Pod Insights Gone Medieval Saladin: Crusher of the Crusades About this episode Who is the Sultan that beat back Richard the Lionheart, and earned his respect as a worthy foe?
Matt Lewis is joined by Professor Jonathan Phillips to delve into the life and legacy of Saladin, the formidable Muslim leader who reclaimed Jerusalem for Islam and triggered the Third Crusade. They discuss Saladin’s Kurdish origins, his strategic rise to power in Egypt, and the crucial battles that culminated in his historic victory at the Battle of Hattin.
Prepare to navigate centuries of historical narratives, military strategies, and the enduring legacy of one of medieval history's most iconic figures.
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Richard the Lionheart
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Medieval Jerusalem
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Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/3g3JTtYt3iIJ68fovcg22x
Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Edited and produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.
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1:19 Matt Lewis? Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.
1:59 Matt Lewis? Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm Matt Lewis. Two names tend to dominate any account of the Third Crusade in the Holy Land. From the Christian side, Richard the Lionheart bursts onto the scene to steal any glory that's going, which didn't really win him any friends. Perhaps the greatest respect he achieved during the campaign came from his enemy, with whom he developed a close relationship that might look a little like friendship. Saladin led the Muslim forces in that crusade, but how did he rise to rule such a vast and disparate empire? Who was Saladin? And how did he become so successful that he drove the Lionheart from the Holy Land? To answer all these questions and more, I'm delighted to be joined by Jonathan Phillips.
2:43 Matt Lewis? Jonathan's book, The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin, is out now, and as Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway University of London, he's perfectly placed to introduce us to Saladin. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Jonathan, it's great to have you with us.
2:59 Speaker 02 Thank you for asking me.
3:00 Matt Lewis? Looking forward to finding out more about Saladin. So I wondered if you could help us out to begin with to introduce him with a little bit of who Saladin is, when is he born, and what is his family situation?
3:11 Speaker 02 Saladin is one of the great figures of medieval history. He was born in 1137 in Crete, which is now in Iraq. He's famous in history as being the man who recaptured Jerusalem for Islam, defeated the Crusaders, crushed them at the Battle of Patene, and then took back the Holy City. He then faced off against Richard the Lionheart, I guess two of the epic figures of medieval history. They never actually met, but they faced each other in the Third Crusade, biggest crusade of the medieval period, which he ends up flending off and holds on to Jerusalem. So that really is his claim to fame. But there's a lot more to him than that, and he's an interesting figure, there's some tensions and contradictions in those kinds of images, and there's more to him about his life than simply a man who was fighting battles.
3:53 Matt Lewis? And is Saladin born into a position of nobility of any kind? He would obviously rise right to the very top, but is he of more humble beginnings than we might think?
4:02 Speaker 02 That's an interesting question. Ethnically, he's Kurdish. And most of the ruling families of what we would say is now Syria are Turkic. They're both Sunni Muslims, but this family is Kurdish. So in some ways that makes him a little bit of an outsider. Although the Turks and the Kurds work well alongside one another. His family is of status. His father is called Ayub and the dynasty is called the Ayubids. And his uncle is a man called Shurku. Shurku is a great warrior. We know what he looks like. We have a great description. He's a sort of short guy with a cataract. He sort of kind of looks a little bit something out of Lord of the Rings. I suppose is how I rather crudely imagine him. He's the great warrior and Nur al-Din selects him to lead his various battles and invasions. His father, Ayub, is rather more cerebral. He's a very good administrator.
4:47 Speaker 02 And I think Saladin gets a bit from both of them. You can see the kind of blend that he's got there. This Kurdish family rises up in the service of a man called Nur al-Din. And he is an important figure in Saladin's story. He's the man who took what we would say the jihad, the Muslim holy war. You might say the counter crusade to the Franks, the people who are the descendants of the Crusaders who are living in the Holy Land. He's a really important figure.
5:12 Matt Lewis? And having been born into an ethnically Kurdish family, how does Saladin come into contact with the Zengi dynasty in Egypt? How closely is Egypt aligned to the rest of the Near East at this point?
5:25 Speaker 02 There's a big fracture in the Muslim Near East, which is the Sunni Shiite split, which is the sort of basic division in Islam that's been there for centuries. And actually where that kind of fault line lies at this time is that Egypt is ruled by a Fatimid Shiite dynasty. And what we would say is Syria and Iraq are by Sunni Muslims. So you've got that inbuilt tension. And then in the middle, you've got the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem. So you've got three competing parties there. But Saladin is very much part of Nur al-Din, this they call the Zengids, his ruling empire, should we say, that's in Syria. And they're important. And one, Nur al-Din, is important is that when the first crusade turned up, the Muslim Near East was very fragmented. That's one of the reasons it succeeds. And also because the idea of jihad, the counter crusade, the Muslim holy war is inabeyance.
6:10 Speaker 02 There's not really many people who are pushing it. And under Noor al-Din, you've got a strong warrior and you've got a very pious man. And he connects the religious classes and the noble classes and gives the jihad a really sharp, strong edge, physically and I guess intellectually. That's why Noor al-Din is, if you like, the important figure in setting the scene for Saladin's later successes.
6:33 Matt Lewis? Yeah. How does Saladin then begin to rise to power? Does he come to the attention of Noor al-Din through his family connections?
6:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's the family that does it. It's his father, Ayub, and his uncle, Shurku, who are, if you like, the sort of the way in. They're both very important to Noor al-Din in administration and in fighting. And in the 1160s, Fatimid Egypt is weak, but it's also very wealthy. And it's this great big sort of soft, attractive target that the Franks in Jerusalem, the Christians in Jerusalem want and Noor al-Din wants. You want it because strategically, holding Egypt will allow you to pressure the Crusaders or vice versa. And you want it because of the money. If you've got the wealth of Egypt, which is, Alexandria is by a massive factor the wealthiest portion of the Mediterranean, you will have the resource to really make life very difficult for whoever you're fighting. So it's a competition. And Noor al-Din asks Shurku to lead his army.
7:23 Speaker 02 And so there's five invasions of Egypt in the space of about seven or eight years. Very sort of complicated back and forward. The Egyptian rulers are sort of playing one side off against the other. But in January 1169, Shurku takes control of Egypt for Noor al-Din and the Sunni Syrian Turks. And that is a great breakthrough. It's a really bad moment for the king of Jerusalem. So that's an important step.
7:46 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and I guess from the Crusaders' point of view, what they're seeing happening around them is the removal of that fracture between the Muslim world that has enabled them to have a degree of success. So where there were three sides, there is a danger that there will now become two, which means that the other side only have the Christians to focus on.
8:04 Speaker 02 That's an important point. It also allows Nooruddin to push himself as the leader of Sunni Islam, not in the spiritual sense, but as the sort of figurehead for Sunni Islam. Look, I've broken the power of the Shiites in Egypt, and that is an important kind of propaganda piece.
8:19 Matt Lewis? So having conquered Egypt, how does Saladin move to a position of power? I mean, he will end up being appointed by Nooruddin as vizier and then Sultan of Egypt. How does he achieve that sort of rise to power?
8:33 Speaker 02 The rise to power is not planned. His uncle Shuq is the great warrior, has taken control of Egypt in January 1169. Only about two months later, this man enjoys eating and overeats and dies, expires from overeating. And so you have to choose somebody new to succeed him. And there's a few candidates, and Saladin, about whom we don't really know much at this time. It's the one chosen. There's some suggestion he's chosen because people don't think he's going to be terribly good and could be pushed around a bit. That was a mistake because that was completely wrong. I suspect people had seen that he was an effective and competent administrator, and he's clearly got some personal charisma. He's been involved in a siege in Alexandria before, in which he performed well. So I think he's a good candidate.
9:17 Speaker 02 Turns out to be an exceptional candidate, of course. So he gets control of Egypt as early as March 1169, and it's from there he begins to consolidate his power. One of the things I think that's quite interesting about him, we sort of think about battles and warfare in this thing. I think he's really quick in wanting to understand how Egypt operates. He grew up in Damascus, an urban environment, an equestrian environment. Egypt's really different. I mean, it's kind of ruled by the River Nile, thousands of years of different tradition. And he asks somebody to write him a book of etiquette of Egypt. How does this place operate? He asks for a kind of doomsday book equivalent, an economic survey of Egypt. He wants to understand what he's got under his control. There's quite interesting insights into the way that he's thinking a long game here.
10:03 Matt Lewis? Yeah, it's fascinating. You mentioned that Noor al-Din perhaps saw in him the best of both his father and his uncle, a competent administrator, but someone who could also lead militarily and therefore he may have seemed like someone who would be good to put in charge of Egypt. But it sounds like he's also operating a Roman way of doing things in that he's not going in and changing all of the structures of power. He's allowing himself to be absorbed into them.
10:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, he's working with the grain, if you see what I mean. Yeah, as you say, you know, you could go in and try and smash the existing structure up. But to do that, you've got to, you've got to have vast numbers of people. He's occurred in a Sunni Syrian and Turkish invasion force. So he's an outsider of outsiders. And there's still going to be people who are going to try and resist his rise to power in Egypt. So yeah, he's very astute. He's not overreaching himself early on. I mean, for the first couple of years, the young Fatimid Shiar caliph is still alive. So he kind of keeps him under confinement and this young man dies of natural causes, we hear, after a couple of years and is not then replaced. So that's the moment when the Sunnis, if you like, take religious control of Egypt. But effectively, they've got the political control already.
11:10 Matt Lewis? And how long is Saladin solely in Egypt? And what do we see him doing with his power there? How is he ruling?
11:17 Speaker 02 One thing that's fairly rapidly obvious with Saladin and his family is that he is building a dynastic kind of power base in Egypt. His father comes down to be the treasurer. His family work with him. That's one of the secrets of his success is that the Ayubid family stick with him. You think of the number of times families squabble throughout history and kind of derail each other. But the Ayubids can see Saladin as he's kind of their front man. As a man who's very effective, he's obviously very good with people. That's one of his great strengths. He's a good diplomat. He's clearly good at personal relations and rewarding people. So he really is, if you like, establishing a dynastic base in Egypt. It's such a wealthy base.
11:59 Speaker 02 So things are looking pretty good for the Ayubids, which of course starts to worry Noor al-Din. And tensions begin to creep in. Noor al-Din asks him to come and fight at the great castle of Kerak in Transjordan. Come and join me in besieging Kerak. This is the Pinzan movement from Syria and Egypt that's kind of been envisaged. And Saladin, well, ums and ahs, oh, there's trouble in Cairo. I can't make it, you know, it'd be dangerous. And this is just clearly making excuses. He's worried that Nureddin would arrest him or sort of strip him of authority because it's too obvious what's happening. You can see him as the great hero, the man who recovered Jerusalem for Islam, but you have to say alongside that, he isn't a usurper in some senses and an empire builder. I don't think any of those things are contradictory. Nureddin usurped the previous rulers of Damascus, so it's kind of just what's
12:43 Speaker 02 done. But that's what's happening. So there's this tension building up with Nureddin.
