Today
I continue my series of short biographies featuring the historical
figures who play a role in my biographical novels about Balian d'Ibelin.
Today I focus on the man who made Balian a historical figure: the Sultan Salah ad-Din or Saladin.
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| Saladin as Portrayed in the Hollywood Film "The Kingdom of Heaven" |
Salah ad-Din, or
Saladin has he is more commonly known in Western literature, has long been
viewed as the epitome of Saracen “chivalry.” Indeed, in the last century it
became common to suggest that, while the crusaders were treacherous barbarians,
Saladin stood out as a paragon of virtue and honor, a shining light of decency
and chivalry in an otherwise brutal age.
This is the view of Saladin that dictated the highly sympathetic
portrayal in Ridley Scott's film “The Kingdom of Heaven.”
This positive
view of Saladin in Western literature evolved slowly, starting in 13th century attempts to explain away a shameful defeat by making the adversary more worthy and more "like us" (see John France's excellent summary of this process in his book Hattin), and culminated in a biography of
Saladin published by Stanley Lane-Poole in 1898. While Lane-Poole made a major contribution to Western
scholarship by drawing upon Arab sources for his work, he unfortunately did so uncritically,
adopting without scruple or embarrassment the purely adulatory descriptions of
Saladin penned by the Sultan’s court biographers. The result is a work in which
Saladin is described as a man “whose chivalry and generosity excited the
admiration of the Crusaders.” More disturbing to the historian, Lane-Poole is
so completely under the spell of his Arab sources that he claims: “...civilization,
magnanimity, toleration, real chivalry, and gentle culture were all on the side
of the Saracens.”
While the latter statement alone discredits Lane-Poole as a serious historian of the crusades, other historians uncritically followed his lead. The
British Orientalist, H.A.R. Gibb, claims that Saladin inspired his followers
“not so much by the example of his personal courage and resolution — which were
undeniable — as by his unselfishness, his humility and generosity…. He was no
simpleton, but for that an utterly simple and transparently honest man…Guileless
himself, he never expected and seldom understood guile in others.”
Yet, as Andrew
Ehrenkreutz points out in his biography of Saladin published in 1972: “The
political, social and economic climate prevailing in the Near East in the
second half of the twelfth century was not conducive to seeking power through
the exercise of tolerance, magnanimity, chivalry or any altruistic behavior.” Ehrenkreutz goes on to catalogue in his
meticulously documented and detailed biography the number of times Saladin used
deceit, hypocrisy, propaganda, bribery, extortion, murder and, ultimately
aggressive war to establish an empire in the Near East. He notes that he spent much more time and
more resources fighting (and killing) fellow Muslims than he did fighting Christians,
and that Saladin was responsible for the loss of many more Sunni Muslim lives
than Christian ones. Ehrenkreutz concludes that: “Most of Saladin’s significant
historical accomplishments should be attributed to his military and
governmental experience, to his ruthless persecution of political opponents and
dissenters, to his vindictive belligerence and calculated opportunism, and to
his readiness to compromise religious ideals to political expediency.”
The real Saladin
probably lies somewhere between these two extreme portrayals of his character,
but what Ehrenkreutz makes abundantly clear is that even in those
well-documented cases of Saladin’s apparent magnanimity, we need to look closer
at his the motives. One case in point is
the return of the fortress of Azaz to the ruler of Aleppo. In June 1176, during one of Saladin’s several
attacks on the legitimate successor
regime of Nur al-Din in Aleppo, his army captured the fortress of Azaz. The
rest of the campaign against Sunni Aleppo, however, proved less successful, and
Saladin was forced to sue for terms. Eventually a treaty was negotiated. Then
according to Lane-Poole: “When the treaty was concluded, there came to Saladin
a young girl, the little sister of es-Salih [i.e., the man whose place Saladin
had usurped and driven from Damascus]. He
received her with honour and asked her: “What is thy wish?” “The castle of
Azaz,” she said. So he restored the castle to its old owners, loaded the
princess with presents, and escorted her back to the gate of Aleppo at the head
of his staff.” Now quite aside from the improbability of a Muslim maiden ever
setting foot outside the haram of her home (in this case her brother’s home),
had she spoken to a man not her relative (Saladin) she would have dishonored
her brother (the Sultan of Aleppo) and so most probably would have been stoned
to death. In short, Lane-Poole’s entire
story can only be fiction on the same par as an opera and utterly lacks understanding of Islamic culture in the 12th century. Furthermore, as Ehrenkreutz points out, the
return of Azaz was quite simply one of the terms of the negotiated treaty. No
“princess” had to plea for its return at all. Saladin surrendered it
diplomatically because it was virtually impossible to hold militarily after the
rest of his campaign collapsed.
