by John Man
At first, the city’s leaders opted for resistance. Guy was clearly making his request under duress, and they had no faith in the deal. So Saladin attacked, undermining the outer-works and hauling mangonels to bombard the walls. Guy was once again allowed to summon the leaders from inside the city, and this time managed to talk sense into them. After ten days of siege, they surrendered and left with their families – but, since the town had not surrendered freely, Guy was not given his liberty.
Ascalon fell just in time to allow Saladin in before he welcomed a delegation from Jerusalem, summoned to discuss terms for their surrender as well. Saladin offered reasonable terms: no assault, a peaceful surrender, the inhabitants allowed an exit with their possessions. Respect for Christian Holy Places, future pilgrims welcomed. This was on 4 September, about midday, as people remembered, because by coincidence the sun dimmed and vanished, bathing the proceedings in the shadow of a total eclipse. Perhaps the Christians saw in this some good omen, for they refused the terms point-blank. Surrender the place where their Lord died? Never. They returned to prepare its defences.
Gaza’s Templar garrison surrendered in obedience to their master, who was then granted his freedom. Other strongholds followed: Darum, Ramla, Yubna, Latrun, Ibelin, Hebron, Bethlehem. Now all the Christians had left were Tyre, a few scattered castles and Jerusalem itself. Tyre or Jerusalem? Well, Saladin had been ill, might fall ill again, and if he did and had not captured Jerusalem, what of his reputation? As Saladin’s brother al-Adil put it, ‘If you die tonight, Jerusalem will stay in the hands of the Franks. Strive therefore to take it.’ And Tyre was a tough nut, especially with Conrad in command. An assault would delay things, allowing the possibility of reinforcements arriving from Europe.
Jerusalem it would be.
There now occurred one of those incidents that revealed the paradoxical, almost schizoid nature of the struggle between these two enemies, both claiming to observe chivalric ideals. Balian of Ibelin, head of one of the most eminent of Crusader families, had escaped from Hattin with Raymond and was now holed up in Tyre. His wife, Maria Comnena, was stuck in Jerusalem. (Ibelin, 30 kilometres east of Ascalon and almost the same distance from Jerusalem, is today’s Beit Guvrin.) Balian sent a message to Saladin, asking to be allowed to get her. Can you imagine any general in any recent war making a similar request to his main opponent? Since the seventeenth century, war has become ever more ‘total’; in Saladin’s day it was partial, with soldiers doubling as farmers, generals as leaders of towns and castles, enemies who became allies overnight. Why, of course Balian could retrieve his wife, if he agreed to spend only one night in Jerusalem and to travel unarmed. He agreed; but when he arrived he found the city leaderless and so keen to keep him that he had to stay, with profuse apologies to Saladin for breaking his promise. Saladin, ever polite, accepted the apology, and Balian duly set about finishing Jerusalem’s defences.
*
On Sunday, 20 September, Saladin arrived outside Jerusalem. It seemed formidable. The fortifications had been strengthened, the ditch around the walls deepened and mangonels set up, all defended by fighting men drawn from a population of 60,000, according to Saladin’s advisers. The west end, where he camped, was particularly forbidding: deep wadis, towers, a massive wall. Why focus the assault there? Possibly because the Citadel, also known as the Tower of David, looked like the key to the city. For the next five days, mangonels, crossbowmen and bowmen filled the air with missiles. Though holed in places, the walls held, and Saladin’s troops huddled beneath shields with their rock-damaged machines. Jerusalem seemed impregnable.
In fact, it was a city in crisis. Swollen by refugees, deprived of fighting men by the battle of Hattin, it had one man to every fifty women and children, and only fourteen knights. So Balian, the city’s new master, knighted every lad of noble birth aged sixteen or over, as well as thirty non-noblemen. He seized all the treasure he could find – the remainder of King Henry II’s cash, even silver from the roof of the Holy Sepulchre. He had a greater problem: the crisis was in part one of loyalty. There were Greek, Syrian and Armenian Christians who had been poorly treated by the westerners and would welcome Saladin as a liberator. The mass of common people saw disaster looming: William of Tyre says they begged the city’s leaders to surrender.