12:48 Matt Lewis? Yeah, I was going to ask about that, how that tension develops. We presumably are going to see a change in the relationship between Nureddin and Saladin. If Saladin is no longer behaving in the way that Nureddin, having appointed him, is expecting him to behave, does that tension ever reach a kind of crisis point?
13:04 Speaker 02 Absolutely. You know, it's growing and growing in the early 1170s. And there comes a point in early 1174 when Nureddin gathers an army and he's going to march to Egypt to try and bring his young lieutenant to heal. So we're looking at being on the verge of civil war here, which is quite a startling thought. But then what happens with Saladin, as happens a few times in Saladin's career, to be a successful ruler, you need to be lucky. And he's very fortunate because in May 1174, Nureddin, just as he's about to set out, dies. He gets sick and he dies. And so that gives Saladin such a breathing space. It really is one of those moments that, yeah, it would have been civil war, he could have been defeated. But
13:44 Speaker 02 it gives him a kind of open space, not least because Nureddin is succeeded by an 11-year-old boy. So that gives Saladin some scope to work with. He's lucky then, two or three months later, when the king of Jerusalem, Amorik, who's a very kind of robust, energetic, impressive king of Jerusalem, he also dies of natural causes. And he is succeeded by a teenage boy who has leprosy. So January 1174, it's Nureddin and Amorik, two formidable rulers. By the autumn of that year, they both died and both been succeeded by boys. So wow, what a chance for Saladin.
14:18 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And I guess from Saladin's reputational point of view as well, it saves him ever having to have turned on his master, ever having to have, you know, been the cause of a civil war amongst the Muslims again.
14:29 Speaker 02 Not quite, because after 1174, he then moves into Syria. And he makes it clear that he wants to take over the Zenid empire. He says, oh, I'll look after the young successor. I'll be his guardian. And nobody really buys into that. He gets hold of Damascus quite quickly, that's where he grew up, he has quite a lot of support there, he marries Nuruddin's widow, and so that is fairly smooth. But when he wants to really take Nuruddin's heartlands up in Aleppo and Mosul, there's a lot of opposition. And there are a couple of occasions where there's battles. So again, Saladin, you think of him fighting crusaders, fighting Christians, does end up in a couple of military engagements and certainly some sieges against his fellow Sunni Muslims.
15:10 Matt Lewis? And does he make any effort to justify fighting fellow Muslims when there is a Christian crusader army sort of next door to the pair of them? Does he make any effort to reconcile that infighting between the Muslims that detracts from focusing on the Christians?
15:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, you've hit upon a really, I suppose for him, a very sensitive issue there. One of the things about Saladin, he's got great propagandists, the people around him are very good at churning out a positive image of Saladin. They try and say that really he is the most effective man to take the fight to the Christians. He is the man who will enable Sunni Muslims to recover Islam's third most important city, Jerusalem, for their faith. So it's in a sense of pushing his candidacy as the best person possible. That's really one of the methods that he used. But he's absolutely criticised for this from time to time. The caliphate Baghdad is very suspicious of him. There's no that I'm not going to grant you authority over Aleppo. That should be the Zengids. So there is a tension, part of which he tries to allay
16:08 Speaker 02 by fighting the Franks, by fighting the Christians of Jerusalem. And it doesn't always go very well. There's a battle called Mojizad in 1177, where his forces are absolutely hammered, and he's quite lucky to escape. So there's a period, again, we know the end result, he's going to get Jerusalem back, but there's a period in which he's not doing terribly well.
16:28 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and I guess those, you touched on the sources about Saladin then, are they...
16:35 Matt Lewis? Predominantly coming from Saladin, do we need to be conscious when we're studying the sources about Saladin of the inherent bias? Or do we see lots of criticism of him too?
16:45 Speaker 02 A lot of the sources that we have about Saladin are very, very positive. And a lot of them are written by people very close to him. I think, again, another reason why he's successful, he's got a really good group of administrators around him, really clever, loyal people who support him very, very closely. But they also are responsible for some of the written accounts that we have of his life. And there's a danger that they look a bit too good to be true. You know, this man, if you read them fairly superficially, does appear to be almost perfect. There's a genre called Mirrors for Princes, Advice Book for Princes. And it seems as if he's merciful, generous, brave, pious, cultured. And it's almost like a sort of tick box exercise. And some scholars have sort of said, well, this, you know, is this too good to be true? Is it just kind of almost a literary confection?
17:29 Speaker 02 But against that, I guess you have to look at what he achieved. And you also have to look at some other sources. There's one that's quite interesting, a man called Ibn Jubayr, who's a Spanish Muslim pilgrim, who visits King of Jerusalem and the Muslim lands in 1184, 85. And then he goes back to Spain. He could have written anything he liked about Saladin. He's not in his pay, he's hundreds of miles from him, and he talks about him in incredibly positive terms. But you could even flick it the other way and see what the Franks of Jerusalem had to say. There's a man called Willie McTire, who's the great historian of the kingdom. And he, in the early 1180s, again, without knowing what happens in Jerusalem, says that there's three things you need to know about Saladin. He's wise in council, got good people around him, he's valiant in war, and so he's a good warrior.