Another example
is the apparent generosity of Saladin in providing Balian d’Ibelin with a
safe-conduct to cross Saracen-held territory to enter Jerusalem and remove his
wife and family after the Battle of Hattin but before the fall of Jerusalem.
Not only was this an apparently magnanimous gesture to a Christian lord and a
foe, it was topped by Saladin sending some of his own personal body-guard to
escort the Lady of Ibelin to safety after
her husband broke his word, and — ceding to immense pressure
from the Christian population in Jerusalem — agreed to take command of the
defense of the Holy City. But the “chivalrous” character of these gestures is
somewhat mitigated by the fact that the Lady of Ibelin was also a Byzantine
princess and a relation of the ruling Greek Emperor Isaac II Angelus, with whom
Saladin had just concluded a treaty of alliance. It was still a generous
gesture as Maria Comnena, Lady of Ibelin, was not a close relative of Isaac II,
but Saladin’s decision was certainly salted with self-interest.
Likewise, the
many instances in which Saladin treated former Sunni foes with leniency, often
awarding them new lands and titles within his growing empire, demonstrates not
so much his “gentleness” and “chivalry” as his cynical opportunism. If fighting
men, particularly the commanders of contingents of troops that offered
effective armed opposition to Saladin, could be bought with the promises of
riches and titles, then why fight? After all, the alternative (killing or
enslaving his opponents on capture) would only have increased the tenacity and
fervor of his opponents, and Saladin had a hard enough time subduing them as it
was. His mild treatment of defectors is not so much a mark of “gentleness” and “chivalry”
as of opportunism that was particularly effective against the fragmented and
jealous feudal lords in northern Syria.
Against these
documented cases of apparent “gentleness” and “chivalry” are a number of
equally well documented incidents of ruthlessness, brutality, duplicity and
vindictiveness that are incompatible with the Lane-Poole/Gibbs image of
Saladin. To name only a few, Saladin played a key role in eliminating the
Egyptian vizier Shawar, even if the actual murder may have been carried out by
someone else on the orders of the Fatimid caliph. (Shawar’s head and later
that of his son were delivered to Saladin’s uncle in a silver container; no
doubt it was the use of silver for transmitting the heads of murdered men that
made Lane-Poole conclude that “civilization” was always on the side of the
Muslims.)
Then, having won the confidence and trust of the Fatimid Caliph, who
appointed Saladin his vizier, Saladin worked systematically to undermine his
regime and carried out a bloody coup d’etat against the Fatimid elite as soon
as the Caliph conveniently died. While it might be argued that this was
justified by repeated Fatimid conspiracies against Saladin or by Sunni
orthodoxy’s hostility to Shiism, the same cannot be said of the slaughter of
the unarmed women and children of the Sudanese guard that the “gentle and
chivalrous” Saladin ordered burned alive in their homes. And if that weren’t
enough, Saladin ended the rebellion of their men by agreeing to spare their
lives if they left Cairo — only to break his word and slaughter them after they
had laid down their arms.
Saladin next
distinguished himself by waging war against the heir of his feudal overlord Nur
al-Din, the eleven-year-old al-Salih. First, however, he sent a letter swearing
humble and abject submission to al-Salih, ordered the young sultan’s name
invoked in the mosques of Egypt and minting coins in his name, evidently with
the intent of luring him into a sense of security. While vowing his allegiance to al-Salih,
Saladin also wrote to the under-aged Sultan’s regency council with the absurd
claim that: “if death had not prevented him, [Nur al-Din] would have bequeathed
to none other but me the guardianship and upbringing of his son.” (Ehrenkreutz,
p. 123). In fact, Nur al-Din allegedly said on his deathbed that “Nothing makes
me so sad except the thought of what will befall my family at the hands of
Yusef, the son of Ayyub [i.e. Saladin].”