After five long days – days he could ill afford – Saladin decamped, raising hopes in the city that he was about to leave, but he was only shifting to the Mount of Olives, ready for an assault from the north and north-east, the place chosen by the Crusaders when they took the city almost a century before. In their new positions, as archers kept the walls clear of Christians, forty mangonels began a bombardment, with sappers working at the base of the walls to burn away the foundations. It took three days to breach them.
In the city, a proclamation called for fifty volunteers to guard the gap, promising a lavish reward of 5,000 gold coins. No one came forward.
Obviously the city was doomed. Officials came to talk terms. But now Saladin had the whip-hand, and chivalry played no further part in his strategy. Jerusalem, he claimed, could be cleansed only by Christian blood. He reverted to the terms he had set himself, to take the city by the sword. ‘I want to take Jerusalem, the way the Christians took it from the Muslims 91 years ago,’ he said, according to Imad al-Din. ‘They inundated it in blood . . . The men I will slaughter, and the women I will make slaves.’
Balian, the city’s leader, came to plead with Saladin, without effect. But he still had a strong card to play: the razed-earth tactic, which would leave Saladin with nothing worth having. His words – or rather his approximate words and his passion – were captured in two different versions. Here he is as quoted by Imad al-Din, promising an existential confrontation:
If we despair of having our lives spared, if unable to count on your kindness, we have everything to fear from your might, if we remain convinced that there is neither salvation nor happiness nor peace nor settlement remaining for us, no longer truces or security, no longer benevolence or generosity, we shall set out to meet our deaths; it will be a bloody struggle of despair; we shall exchange life for the void; we shall throw ourselves into the flames rather than accept destitution and shame.
And here are al-Athir’s more specific words:
O Sultan, be aware that this city holds a mass of people so great that God alone knows their number. They now hesitate to continue the fight, because they hope you will spare their lives as you have spared so many others . . . But if we see death is inevitable, then, by God, we will kill our own women and children and burn all that we possess. We will not leave you a single dinar of booty, not a single dirham, not a single man or woman to lead into captivity. Then we shall destroy the sacred rock, the al-Aqsa mosque, and many other sites; and we will kill the 5,000 Muslim prisoners we now hold, and will exterminate the mounts and all the beasts . . . not one of us will die without having killed several of you.
Was he serious? Who knows? But he had to be believed, because otherwise Saladin would have risked losing the prize he had been fighting for all this time. Only by coming to terms could he be sure of getting what he wanted. So it was as much for tactical reasons as personal ones that he abandoned vengeance for mercy. When executing a U-turn, a leader who values the opinions of his advisers may be greeted with opposition. Not so in this case. When he asked to be released from his earlier promise to take Jerusalem by force, they agreed, insisting only that the Christians be made to pay for their freedom.
Terms followed on 2 October. The Christians would ransom themselves, 10 dinars per man, 5 per woman, one per child, to be paid within forty days, and slavery for those who couldn’t. Horses and military gear were to be surrendered, all other possessions to be kept. Balian agreed in principle, then haggled for the 7,000 he said could not pay – the old, the widowed, the children. How about 30,000 dinars for them all? He, Balian, would pay. So it was agreed.
Imad al-Din returned from his convalescence in Damascus the following day and sa
w total chaos. The gates were shut, so that in theory no one could leave without payment and a receipt from a clerk, which was to be shown to the guards. But there was no way to check up on the clerks, the receipts or the guards. In practice, the clerks took whatever money was offered, handed over receipts, gave a cut to the guards, who let the prisoners go and ‘mislaid’ the receipts. Those without enough to ransom themselves – 20 or 30 dinars for a family was income for a year or more – climbed over the walls or were lowered in baskets or fled disguised as Muslims. Much of the ransom money went into the pockets of Saladin’s generals. ‘Complete negligence,’ Imad al-Din wrote. ‘General disorder. Anyone who made a gift under the table was released.’ Saladin himself, again giving way to his innate generosity, allowed the widows of top leaders to leave without payment. Those without ready cash or wagon-space put household goods up for sale. Traders had a field day, picking up furniture for a tenth of its true value. Patriarch Heraclius snatched 200,000 dinars worth of treasure from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – gold, carpets, ornaments – loaded the lot into several chariots and drove out with them. Balian himself escaped to Tyre. A Christian chronicler said he saw church treasures being sold off in the marketplace and churches turned into animal sheds and brothels. Even the ransom money that was collected vanished. Saladin himself gave away one day’s collection of 70,000 dinars, using ransom money a second time to ransom Christians of his own choosing, and simply granting others their freedom. His officials despaired at the waste. The great man himself was intensely relaxed. Christians everywhere ‘will speak of the blessings we have showered upon them’.