18:14 Speaker 02 But thirdly, he's generous beyond measure, and for that reason alone, you need to be fearful of him. And I think his generosity is an interesting characteristic to be fearful of.
18:23 Matt Lewis? Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting kind of third wheel on that vehicle, isn't it? That, you know, he's a good administrator and he's a good soldier, but actually what you should fear most is the fact that he's generous.
18:34 Speaker 02 That generosity is something that's greatly esteemed in Western culture at the time and in the Muslim Near East. But he's doing it to get support. He has the wealth of Egypt, as I said, you know, he knows how wealthy Egypt is, so he can dole it out to his supporters. He dols it out not just to nobles, but to the religious classes. So they pray for him, they again, push his kind of perspective. He's very clever in using generosity to bind people to him. Let's be clear, this is not always charity. This is, I give you this and you give me your support back. But he uses it very, very effectively, ceremonially, publicly. I think that's a way to think of it, visually rewarding people with a public recognition of their support and service. We're obviously pre-internet, pre-television.
19:17 Speaker 02 People see, display, you're given robes by him that you can then take away, or that kind of thing. It's very, very effective.
19:24 Matt Lewis? Yeah, powerful kind of lever of almost soft power to balance out the hard power that he clearly possesses as well. And how successful is Saladin in his efforts to take over Syria and the Zenyid Empire? At this point, can we see him trying to build an empire of his own? Does he come close to having an empire at this point?
19:42 Speaker 02 He gets Damascus pretty quickly, but then it takes him quite a long time to persuade the people of Aleppo to submit to him and to work with him. And they do eventually come round, if you like, to the pressure that he puts on them. Takes him another few years to get Mosul. And once you've got Mosul, Aleppo and Damascus, you've got the sort of crucial trio of cities that you need to have the strength, the resource, and you need them on your side to then take on the Crusaders. He has periodically, as I say, he got hammered in that Battle of Mozhaysad. The Crusaders exploit that by starting to build a huge castle, just about a day's ride from Damascus. And that again is really putting pressure on him. And so they can see that he's a bit vulnerable.
20:23 Speaker 02 He manages to break into that castle and destroy it. But there's other people, a man called Rehald of Chatiyot, who's a very, very mercurial, dangerous figure, who again puts pressure on Saladin from time to time.
20:34 Matt Lewis? And how do we see Saladin dealing with those pressures that he's experiencing? Is it, I mean, similar to his arrival in Egypt? Is he measuring up his situation? Is he weighing up his enemies and trying to get the measure of everybody around him? Or do we see him kind of lashing out at these sort of embarrassing defeats?
20:52 Speaker 02 A bit of both. I think he's constantly trying to build up his resource and trying to assemble this this coalition of the great Muslim cities of Syria. Rehald of Chatiyot is a thorn in his side. This is a man who spent 15 years in a prison, a Muslim prisoner, is a prisoner of war, but when he gets out, holds the powerful Lordship of Kerak in what we now say is Jordan. And in 1182, launches a very, very provocative raid. He sends some ships down to the Red Sea, that sail down and look as if they're going to attack Medina, the prophet's tomb. And this is an outrageous and very left field bit of thinking and it embarrasses Saladin beyond all. You know, he's posing as the champion of Islam and here you are with people threatening the Prophet's tomb. And of course, it's a really, a really effective
21:35 Speaker 02 way of trying to unsettle him. When he captures these men, the prisoners are then, contrary to Islamic law, they surrender, they should be spared, they are sent around the centres of his power and publicly executed, just to show his anger and his embarrassment.
21:49 Matt Lewis? And as he's improving his level of control over all of these regions, do we have a real sense of what Saladin's end game is, what his ultimate goal is? Is he keen to to control all of the former Zenkid lands? Is he trying to build a united Muslim empire? Is he going to drive out the Christians? Is it all of those things? Is uniting the Muslim world a step towards driving out the Christians? Does he have a kind of priority list that he's working to?
22:15 Speaker 02 Yes, I think his ultimate goal is to follow on from Nur al-Din's ultimate goal, which is to recover Jerusalem for Islam. But to do that, he would argue, and manifestly he's intending, is to establish an Ayubid empire, which is basically Syria, Iraq, Egypt. He's got a bit of the Yemen too. These are the kind of core, the sort of heartlands of the Ayubids. And he doesn't see those two things as contradictory. He would argue, you need all those things to then take on the Franks and recover Jerusalem. But there's a clear line. I mean, Saladin is undoubtedly a pious man. I think Nur al-Din is probably more pious. But I don't think we should question Saladin's religiosity. He's got a lot of religious men around him. He's certainly a great sponsor of the religious classes.
22:59 Speaker 02 And they are producing propaganda stressing the importance of Jerusalem for Muslims and the need to remove the Christians from the Holy City.
23:06 Matt Lewis? So is he almost trying to make an effort to sell his campaigns against fellow Muslims as the pain that needs to be gone through to achieve the ultimate goal of expelling the Christians?
23:17 Speaker 02 Yes, I'm not sure he put it quite like that. But if we all work together, under me, this is what we're going to achieve. So there's a sense of, join me with a sort of shared goal. That's the impression that he's trying to create. But everybody sees that it's empire building. There's no doubt about it. Because as I said, this is what Nur al-Din has done before. It's kind of the way that people operate.
23:50 Speaker 03 After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Ellipsum, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
24:32 Matt Lewis? And when we get to 1186, Saladin comes very close to dying from an illness. Just as an interesting kind of what if, if he had died at that point, how do you think Saladin might have been remembered as kind of just another self-interested Muslim warlord? It seems like he wouldn't have the same kind of glittering reputation that he has now.
