Saladin: The Sultan Who Recaptured Jerusalem

Written by Simon Williams

Saladin united Egypt and Syria, crushed the Crusader army at Hattin in 1187, and recaptured Jerusalem after 88 years of Christian rule. Rather than repeat the massacre of 1099, he freed thousands by ransom and mercy, becoming Europe's most respected Muslim adversary.

• Full name: Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub
• Born: c. 1137 to 1138, Tikrit, in present-day Iraq
• Died: 4 March 1193, Damascus
• Title: Sultan of Egypt and Syria, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty
• Defining victory: Battle of Hattin, 4 July 1187
• Defining act: Recapture of Jerusalem, 2 October 1187
• Great rival: Richard I of England, the Lionheart, during the Third Crusade

On 2 October 1187, a queue of Christian prisoners filed out through the gates of Jerusalem, past a sultan who had every historical precedent to slaughter them where they stood. Eighty-eight years earlier, when the First Crusaders had taken the same city, they had massacred its Muslim and Jewish population in the streets, in the mosques, in their own homes. Saladin's soldiers had grown up on stories of that massacre. Now the city was his again, and he was expected to answer it in kind.

He did not. Some prisoners paid a ransom and walked free. Others could not pay, and Saladin's own brother asked for a thousand of them as a personal gift, then let every one of them go. Queens left with their households untouched. This is not the Saladin of popular imagination, the fearsome Saracen sultan of Crusader nightmares, nor quite the flawless knight of Walter Scott's fiction. He was something more specific and more interesting than either: a Kurdish soldier who rose from an exiled family to rule an empire, fought the greatest king in Europe to a standstill, and left almost nothing behind when he died except a reputation that outlasted every kingdom he built.

What follows is the actual sequence of events that made that reputation, from an obscure posting in Cairo to the gates of Jerusalem and the battlefield at Arsuf.

From Tikrit to Vizier: Saladin's Unlikely Rise

Saladin was born around 1137 or 1138 in Tikrit, on the night his family fled the town after his uncle, Asad ad-Din Shirkuh, killed a man in a dispute connected to the local governor. It was not an auspicious start. The family, Kurdish by origin, found refuge in the service of Imad ad-Din Zangi, the powerful ruler of Aleppo and Mosul, and Saladin grew up in Baalbek and Damascus with a reputation for religious study rather than martial promise.

His path to power ran through his uncle Shirkuh, a general under the Zangid ruler Nur ad-Din. Shirkuh led three military expeditions into Egypt during the 1160s, campaigns Saladin took part in as a young officer without any particular distinction. What changed his fortunes was not battlefield brilliance but survival. When Shirkuh died in 1169, shortly after securing control of Egypt, the succession fell, almost by accident of circumstance, to his nephew. At thirty-one, Saladin became both commander of the Syrian garrison in Egypt and vizier to the Fatimid caliph, the ceremonial ruler of a dynasty that had governed Egypt for two centuries.

I find this the most underrated detail in his entire career. Saladin did not seize power through conquest. He inherited an administrative post that nobody expected to matter, and built an empire out of it.

Ending a Caliphate, Uniting a Region

The Fatimid Caliphate was Shia, and Saladin's own loyalties, and those of his patron Nur ad-Din, lay with Sunni orthodoxy centred on the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. In 1171, with the last Fatimid caliph on his deathbed, Saladin quietly ordered the Friday prayers said in the name of the Abbasid caliph instead. The Fatimid Caliphate ended not with a battle but with a change of wording in a sermon, and Egypt's two centuries of Shia rule were over.

Nur ad-Din's death in 1174 removed the one figure who might have checked Saladin's growing independence. Over the following decade, Saladin absorbed Damascus, then moved against Nur ad-Din's own family and former lieutenants across Syria and northern Mesopotamia, gradually uniting Egypt and Syria under a single ruler for the first time in generations. This mattered enormously for what came next. The Crusader states had survived for eighty years partly because their Muslim neighbours were divided against each other. Saladin removed that division.

The Road to Hattin

Even a united Egypt and Syria might not have been enough to threaten the Kingdom of Jerusalem, had the kingdom's own nobility not handed Saladin his opportunity. Raynald of Chatillon, lord of Kerak, had built a career on raiding Muslim caravans and shipping routes in open defiance of the truces his own king had negotiated. In late 1186 or early 1187, Raynald attacked a caravan that, by some accounts, included members of Saladin's own family, while a truce was formally in effect. It was not the first time Raynald had done something like this, but this time Saladin's patience, always calculated rather than genuinely exhausted, ran out in public.

Saladin had spent years building the coalition capable of taking on the Crusader states as a unified force. Raynald gave him the pretext, and arguably the moral case within his own camp, to use it. He mobilised what was by the standards of the region an enormous army, reportedly drawing troops from across Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia, and marched into the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the summer of 1187 with a force the Crusaders could not hope to match in the open field.

The Battle of Hattin, 4 July 1187

The Crusader army that met Saladin at the Horns of Hattin, a pair of extinct volcanic peaks near the Sea of Galilee, was arguably the largest force the Kingdom of Jerusalem had ever assembled, and it walked into a trap of thirst and terrain. Saladin's forces controlled the water sources. The Crusaders, marching in high summer heat with no reliable access to water, arrived at Hattin exhausted and disorganised.