Claiming a position he had been
neither formally nor informally granted by Nur ad-Din, Saladin set out to gain
control of Syria by force, using the resources he had accumulated by his
seizure of power in Egypt. The young
Sultan’s legal guardians fled to Aleppo and Saladin gained control of Damascus
without bloodshed, but the Turkish commanders and lords around the young Sultan
flatly refused to acknowledge Saladin’s bogus claims to be the “true” guardian
of the young Sultan. So Saladin marched his army against Aleppo. In northern
Syria, Saladin met with real resistance and was ultimately repelled — with a
little help from the Christians, who attacked his lines of communication, and
the assassins, who made an attempt on Saladin’s life. Saladin returned to
Damascus, where he gave up his pretense of serving the interests of al-Salih,
and demanded patents for his position as Sultan of Damascus from the Abbasid
caliph of Baghdad. He also issued coins in his own name. He then spent the
better part of the next ten years fighting bitter campaigns against the family
of Nur al-Din and their supporters based in Aleppo and Mosul and all across
northern Syria.
Throughout this
bloody, exhausting and bitter struggle for complete supremacy in Syria, Saladin
used the excuse of needing to unite Islam for jihad against the crusader
states. Ehrenkreuz notes: “…the overly long and bloody conflict in the Muslim
camp had been caused, not by Saladin’s ambition to build a united front against
the Crusaders, but by his opponents’ realistic refusal to recognize his claims
for other than they were: an adventurous and unscrupulous policy of personal
and territorial aggrandizement.”
Which is not to
say that Saladin did not fight the Christians too. In fact, Saladin undertook a
number of campaigns against the Christians including the invasion of 1177 that
ended Saladin’s complete humiliation at Montgisard, the invasion of 1179 that
ended in the routing of the Templars and the capture of nearly 300 Christian
knights and nobles on the Litani. The siege of Beirut in the same year, the
campaign that ended in the draw at Le Forbelet in 1182, the equally indecisive
campaign of 1183, and the sieges of Kerak in 1183 and 1184. This may sound like
an impressive track record, but given Saladin’s overwhelming strategic
advantages, and the fact that the Kingdom of Jerusalem was led by a youth
slowing dying of leprosy, his lack of success suggests either strategic and
tactical incompetence or anemic motivation.
Not that Saladin
didn’t demonstrate his hatred of the
Franks. When in August of 1178, less
than a year after Saladin’s scalding defeat at Montgisard, Christian prisoners
fell into Saladin’s hands he had them summarily executed, one by one, by
members of his retinue. Aside from it being against Sharia law to kill men who
had surrendered, it was hardly a demonstration of “chivalry.” Nor was it an
isolated incident. When the Christians involved in the Red Sea raids were
finally run-to-earth and captured, Saladin again ordered their execution. According
to Bernard Hamilton in his excellent work The
Leper King and His Heirs, the Christian prisoners were “taken to Mecca
where, during the great annual pilgrimage, they were…slaughtered ‘like animals
for sacrifice.’” Clearly these men were mercenaries and they had killed Muslim
pilgrims and captured Arab shipping so perhaps they were not worthy of mercy,
but the same cannot be said of the “unlucky common Christian soldier whom the
sultan had slain when he noticed a minor facial scratch his son al-Afdal [by
then in his late teens] sustained in the battle of Arsuf.” (Ehrenkreutz, p.
228.)
Last but not
least, no discussion of Saladin would be complete without reference to the
brutal execution of the Templars and Hospitallers taken captive at the Battle
of Hattin. On July 6, these knights and sergeants, bound and helpless, were
beheaded in public. Bartlett describes the scene in Downfall of the Crusader Kingdom as follows: “Saladin gave the task…to
a group of religious Sufis, holy men largely untrained in the arts of war. Some
of them took six or seven attempts to sever the heads of their victims…However
justified the death of these men might have been in military terms, the cruelty
and indignity of their death did Saladin no credit whatsoever. It was an act of
violence, almost barbarism, which Saladin’s apologists have all too frequently
glossed over.” (Bartlett, p. 204-205.) It is important to remember that this
massacre preceded — and may indeed have helped instigate — the slaughter of the
Muslim garrison of Acre by Richard the Lionheart four years later.
Saladin in a character in Book II of my three part biography of Balian d'Ibelin.