24:52 Speaker 02 It's a really interesting question. Of course, yes, he wouldn't have the great achievement on his CV of recovering Jerusalem. And he hadn't been massively successful against the Franks, against the Crusaders at that point either. So I suppose conquering Egypt for the Sunnis would have been the big achievement and ruling it. I think he'd be remembered for that. But no, he certainly wouldn't have the reputation that's lasted down the centuries, which to my mind is undoubtedly based on the recovery of Jerusalem.
25:20 Matt Lewis? And his even faster rise, if you like, almost follows hard on the heels of that near-death experience. In 1187, he has a kind of revelatory year for him, you know, an incredibly successful year. I wonder if you could talk us through a little bit about what happens at the Battle of Hattin and why that's such an important moment for Saladin?
25:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, just before doing so, you mentioned his illness a couple of times, and I think those are quite interesting. He is sick for so much of the last six or seven years of his life, and I think that's quite easy to forget. And it's very interesting to explore the health struggles that he faces again. You kind of think of him as a warrior or a leader of the people of Islam, but he had to face a lot of health difficulties in 1186. He very nearly dies, as you say, and I think that really brings home to him, he needs to get on with this. And in fact, there's a conversation recorded with his brother saying, look, you know, you could die at any time. You are the man who holds this together. We need to get cracking on Jerusalem now. So there's a strong sense of having spent these 13 years building up this empire, this confederation of lands, you have got to start defeating the
26:24 Speaker 02 Christians and you really need to do it quite quickly for reasons of your health. But also, you keep saying, yes, this is why we're doing it. This is why you've got to work with me. You've got to deliver. Otherwise, people will think, oh, come on, he doesn't mean it.
26:36 Matt Lewis? Yeah, so there's a danger that if he drags it out for too long, he will simply be seen as trying to conquer fellow Muslims without ever turning his attention to the Christians and the Crusaders.
26:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's all talk and no action. And so in 1187, he has gathered, was all Aleppo, Damascus, Egypt, and he's looking for an excuse to fight. And a reinald of Chatiyan, this rather sort of out of control baron that we've talked about, attacks a caravan, breaks a truce, a trade caravan that's moving through his lands. And this breaking of a truce with the Franks is Saladin's excuse to invade. And in the spring of 1187, he gathers all his forces together in a bigger way that he's ever done before. And he then invades the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He moves towards Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee and catches a castle there in which is the wife of one of the Frankish nobles. So it's a great challenge to the chivalric integrity of
27:28 Speaker 02 the Franks. There is a genuine maiden in distress in the castle. Should they try and fight and rescue her? Or should they not? And that's the dilemma at Saladin's, I will say brilliance in putting them under that kind of pressure. Are you going to fight? Or are you not going to fight? And that's really the key question in medieval warfare, particularly in the Crusader states.
27:48 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and I guess, you know, every general in Saladin's position is looking for a way to force the enemy's hand. And he's sort of asking that unanswerable question, you know, are you going to come and fight my huge army to save this maiden? Or are you going to leave her in the peril that she finds herself in and expose yourself as unchivalric and lacking in bravery to some extent? So he's kind of asking an unanswerable question of the Christians at this point.
28:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, putting that question to them is the clever bit because the Franks, two or three times in the previous four or five years, Saladin has kind of not invaded fully, but sort of launched quite big incursions and they've avoided fighting him. They're like staying out of the reach of a boxer's punch. Because if you fight a battle, as we're about to find out, the danger is you lose. And then given that if you've got limited resources, you've really got sort of one shot at it. But if you don't fight, you stay safe. But if you stay safe at a cost, it doesn't look very brave, doesn't look very noble. You'll lose crops and some villages and things like that. So there's nice tension that Saladin is looking to exploit again. He also knows that the man who's the king of Jerusalem, a man called Ghi, had been the regent at one of his earlier raids, and he loses the regency, he's stripped
28:57 Speaker 02 of the regency for allegedly not being brave enough. There's political reasons behind that. But it's used as a lever against him. And Saladin again is pressing on that.
29:06 Matt Lewis? Yeah, he's kind of understanding the levers that he's able to pull very, very well, isn't he? So does he succeed in luring the Crusaders to him?
29:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, he does. There's a wonderful scene in the tent of the Crusaders that the king has decided not to march. He's not going to rise to the temptation. But then late at night, the master of the Templars comes to him. You've got to imagine a very sort of melodramatic sort of candlelit scene, I think, in a tent and says, come on, remember what happened last time you didn't fight. You were booted out. And as a Templar, he is dedicated to fighting Muslims. And he says, come on, you've got to force this. And so whenever he wakes up the following morning, there's a sort of rather shock order, we are going to march. And the king says, you know, yeah, this is what's happening now, folks. Absolutely. Saladin has tempted them into a 32 kilometer march across a parched plateau in the middle
29:56 Speaker 02 of Palestine. And that's a really dangerous, risky thing to do. There's hardly any water supply. We're in early July, incredible heat. And Saladin's got more men, he's got arrows, he's got camels bringing up huge amounts of water. And the Frankish army is just not very strong. I mean, a lot of them are not professional soldiers. They've just been dragged off the fields or the towns. And they're a pretty ramshackle lot, many of them, trying to do this 32 kilometer march. And it's hopeless.
