schism; now, as then, sects multiply; now, as then, Arabs are hungry for some way to heal the split; now, as then, they are eager to confront and confound the challenge from without – then the Crusaders, now the USA, working through its proxy, Israel, and its other allies, its armed forces, its companies. There is a hunger for simpler problems and a solution as simple as ‘Liberate Jerusalem!’ One cry remains the same: ‘Jihad!’ – though it was simpler then, because the enemy was not a distant and indestructible superpower but was on the spot, occupying cities and castles, with finite forces, which could be vanquished with the right leadership.
Another echo from the past is the habit of taking hostages. The circumstances in Iraq and (as I write) Syria are often remarkably similar, even more so recently. Not long ago, announcing the taking of a hostage and the terms for his – almost always his – release took a simple call on the victim’s mobile phone. But today mobile phones are easily traced, revealing hiding places and summoning drones. Kidnappers have resorted to medieval means: handwritten demands, go-betweens and in one case . . . well, a source who advises on kidnap-and-ransom cases told me the story. An Iraqi businessman was taken hostage. Soon after, his family received a large crate. It contained homing pigeons, along with instructions: tape $100 to the legs of each pigeon, and release it. When the last pigeon was released, so was the prisoner. Any Muslim leader in the twelfth century would have understood, because carrier-pigeons were the equivalents of email servers, linking in hours even the most distant of friends and enemies.
Today, as then, the main focal point is Damascus, the home town of both Assad and Saladin. Today, warring factions make it impossible even to imagine a solution. In Saladin’s day, the problems were similar. Even if he had expelled all crusading Christians, Muslim divisions would have remained. The underlying difference between then and now is leadership. Saladin was a genius, able briefly to focus Islamic energy on the tasks of unity and jihad. He was the best his people could have hoped for, and a role model for any leader working for a better tomorrow.
A Note on Dating
Since this book is initially for western readers, I use AD/BC, increasingly called the Common Era (CE) or Before the Common Era (BCE). The Muslim calendar has a different system. Its base-year is the Hijira (also spelled Hijra and Hegira), the year of Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina. In theory all AD dates can be transferred into AH (After Hijira). But it is not straightforward. The two systems overlap and the relationship between them in the early years of Islam is still disputed. The base-year of 1 AH runs for a year, roughly from the spring of 622. By convention, Saladin’s birth was in 532 AH, which ran for a year from September 1137.
1
A World in Conflict
BAALBEK, LEBANON, 900 YEARS AGO WAS A WONDERFUL PLACE and a wonderful time for a curious boy. So much life. Such mysteries.
The Temple of Jupiter, with fifty-four columns, each of them 63 feet high, looked like the work of titans, but this Roman glory stood on massive monoliths which are today, as they were then, the world’s greatest hewn stones. Weighing up to 1,000 tonnes each – twenty times the weight of the megaliths of Stonehenge – they hark back to some ancient culture whose people had somehow managed to cut and shift them. Who made them? How did they move them? No one knew then, no one knows now.
Other ruins recalled construction and destruction by Macedonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and the earth itself. This is a region of earthquakes, which ruined buildings and buried ruins. But Baalbek was a phoenix, endlessly renewed by its people and by nature. Standing half a mile high, its crisp, clean air smelled of orchards and gardens. It was at the centre of the Islamic world, almost on the frontier between Islam’s two rival Arabic empires, Abbasid and Fatimid, almost equidistant from their two ancient capitals, Baghdad and Cairo. What a mixture of security and apprehension the young Saladin would have breathed – the security of his religion set against the region’s unending wars, power struggles, rebellions and assassinations, all this mayhem made worse in living memory by a new set of invaders, alien in creed and culture.
Saladin – little Yusuf (Joseph) as he was then – was not born in Baalbek. He was brought there by his father, Ayyub (Job) al-Din,1 for reasons we will get to in due course. So it was in Baalbek, during his unrecorded childhood, that Saladin began to learn something of the world into which he had been born.
To give them their full names, Yusuf al-Din ibn Ayyub and Ayyub Najm al-Din ibn Shadhi ibn Shadhi.
Islam, despite all its diversity and violence, was united by religion and culture. At its heart was the Quran, which distilled and stimulated a language at a crucial moment in its evolution. Muslim scholars from the Hindu Kush to southern Spain all worshipped the same god, honoured the same prophet, shared Arabic as a lingua franca, and inherited the same astonishingly rich intellectual mantle. All Islam shared the same economic strength, with trade linking north Africa, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, India and China. Since Islam accepted the enslavement of non-Muslims, all benefited from a lucrative trade in slaves, whether African, Turkish, Indian or Slav. Arab coins found their way north as far as Finland, and Muslim merchants wrote cheques honoured by banks in major cities. One trader had a warehouse on the Volga, another near Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan and a third in Gujarat, India.