These were showered particularly on Christian women. Saladin fulfilled his promise to Balian, allowing his wife, Maria, to leave with her children, a nephew and all her possessions, even entertaining her and her children in his tent, in an incident told in sentimental terms by an anonymous Christian author:55
The Old French Continuation of William of Tyre.
When the children came before Saladin, he received them honourably as the children of free men, and had them taken off and given robes and jewels and ordered them to be given something to eat. After he had had them clothed and they had eaten, he took them and sat them on his knees, the one on the right and the other on his left, and began to sob. Some of his emirs who were there asked why he was weeping. He said that no one should wonder at it because the things of this world are merely on loan and are then recalled. ‘And I shall tell you the reason. For just as I am now disinheriting other men’s children, my own will find that after my death they will be disinherited.’
This author recorded other acts of charity as well, because he had an agenda: to explain Saladin’s success as God’s way to punish the Christians for their sins. ‘For the stench of adultery, of disgusting extravagance and of sin against nature would not let their prayers rise to God. God was so very angered at that people that he cleansed the city of them.’
Now I shall tell you of a great act of courtesy that Saladin did for the ladies of Jerusalem. The women and daughters of the knights who had been killed [at the battle of Hattin] had fled to Jerusalem. After they had been ransomed and had left the city, they came before Saladin and craved mercy. When he saw them he enquired who they were and what it was they were asking. They told him they were the wives and daughters of the knights who had been killed or taken in the battle. He asked what they wanted . . . They called on him for the sake of God to have mercy on them and give them counsel and aid. When Saladin saw them weeping, he had great pity on them and said they would be informed as to which of their husbands were alive and he would have them all freed . . . Then he ordered that the ladies and maidens whose fathers and lords had been killed in the battle should be provided for generously from his goods . . . He gave them so much that they praised God and man for the kindness and honour Saladin had showed them.
Queen Sibylla left to join her husband, King Guy, a prisoner in Nablus. Finally there was Stephanie, the widow of Reynald, the embodiment of Christian malevolence. She was freed, with a deal: that her son, Humphrey, captured at Hattin, would be released if she surrendered the two castles – Kerak and Montreal – she had inherited from her dead husband. It was agreed. Humphrey joined his mother in Kerak. But it didn’t work out that easily, because the garrisons refused to surrender. Stephanie, displaying an integrity that owed nothing to her husband, actually sent her son back into captivity. The gesture so appealed to Saladin that he released Humphrey anyway.
Well, negligence, disorder, wastage and ‘kindness’ were better outcomes than many other possible ones. Jihad on the one hand (for many jihadists resented Saladin’s generosity) and Christian fervour on the other might have led to extreme violence and appalling bloodshed: torture, rape, looting, destruction, thousands dead.
Saladin was never happier. As he proudly wrote to the caliph – or rather dictated to Imad al-Din in one of seventy letters taken down by his long-suffering secretary – he had fulfilled his main aim: to unify Islam.56 True, it had meant fighting other Muslims, but only for the greater good of unity. Tongues had wagged in criticism and the ‘cauldrons of men’s thoughts’ had boiled against him, but patient endurance had quenched the fire. Muslims had had their revenge for the loss of Jerusalem, and it had all been achieved without the bloodshed and destruction unleashed when the Christians had seized it. Islam was victorious twice over, militarily and morally.