30:24 Matt Lewis? The film Kingdom of Heaven, you know, presents the Battle of Hattin as incredibly brutal, but also as a big and stupid mistake by the Crusaders. How accurate do you think that is? Is this the Crusaders hubris? Is this just a stupid error that they make in trying to face Saladin here?
30:40 Speaker 02 Yes, it's as simple as that. Yes, he is under so much pressure to make something happen. He's talked the talk for so long and he's set the trap and they fall for it. And once they start marching, he's able to fall in around them, harass them with arrows. When it's at night, he sets the dry sort of brush on fire, the smoke goes into the lungs of these people. They've hardly got any water. So he's shattering them around. The other thing he's got is noise, a huge amount of drumming and discord and trumpets, all putting pressure on the Crusaders. And in the end, they're forced into a place called the Horns of Hattin, which is an old volcanic crater. And they make their last stand there, but to no avail. And the banner falls and the King of Jerusalem is captured.
31:25 Matt Lewis? And I mean, it's such a crushing victory for the Crusaders too, that it effectively opens the way to Jerusalem for Saladin. Is this the realisation of everything that he'd been trying to achieve? So we've talked about, you know, he's promised so much for so long. Is this him finally delivering very, very quickly?
31:43 Speaker 02 Absolutely. He's utterly broken the strength of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. That really was the vast majority of the military forces that they had. He tidies up a couple of other places. Acre, the most important port on the coastline, he goes to fairly quickly, he heads to Jerusalem to deliver the ultimate goal to the people of Islam. And he besieges it in September and he gets in there in early October. And this is a moment of great delight and celebration for him. And his PR machine cranks into top here and sends out message after message saying, you doubted me, you said I was the wrong man, you said I was fighting Muslims. Well, look, it appears that God has decided. And it was me and my family that achieved this.
32:23 Matt Lewis? An incredible PR moment for him to be able to stand in the middle of Jerusalem and say, see, I told you.
32:28 Speaker 02 It is. But there's another interesting element to that because the siege of Jerusalem, when it began, Jerusalem, even though there's not many Christian defenders, is still a walled city. And he negotiates with the defenders. There's a question as to whether he's going to avenge the massacre. Muslims and Jews were massacred in 1099 when the first Crusade took the city. There's some question, are you going to reverse this and 88 years later massacre the Christian defenders? And the man called Baal Yen of Iblaan, who's in charge of Jerusalem place, they have a very poor hand of cards brilliantly and says, well, I think you should let us go for a ransom because otherwise we will kill all the Muslim prisoners, we will fight to the death and we'll take a lot of you down with us and we will smash up the Dome of the Rock.
33:12 Speaker 02 And that is the place from which the prophet ascended to heaven on his night journey and that is the core reason why Jerusalem is so important to Muslims. So in other words, he's saying this isn't really going to be worth your while. And Saladin very quickly sees the logic of that and his advisers do, so they agree to surrender. So he's shown mercy and I think that again is a form of power. It also gives him a huge amount more money to be generous with and I think that's also a part of his reputation. Saladin is well known for his mercy and not slaughtering the defenders of Jerusalem is a big part of that.
33:44 Matt Lewis? And how then, having been broken particularly by the Battle of Hattin and lost Jerusalem, how do the Crusaders respond to this?
33:52 Speaker 02 It's interesting, the moment he took Jerusalem, he set the starting gun off for the third crusade and he knows it. But things move slowly in the medieval world. He knows he's probably got two years to get ready for the response of the West. Pope is said to have died of a heart attack. Appeals are brought out, the knights, nobles, rulers, the whole people of Western Europe are in a sense morally obligated to go to try to recover Christ's city. So he knows that he's going to be facing an enormous series of armies. So he's got about two years to try and consolidate his position. So he moves through the Crusader lands, basically trying to mop up the whole lot. So he's there in a position to face them when they come. So he's very successful in that with one exception. For once, his luck deserts him.
34:36 Speaker 02 There's a port called Tyre on the coast, it's just in southern Lebanon now. And a man called Conrad of Molferat, who's a significant Western noble, just happens to turn up on pilgrimage. He's no idea of the Battle of Hattin and he sails past Acre and he thinks, those people don't look like Christians in the port there. So he sails up to Tyre, which is about to surrender to Saladin and he says, no, come on, we need to hold this place. And that, if you'd have arrived a week later, Tyre would have fallen. So that is one occasion Saladin is not fortunate and having Tyre as a bridgehead gives the Crusaders something to aim for.
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36:40 Matt Lewis? One of the most famous aspects of the Third Crusade will become the relationship that emerges between Richard I of England, Richard the Lionheart, and Saladin. Do we get any sense of just why there is, apparently at least, so much mutual respect between them? Are they so alike that they get on? Or do they recognize something in each other?
37:01 Speaker 02 It's a mixture of all those things. I think from Richard's perspective, when Saladin captured Jerusalem, he's immediately demonized. I mean, he had a fairly negative reputation anyway. But of course, capturing Christ's city, he is then described as the son of Satan. He's a really terrible man. He's depicted as one of the heads of the dragon of the apocalypse. He's demonized. And that's the image that all the Crusaders coming out from the West, their sort of heads are filled with. But there is an engagement at a place called Acre, the Siege of Acre, which has been going on for two years before Richard actually turns up. This man, Connor de Monferrin, and King Guy of Lusignan, who I mentioned, are rivals. And Guy takes a rather desperate step to regain the prestige that he lost at the Battle of Hattin
37:46 Speaker 02 by besieging his port called Acre. And that becomes the target of the Third Crusade. And there's a two-year siege, enormous amount of sickness, struggle. But again, it's Christians and Muslims in close proximity. And that's where Richard is going to turn up at. And I think when Richard's army turns up, they spend, because the Crusade lasts a long time, these Westerners spend a lot more time in proximity to the Muslims and to Saladin and his brother Saladin, who I'll talk about in a moment. And their understanding changes. And I think it's from, if you like, the duration of the Crusade and the proximity of these people. They're hundreds of yards apart and there's endless amounts of diplomacy that begins to change people's mindset.