Fuelled by staggering wealth, medieval Islam hungered for learning and inspired brilliant scholarship. Paper displaced papyrus, bookshops thrived, libraries graced the homes of the rich. At the end of the ninth century, according to the geographer al-Ya’qubi, one street in Damascus had a hundred bookshops. Since Arabic was the language of divine revelation, the written word was venerated and calligraphy became an art form valued above painting. Medieval Islam, assured of its superiority, was innovative and curious. The Arabs, looking back to the Greeks for the foundations of science and philosophy, translated Greek classics en masse (a strand of scholarship that would eventually feed into Europe’s Renaissance in the fifteenth century). Many other languages and creeds – Persian, Sanskrit and Syriac, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism – also formed part of this rich amalgam.
One consequence of Islamic scholarship and self-assurance was its tolerance. This was not a world of inward-looking fundamentalism. True, Jews and Christians were seen as benighted, the Jews for believing that divine revelation had stopped with the Hebrew prophets, the Christians for abandoning monotheism, believing that God was not one but a Trinity. Yet Judaism and Christianity were seen as stepping-stones from barbarism to revelation and Islam. All three were ‘Peoples of the Book’, namely what Christians know as the Old Testament.
The arts flourished. Urbanized literati patronized the ornate and elegant creations of poets. Historians recorded and honoured Islamic achievements. Though Islam discouraged (and later banned) human likenesses in art, there was nothing to inhibit design and architecture. Wonderful domed mosques arose, pre-dating Italian Renaissance domes by centuries. Potters tried to match Chinese porcelain (they failed, but they created lustrous, wonderfully decorated glazes). Stuccoed and frescoed palaces set an ornate style e
mulated throughout Islam.
Science also blossomed. It was not seen as a threat to Islam. How could it be, seeing as all Creation reflected the glory of Allah? Indeed, the late-tenth-century bibliographer ibn al-Nadim said that Aristotle had appeared to him in a dream and assured him there was no conflict between reason and religion. Thousands of scientific works were translated from Persian, Sanskrit and – most notably – Greek. ‘Arabic’ numerals, derived from Indian ones, provided a far more powerful mathematical tool than any previous system, as Europe later discovered. Though Arab scientists remained convinced that gold could be produced by the transformation of metals, their rigorous search for the ‘philosopher’s stone’ that would cause this to happen created the bridge between alchemy (al-kimiya, ‘transmutation’) and modern chemistry. Muslim travellers wrote reports of China, Europe and much of Africa. European languages, enriched by translations from Arabic into Latin, still contain many other tributes to Arab scientific predominance: zero (from sifr, ‘empty’), algebra (al-jebr, ‘integration’), star-names such as Betelgeuse (from bayt al-jawza, ‘the house of the twins’) and Altair (‘the flyer’), zenith, nadir, azimuth.
Among the great centres, Baghdad was the greatest. With its roots in the wealth of ancient Persia, the city was a magnet for traders, scholars and artists from as far afield as Spain and northern India. By 1000, it had become one of the largest cities in the world, equalling Constantinople – 1,200,000, about the same size as London in 1800 – with wealth to match. One caliph greeted a Byzantine ruler with a pageant of 160,000 cavalrymen and 100 lions. The city’s wharves harboured vessels bringing porcelain from China, silk, musk and ivory from east Africa, spices and pearls from Malaya, Russian slaves, wax and furs.
To the east lay a subdivision of Islam that was not Arabic, but Persian and Turkish. Its centres were the ancient oasis cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, Merv and Gurganj (later Urgench), all worthy if lesser counterparts to Baghdad. Once, for a long century (874–999), this region had been independent. Looking back to their eighth-century Persian ancestor Saman Khudat, the Samanids had thrown out their Arab overlords and built their own brand of Islam, spreading east into Afghanistan, holding off the Arabs to the west and, for a while, the Turks, who ended Samanid rule in 999. All four cities were trade emporia linking east and west, China and Islam, their exports including soap, sulphur, silks, sable, leather ware and ornamental arms. Watermelons packed in snow were couriered westwards from the foothills of the Tien Shan to Baghdad. Paper from Samarkand was in demand all over the Muslim world. Caravans the size of small armies – one numbered 5,000 men and 3,000 horses and camels – ranged back and forth to eastern Europe, trading silks, copper bowls and jewellery for furs, amber and sheep skins. From China came pottery and spices, in exchange for glass and horses, of which China could never get enough.