Well, the Sunni heartland: north Africa, Arabia and Persia remained beyond his reach.
The first Friday for prayers in the al-Aqsa mosque after the taking of the city was 9 October 1187, and it was the first khutba (sermon) in eighty-eight years. Who would have the honour of pronouncing it? Imad al-Din described many imams standing by in hope, ‘preparing themselves, observing, insinuating’, as well they might, because Imad al-Din was ready to hand the chosen one a long black robe given him by the caliph, al-Nasir, himself. At the last minute, Saladin made his choice: the chief qadi (judge) of Aleppo, Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Zaki. Having put on Imad’s cloak, his voice trembling slightly, the qadi pronounced to a tight-packed and silent congregation the names of the rulers, the caliph and Saladin together; quoted the Quran (‘So the people that committed wrong were eliminated. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Universe’, 6:45); and spelled out the significance of the place and the occasion – the Muslims supreme, the Franks evicted, filth purified, the land of Abraham and the site of the Prophet’s ascent into Heaven all saved. And now on with jihad! Reconquer the remaining territories held by the infidel! Do not be like the woman who unravels her firmly spun web! ‘And may salvation be upon you, Salah al-Din Yussuf, son of Ayyub, you who have restored the spurned dignity of this nation!’
That was the formal part. Then the qadi was followed in the pulpit by someone with a more common touch, ibn Naja, a long-time friend of Saladin’s from Cairo. The themes were the same, but ibn Naja was an orator who knew how to pull at heartstrings. The congregation dissolved. ‘Some noisily wept; others shouted . . . Hearts softened; sadness was alleviated; howls rose up; tears flowed; sinners repented; the afflicted returned to God; the penitent moaned; the repentant lamented.’
As the city’s Franks scattered to Christian enclaves in Tyre, Tripoli or Alexandria, Jerusalem changed fast. Some 16,000 of the poor – those not covered by Balian’s contribution – were enslaved: there was a limit to Saladin’s generosity, but enslavement was better than mass murder. Churches and monasteries became places of Muslim worship, with new decorations and Quran reciters. In the Dome of the Rock, paintings and statues vanished, as did the gilded cross above the dome itself and a Christian cemetery nearby. There was some debate about what to do with the Holy Sepulchre, the fourth-century complex that marked Golgotha, the place of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. To leave it would attract Christian pilgrims; to destroy it was unthinkable. Well, it had been left untouched when the city was first taken by Muslims in the seventh century. Guided by considerations of tradition and commerce, Saladin deci
ded to leave it untouched once more and charge pilgrims to enter. It was put in the care of the Melkites, a fifth-century term for a sect that traces its rituals back to the Apostles. What should be done with another important institution, the House of the Hospitallers, the warrior-monks originally charged with the care of pilgrims, which was now a place for medical treatment? Many patients were still there. Saladin decreed that ten knights could remain for a year to care for them. Christian churches became Muslim charities and schools. The Tower of David, a Frankish fortress, acquired an imam.
All of this was a stark contrast to the mayhem and murder let loose on the city by the Christians in 1098. Everyone knew it, because those terrible things had happened only three generations before, and the children of 1187 had heard the story from their grandparents. Saladin performed countless acts of mercy and generosity to individuals throughout his life, but nothing formed his reputation more effectively than the retaking of Jerusalem. Strategy played a part in his decision – the need to preserve the Holy Places intact – but there were many of his advisers who wanted a violent conclusion; it was he alone who had the sense and humility to change his mind.
Of course, Muslims have admired him for it ever since. So have many Christians, down the centuries. Gibbon put it as well as anyone. In his day (he said), it had become a cliché to compare the humanity of Saladin with the massacre of the First Crusade. It is worth remembering that the Muslims in 1098 had put up a long struggle, whereas the Christians in 1187 surrendered by treaty. But still, ‘Justice is indeed due to the fidelity with which the Turkish conqueror fulfilled the conditions of the treaty; and he may be deservedly praised for the glance of pity which he cast on the misery of the vanquished . . . In these acts of mercy, the virtue of Saladin deserves our admiration and our love.’