The man and the name
Saladin is the European form of Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, a name meaning roughly “righteousness of the faith.” He was born around 1137 in Tikrit, in what is now Iraq, to a Kurdish family of military officers. His father and uncle served the Zengid ruler of Syria, Nur al-Din, and Saladin grew up in this world of Turkish and Kurdish military households. He was educated in Damascus and trained as a soldier and administrator.
His later fame can make it seem as though he was always destined to lead the Muslim response to the Crusaders. That is hindsight. In his early career he was a junior commander in an army serving someone else.
Rise in Egypt
In the 1160s, Egypt was ruled by the weak Fatimid caliphs, and rival forces, including the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem and Nur al-Din’s Syrian army, intervened in its politics. Saladin went to Egypt with his uncle Shirkuh as part of a Syrian expedition, and when Shirkuh died in 1169 Saladin became vizier for the Fatimid caliph, in practice the strongest figure in the country.
In 1171 he ended the Fatimid caliphate and restored Sunni allegiance to the Abbasids. Technically he still served Nur al-Din, but their relationship was tense. After Nur al-Din died in 1174, Saladin spent years extending his authority over Damascus, Aleppo and much of Syria and northern Iraq, partly by diplomacy and partly by force. Many of his campaigns in those years were against other Muslim rulers, not Crusaders. Some contemporaries criticized him for putting his family’s power ahead of the jihad, though others admired his success.
The dynasty he founded is known as the Ayyubid dynasty, after his father Ayyub.
Hattin and Jerusalem
By the 1180s Saladin controlled Egypt and large parts of Syria, which surrounded the Crusader states. Truces were made and broken. In July 1187 his army met a Crusader force at the Horns of Hattin, near the Sea of Galilee, and won a decisive victory, as described in the article on the Battle of Hattin. Many knights were captured, and the military strength of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was crippled.
Saladin then took a series of towns and, in October 1187, the city of Jerusalem after a siege. Accounts agree that the surrender involved a ransom system. Many people paid to leave, while others, especially the poor, were sold into slavery or remained captive, so the picture of general mercy needs qualification. Even so, compared with the massacre when the Crusaders took the city in 1099, the capture was relatively restrained, and this contributed to his positive reputation.
The Third Crusade
The loss of Jerusalem led to the Third Crusade (1189-1192), with several European leaders joining the campaign. The siege of Acre lasted for years, and the town was recaptured by the Crusaders in 1191. Richard the Lionheart of England led much of the campaign after that, and the two commanders fought at Arsuf and in other actions but neither could achieve complete victory. They negotiated a truce in 1192 that left the Crusaders with a strip of coastline and allowed Christian pilgrims access to Jerusalem. Saladin died in Damascus in 1193, not long after. The story of Richard and Saladin has been told in many forms, but their contact was mainly through envoys, and they never met face to face according to the usual accounts.
How he governed
Saladin built and repaired fortifications, including work on the citadel of Cairo, and supported mosques, schools and hospitals. He relied on family members and trusted emirs to govern different regions, which made the state a family confederation rather than a centralized bureaucracy. After his death his sons and brother quarreled over the inheritance, and it was his brother al-Adil who eventually emerged as the leading figure.
Two writers who knew him, Baha al-Din ibn Shaddad and Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, gave admiring accounts. Because they were part of his circle, their works are valuable but not neutral.
The legend in Europe
Saladin’s reputation in Europe is more complex than a simple enemy image. Even within a generation or so of his death, writers presented him as a noble and generous enemy, partly because Crusader narratives needed worthy opponents. Some later European legends even gave him a fictional Christian ancestry or said he was secretly knighted. Dante placed him among the virtuous non-Christians in the first circle of hell, in the Divine Comedy, alongside classical figures.
In the early nineteenth century Walter Scott’s novel The Talisman made him a romantic and honorable character for a wide readership. In modern times his image has been used again in the Muslim world, particularly in the twentieth century, as a symbol of unity and resistance, though what he symbolizes differs depending on the speaker and context. For centuries before that, within the Islamic world, he was not remembered nearly as prominently as Europeans assumed.
Weighing the record
A fair assessment includes several points. He was a skilled leader who united large territories and achieved a major victory. He was capable of generosity and also of severity, including the executions of some captured knights after Hattin. His rise involved Muslim-on-Muslim warfare, and his state did not survive long as a single unit.
The legend helps explain why his name endures, but the more modest story is the more useful one for understanding the period.