What followed on 4 July was less a battle than a collapse. Saladin's forces destroyed the Crusader army, capturing King Guy of Lusignan and seizing a fragment of the True Cross, the relic believed to be the actual wood of the crucifixion, which the Crusaders had carried into battle. Saladin personally executed Raynald of Chatillon, the man whose broken truce had triggered the campaign, citing his oath breaking rather than his faith as the reason.

The kingdom that had held Jerusalem for eighty-eight years lost its entire field army in a single afternoon, and there was almost nothing left standing between Saladin and the city itself.

The Recapture of Jerusalem

Jerusalem's defence fell to a man who had not planned to be there. Balian of Ibelin had asked Saladin for safe passage into the city purely to collect his wife and family, on the promise that he would not take up arms. Once inside, the city's desperate inhabitants begged him to lead its defence instead, and Saladin, when he learned of it, released Balian from his oath rather than hold him to a promise made in different circumstances.

The siege lasted less than two weeks before Balian negotiated a surrender. Saladin's initial terms were unconditional surrender with ransom, ten dinars for each man, five for each woman, two for each child, with those unable to pay facing slavery. Balian told him plainly that twenty thousand people in the city could never raise that sum. Saladin agreed to a bulk settlement, thirty thousand dinars to free seven thousand of the poorest. He then went further than the agreement required. Queen Sibylla and the dowager queen Maria Komnene left with their households untouched. Saladin's brother al-Adil asked for a thousand prisoners as his own gift and freed every one. Balian was granted five hundred more to release himself.

Set against the massacre that had followed the First Crusade's capture of the same city in 1099, this was a genuinely different kind of conquest, and it is the single act on which the widest part of Saladin's later reputation rests.

The Third Crusade and Richard the Lionheart

News of Jerusalem's fall reached Europe as a catastrophe, and it launched the Third Crusade, the campaign that would define Saladin's final years and produce his most famous rival. Richard I of England, alongside Philip II of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, led the response, though Frederick drowned before reaching the Holy Land. Richard's campaign culminated at the Battle of Arsuf on 7 September 1191, where Richard's disciplined cavalry charge broke Saladin's army in open battle for the only time in the entire war.

Even in defeat, Saladin's forces were never destroyed the way the Crusaders had been at Hattin. Richard could not translate his tactical victories into the recapture of Jerusalem itself, and the two commanders eventually settled the war through negotiation rather than further bloodshed. If you want to understand how close Richard came to reversing 1187, and why he ultimately could not, that campaign is worth reading in full, and it makes an ideal companion to Saladin's own story, since the two men never met in person yet came to define each other's legacies entirely through their commanders and correspondence. Readers who want to go deeper into Richard's side of that same campaign, including a free illustrated guide to his life, will find it in the Histories and Castles store alongside the rest of the Crusades collection.

Saladin's Legacy: The Chivalrous Sultan

The Treaty of Jaffa, signed in September 1192, ended the Third Crusade on terms that left Jerusalem under Muslim rule while guaranteeing Christian pilgrims safe access to the city. Saladin died only months later, on 4 March 1193 in Damascus, and the manner of his death did more for his legend than any battle. According to those closest to him, he had given away his fortune so completely that at his death his treasury held a single dinar of gold and forty dirhams of silver, not enough to cover his own funeral.

That detail, combined with the mercy shown at Jerusalem, is what carried Saladin into Western legend even as a defeated enemy. Walter Scott's 1825 novel The Talisman reimagined him as a physician in disguise, curing Richard the Lionheart's fever with his own hands, and that fictional image did more to shape European perceptions of Saladin than any chronicle. The same fascination persists today. Ridley Scott's 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven cast the Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud as Saladin opposite Orlando Bloom's Balian of Ibelin, and Massoud's performance was widely praised, including by a Muslim consultant Ridley Scott consulted directly during production, for capturing something true about the man behind eight centuries of myth. Readers exploring the wider Crusades collection at the Histories and Castles store will find pieces inspired by both men, from Templar ironwork to items drawn directly from this same conflict.

What makes Saladin worth returning to is not that he won. By the strict military accounting of the Third Crusade, Richard beat him more often than not. It is that he built a reputation for restraint in an age that rarely rewarded it, and that reputation has outlived every empire either man ever ruled.

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This article is part of the Crusades series. Read all articles at https://historiesandcastles.com/blogs/the-crusades.

