Saladin
Saladin took Jerusalem back from the crusaders in 1187 and let its population buy their freedom. He was a Kurd from Tikrit, born about 1137 into a family of soldiers serving the Zengid rulers of Syria, and went to Egypt in his twenties on his uncle's staff during a struggle for control of the Fatimid caliphate that the Zengids and the crusaders were both intervening in. He was made vizier of Egypt in 1169 at about thirty-two, abolished the Shia Fatimid caliphate two years later in favour of the Abbasids in Baghdad, and on his master Nur al-Din's death in 1174 spent a dozen years taking Damascus, Aleppo and Mosul from that man's heirs — most of his campaigning was against other Muslims. The war with the crusader states came after that consolidation. Guy of Lusignan marched an army across waterless country in July 1187 and was destroyed at Hattin, and the kingdom of Jerusalem had almost no one left to defend its walls. The city surrendered on terms in October. Balian of Ibelin negotiated a ransom of ten dinars a man, five a woman and one a child; thousands who could not pay were enslaved, and Saladin and his brother freed large numbers themselves and were criticised for it. The contrast with the massacre of 1099 was noted at the time and in Europe. He fought Richard I to a settlement in 1192 and died at Damascus the following year, having given away most of what he had. His European reputation is a curiosity in itself. He appears as a model of chivalry in Dante, Boccaccio, Walter Scott and Lessing, largely on the strength of the terms he gave at Jerusalem, and he was recovered as an Arab national symbol in the nineteenth century after centuries of relative obscurity in the region itself.
- Lived: 1137 CE – 1193 CE
- Nationality: Arab
- Roles: military_leader, leader