38:25 Matt Lewis? I guess there's a little bit of that element of, you know, from a distance, Saladin can look like this terrible monster who, as you say, you can demonize and make a figure of the apocalypse and everything else. But it's very different when you're close to him, dealing with him day to day and you sort of get to know the person, you know, it's easy to demonize an idea, it's more difficult to hate an actual person.
38:47 Speaker 02 Absolutely. And I have to say, this demonization, they stopped demonizing Saladin. And actually, his brother Saladin is important. Saladin and Richard never meet. Saladin refuses to meet somebody face to face who he has not made peace with. He says this goes against my sort of cultural practices. So the man who does a lot of the negotiation is Saladin and he meets Richard many times. And ultimately thinks, it's very logical, a lot of our views of Saladin are a sort of conflation of him and Saladin. But that in a sense doesn't matter. So you've got this kind of, yes, this idea of by meeting each other and through Saladin, you have people who got shared ideals. Richard comes from the West where generosity, mercy, bravery and religion are highly valued.
39:30 Speaker 02 Chivalry, that's the great cultural driver of the West by the end of the 12th century, is being chivalry. When you look at Saladin and Saladin, they are certainly merciful. They're certainly generous, they're certainly pious, they're certainly brave, they share the privations of their troops. You're seeing everything that you want in yourself. And so there's an element of recognition and admiration of the things that you like as well.
39:53 Matt Lewis? Yeah, I think it's a, I guess, a bit of an oddity of the medieval world that you see so many, well, maybe not just the medieval world, but this idea that you can see things that you like and approve of in someone you consider to be your mortal enemy, that you can respect them and deal with them in a friendly and respectful manner while still desperately trying to kill them.
40:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, it does seem a considerable series of contradictions there. Richard and Saladin have, they share food, they like hawking and hunting, they like music. I mean, some people say they are getting a bit too friendly. Hey, come on, you two, you're supposed to be at war here. You're actually looking like you're getting on beyond the levels of diplomacy. So it is interesting how that happens.
40:32 Matt Lewis? Who wins the Third Crusade? That's a tricky question, I guess, but.
40:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, this city called Acre is eventually captured by the Crusaders. And at the end of that siege, Richard massacres two and a half thousand Muslim prisoners. So he certainly is not merciful at all. And that is de facto a war crime. And Richard, over the next year and a bit, is very successful in fighting Saladin. He defeats him in a number of battles. Richard is clearly a much more competent general than Saladin, who all the time, this is the crucial thing to remember, he's not just fighting the Crusaders, he's trying to control an empire that is Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq. If you think of all the people around the borders of them, who are going to be potentially looking to disrupt Saladin's control and causing trouble. It's so easy just to think all he's doing is looking
41:19 Speaker 02 at this city, Acre, on the coastline, two miles from his camp. He's got another 359 degrees, shall we say, to be looking around and worrying about to deal with. So I think my kind of view of Saladin, I guess I admire him for his ability to control and hang on with this great coalition in the face of huge Western crusading armies coming over. We haven't mentioned the King of France. We particularly haven't mentioned the Emperor of Germany, who is the senior figure in Western Europe, who's got a very, very big army, and he is very successful marching towards the Holy Land. He falls into a river and dies of a heart attack. Saladin's luck again.
41:54 Matt Lewis? And I mean, he will ultimately conclude a peace that will see Richard, and the King of France has already gone as well, but it will see those significant Christian rulers from Europe leave the Holy Land. Is Saladin able to package this as a victory?
42:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, and that's a good question. And obviously Jerusalem was something very easy to put in that way. By the end of it, I think the treaty that they've agreed is something that works for both sides. Both Richard and Saladin have been very ill. Both of them are running out of money. Both of them have got domestic problems at home. Saladin's empire is beginning to creak. Richard has got to deal with the unpleasantness of Prince John. They both kind of run out of energy and resource. And Saladin has enough strength, as he points out to Richard, you've got to go home. You've got finite amounts of resource. I've got all these lands, you know, the troops from all these lands. So basically I'm in a stronger position. So I'm not going to give you back Jerusalem. So Richard negotiates back a bit of the coastline, which does improve the position of the Crusaders on the coast.
42:54 Speaker 02 But Saladin keeps the Holy City. And I think he would ultimately argue that, yes, look, Western Europe threw its greatest rulers and troops at me. I did lose some land, but I kept Jerusalem.
43:07 Matt Lewis? And I guess one of the things from Richard's point of view is that so soon after him leaving the Holy Land, Saladin is removed from the scene, you know, he will die. So if Richard had stuck it out a little bit longer, things could have been very, very different. But what do we know about how Saladin dies and what kind of succession planning he might have put in place?
43:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, succession planning is difficult. One of the things about Saladin is that he has 17 sons, which is an alarming statistic in some senses, but it means you've got to sort out land and territory for them. I mean, some of them are still quite young when he's dying. He starts in the last few years of his life trying to give some of them, one like say, control of Aleppo or one Mosul, and then he takes it back from him. It's not quite that sort of certainty of touch. And then when you give something to somebody and take it back, it doesn't always go down well. So he hasn't quite resolved things as clearly as he could have or would have wanted to, I suppose. I guess he imagined he would have lived longer and sorted it out. It does actually then take Saladin, Uncle Saladin, as it were, to begin to restore order. But a couple of years after Saladin dies are
44:12 Speaker 02 marked by warfare between some of his sons. So this very powerful confederation that he's created of Ayubidlands and Zengid, the Nurebene territories, creaks pretty quickly.
44:25 Matt Lewis? And I mean, a big part of your work has been to think about the legacy of Saladin. How has he been remembered throughout history and how has his reputation changed over the centuries since his successes?
44:37 Speaker 02 I think you can look at that in two ways. His reputation in the West, as we said, you know, he's got this terrible reputation immediately after the fall of Jerusalem. And with the Third Crusade, quite quickly, the Westerners liked what they saw on the Third Crusade of him, bracket Saladin, and they told people about it when they went back. I mean, a group of pilgrims, the man who's going to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, actually go to Jerusalem and meet Saladin. And he is as charming and as generous and as courteous as advertised. So word kind of gets out in the West that this man has a lot to admire. The Handbook of Chivalry is written in the 1220s, and one of the two leading characters is Saladin. You can find people, believe it or not, in Oxfordshire starting to call their children Saladin in the 1240s. I mean, this is not the son
45:22 Speaker 02 of Satan anymore. He has a literary career in which he can come to the West in disguise, seduce Western women. And that's garbage, of course. But the fact that Western Europeans are comfortable in adopting him or wanting to adopt him, if you like, is very interesting. And so he's no longer the enemy. It's hard to think of any figure in history who's inflicted such a powerful blow as capturing Jerusalem as then somebody who is taken in such a positive way. And that continues down the centuries. I think the 19th century, you have to mention Walter Scott and the talisman. It's hard for us to understand how successful Walter Scott's books are. I think sort of Harry Potter levels of success internationally, and you've got that. So that's reinforcing Saladin in this positive manner.
46:05 Speaker 02 You go to the Near East and there's obviously the other side to the story. The Shiites don't like him because of course it was on his watch as it were that the caliph, the Shiite caliph died. But for Sunni Islam, he is there as a hero. And the regimes afterwards, of course, the Mamluk regime after the Ayyubids and then the Ottomans, they've got their own heroes. But Saladin is there in history books, he's there in the topography of the place, it's Saladin Citadel in Cairo, he's there in poetry, he's there in legal documents. He's not forgotten. There's a really nice line from an Ottoman administrator about 1700. And he says, this is a different dynasty in Constantinople 500 years later.
46:47 Speaker 02 And he says, books of history are overflowing with stories about Saladin. And that's just a really nice line, you know, he's there everywhere.
46:55 Matt Lewis? I mean, he sounds like someone you might actually like to meet, you know, lots of medieval rulers come off as people who are deeply unpleasant, however successful they might have been. But even if it's through the cipher of Saladin, Saladin, sounds like he's someone you might actually quite like to meet and get along with.
47:10 Speaker 02 You know, let's be clear, he could be merciless, he orders executions of the tempers and the hospitlers. But yeah, I think he's a fascinating character. I don't think he's a terribly brilliant general, how many forces the Battle of Hatun. I think it's his ability to draw people along with him, his understanding of propaganda and resource and things like that. He put all those things together and his endurance in keeping going through these series of illnesses. He suffers from terrible colic. He can't get out of his tent sometimes, he can't ride a horse, his immune system packs in at one point, he's got oils from his waist down all over his legs, really has a tough time of it. And he keeps going through that. But yeah, he's undoubtedly a very charismatic man. And in later centuries or more recent centuries, of course, given the politics of the Near
47:54 Speaker 02 East, the idea of somebody who draws the people of the region together, be they Turks, Arabs, Muslims, Kurds, I mean, again, different groups. People invoke the past for presentist reasons and different groups pick on the bits that they, they would like to identify with. But as the man who drew a people together and expelled Westerners from the Holy City of Jerusalem has very obvious resonances for so many different groups, be they Islamists, be they nationalists, that he's there to be identified with. I suppose the other thing was, as we've said, he's an attractive character in many respects. He's not somebody who's a sort of dangerous psychopath who happened to achieve this. So you can draw on him as a ruler to be admired in that broader sense as well.
48:38 Matt Lewis? Absolutely fascinating. And I think what I'm maybe going to take away from this in particular is the idea that people in Oxfordshire are calling their children Saladin by the 1240s. That's, that's brand new news to me. That's fascinating. Jonathan, it's been absolutely incredible to try and get a little bit closer to Saladin, to try and understand him and his world a little bit better and to, to kind of get under the skin of what is going on around this period in the Holy Land. So thank you so much for joining us and sharing your expertise.
49:02 Speaker 02 Pleasure. Thank you. Really enjoyed that conversation.
49:05 Matt Lewis? That was a great episode. Jonathan's book, The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin, is available at all good bookshops if you'd like to discover more about this fascinating and charismatic figure. You can also find episodes in our back catalogue about the crimes committed by Crusaders with Steve Tybalt, the Templars and other aspects of medieval crusades. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a
49:45 Matt Lewis? new release every week and all of History Hit's podcasts ad free. Head over to historyhit.com/subscribe. Go on, you know you want to. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just Gone Medieval with History Hit.
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