Deepen Your Understanding

→ The History of the Crusades: the full sweep of the crusading era, from Urban II's call at Clermont to the fall of Acre in 1291

→ Balian of Ibelin: The Real Knight Behind Kingdom of Heaven: the real story behind Kingdom of Heaven, and the man Saladin let keep his word rather than his oath

→ Pope Urban II: The Pope Who Launched the Crusades: the man whose 1095 sermon set in motion everything Saladin later fought against

→ Baldwin IV of Jerusalem: The Leper King Who Defeated Saladin: the dying king who defeated Saladin at Montgisard a decade before Hattin, and whose death two years later opened the door to 1187

→ The Battle of Arsuf: Richard the Lionheart's decisive victory over Saladin, and the closest the Third Crusade came to reversing 1187

→ The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople: how the crusading ideal Saladin fought against was transformed beyond recognition within a generation of his death

→ The Council of Clermont and the Crusades: the sermon that launched the movement Saladin would spend his life fighting

→ Who Were the Knights Templar?: the military order that fought at Hattin and became one of Saladin's most determined adversaries

→ Godfrey of Bouillon: The Crusader Who Refused a Crown: the crusader who first captured Jerusalem in 1099, nearly a century before Saladin took it back

→ Templars in the Crusades: Faith, Fury, and Fortresses: the role of the Knights Templar across two centuries of crusading warfare

People Also Ask

Was Saladin a real historical figure?

Yes. Saladin, born Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub around 1137 to 1138 in Tikrit, was a real Kurdish military and political leader who became Sultan of Egypt and Syria and founded the Ayyubid dynasty. His career is documented by contemporaries who knew him personally, including his secretary and biographer Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, as well as by Crusader chroniclers writing from the opposing side. His most famous actions, the victory at Hattin and the recapture of Jerusalem in 1187, are among the best documented events of the entire crusading period.

Why is Saladin considered honourable by his enemies?

Saladin's reputation for honour rests largely on his conduct after recapturing Jerusalem in 1187. Rather than repeating the massacre the First Crusaders had inflicted on the city's population in 1099, he allowed the population to leave through ransom, showed mercy to those who could not pay, and let noblewomen depart with their households untouched. Crusader and Muslim chroniclers alike recorded this restraint, and it shaped his reputation in Europe for centuries, reinforced later by fictional portrayals such as Walter Scott's The Talisman.

Did Saladin ever meet Richard the Lionheart in person?

No verified historical evidence shows Saladin and Richard I meeting face to face. Their relationship, including the negotiations that produced the 1192 Treaty of Jaffa, was conducted through envoys, letters, and intermediaries, including Saladin's brother al-Adil. The two men fought each other's armies directly, most notably at the Battle of Arsuf in 1191, but the popular image of a personal encounter between them, most famously in Walter Scott's novel The Talisman, is fiction rather than documented history.

What was Saladin's greatest achievement?

Historians generally point to two achievements together rather than a single moment. Saladin united Egypt and Syria under one ruler for the first time in generations, ending decades of division that had allowed the Crusader states to survive, and he then destroyed the Kingdom of Jerusalem's field army at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 before recapturing Jerusalem itself. The political unification made the military victory possible, and the manner of the reconquest, with mercy rather than massacre, defined his legacy as much as the conquest itself.

How did Saladin die?

Saladin died of a fever on 4 March 1193 in Damascus, only months after concluding the Treaty of Jaffa with Richard I. Contemporary accounts state that he had given away so much of his personal wealth to the poor and to his soldiers during his lifetime that his treasury at death held only a single dinar of gold and forty dirhams of silver, not enough to cover his own funeral costs. He was buried in a mausoleum beside the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, where his tomb remains today.

What is the Ayyubid dynasty and did Saladin found it?

Yes, Saladin founded the Ayyubid dynasty, named after his father Najm ad-Din Ayyub. The dynasty ruled Egypt, much of Syria, and parts of Mesopotamia and Arabia from Saladin's rise to power in the 1170s until it was gradually displaced by the Mamluks through the middle of the thirteenth century. The Ayyubid period is significant for consolidating Sunni religious authority after nearly two centuries of Fatimid Shia rule in Egypt, and for the sustained military pressure it placed on the remaining Crusader states after Saladin's death.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

• Ibn Shaddad, Baha' al-Din (2001): The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin (al-Nawadir al-Sultaniyya wa'l-Mahasin al-Yusufiyya), trans. D.S. Richards, Crusade Texts in Translation 7, Ashgate. Written by Saladin's own secretary and military judge, this is the closest surviving account to a first-hand biography. A digitised copy is available via the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/rareexcellenthis00dsri
• Lyons, Malcolm Cameron and Jackson, D.E.P. (1982): Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War, Cambridge University Press. A foundational academic study drawing on unpublished Arabic court correspondence to reconstruct Saladin's political career in detail.
• Eddé, Anne-Marie (2011): Saladin, trans. Jane Marie Todd, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. A major modern biography that separates the historical Saladin from the layers of legend built up around him since the twelfth century. Publisher listing: hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674283978
• Phillips, Jonathan (2019): The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin, Yale University Press. The most recent full biography, weighing the historical record against the Western legend built up from Walter Scott onward.

Note: the account of Saladin's precise birth year (1137 versus 1138) varies between sources depending on calendar conversion from the Islamic Hijri calendar, and is treated here as an approximate date rather than a settled fact. The framing of Saladin as uniquely chivalrous compared to contemporaries is itself partly a product of nineteenth century Western romanticism, particularly Walter Scott's fiction, rather than a neutral historical assessment. This article notes his genuine documented acts of mercy at Jerusalem while treating the broader chivalrous knight characterisation as an interpretive legacy rather than an uncontested historical judgement.

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