In an age of religious fanaticism, cruelty and massacres carried out by both sides, Christians and Muslims alike, there arose a towering figure who left friends and foes equally astonished: Sultan Salah al-Din, better known in Europe as Saladin. The great sultan who unified (for a brief spell) the Muslim world and reconquered Jerusalem, tearing it by force from Christian hands. And yet that man "from the other side", so to speak (I mean the enemy side, not the gay side), went down in history, even in European memory, as a model of chivalry, generosity and honour. So great was his prestige that medieval Christians themselves, his mortal enemies, turned him into a legend and admired him. Come with me, dear friends, to meet the noblest and most feared adversary in the whole history of the Crusades.
The rise of a brilliant Kurd
Saladin —whose full name, for his friends, was Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub— was born around 1137 in Tikrit, in present-day Iraq, and was of Kurdish stock. It is worth stressing, because this detail is delicious: the hero whom the Arab world would turn into the eternal symbol of its cause was not an Arab. He was a Kurd, a foreigner and an outsider, a man with no royal blood, who did not descend directly from the prophet Muhammad (as half the kings and rulers of Arabia claimed then, and still claim today), nor had any dynastic right whatsoever to rule over anyone. Everything he became, he earned the hard way.
And earn it he did. He first served other lords, Muslims like himself, rose in the shadow of his uncle Shirkuh, and when fortune dropped him almost by accident into power in Egypt, he did what truly dangerous men always do: keep it and not give it back. There he founded his own dynasty, the Ayyubids, and from the land of the Nile he set himself a task that to anyone else —knowing the ferocious divisions and ancestral hatreds that have always split Shia and Sunni, and the whole Arab world in general— would have seemed sheer madness: to unify the Muslim world under a single banner, his own.
Because that is the detail that films and books so often forget, dear friends. The Islam of the Near East in that 12th century was not a single, monolithic, fearsome bloc, but a mosaic of rival little kingdoms that loathed one another with an enthusiasm worthy of the noblest cause, and that had spent decades far too busy stabbing each other in the back to worry much about those Frankish Christian crusaders settled in the Holy Land since 15 July 1099. Saladin, with the patience and meticulousness of a watchmaker, and a calculated blend of war and diplomacy, stitched that great mosaic into a single vast tapestry that took in the countries and regions we know today as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Palestine and much of Mesopotamia, the region where he himself had been born. And once he finally held a single powerful army under a single hand —his own— he looked towards Jerusalem. The crusaders, who for eighty-eight years had prospered precisely thanks to that disunity among the Moors, were about to discover what it meant to face, for the first time, a strong, united and determined enemy.
The Horns of Hattin: the perfect trap
The occasion, or as they say, the Casus Belli, was served up to him by the Christians themselves on a silver platter, on account of the wicked deeds of a crusader lord named Reynald of Châtillon, (remember this name well, because that nobleman, a Frenchman, was the most evil and treacherous son of a bitch of the age); a downright demon who for years, from his base in the castle of Kerak in Jordan, had been attacking and plundering with brutal violence, and total impunity, the caravans of Muslim merchants and pilgrims. And he did all this while an official truce between the Christian and Muslim realms was in force. He even had the gall to launch a fleet down the Red Sea to threaten the Arab holy cities of Mecca and Medina. He was, let us say it plainly and without mincing words, a greedy fellow without an ounce of honour, very much inclined to bring ruin upon himself and everyone else with his own two hands.
In fact, so the story goes, Saladin —after Reynald had kidnapped and killed his sister in one of those treacherous raids— had sworn by the beard of the "Bruphet" and by Allah to behead him with his own hands. And Saladin was not a man to swear by those two divinities in vain.
In July 1187 he assembled an imposing army and manoeuvred to force the battle on ground of his own choosing, not the enemy's. The king of Jerusalem at the time, Guy of Lusignan, a puppet of a man whose main qualification for climbing onto that throne had been to marry well —the sister of the late leper king Baldwin IV— then committed a grave strategic blunder that historians still debate was the fruit of his utter military incompetence or of sheer bad luck, (spoiler: the former). The fact is that the idiot Guy pulled the entire Christian army out of its solid positions at Saffuriya —where they had water in abundance— and flung it on a march across an arid plateau scorched by the sun, just imagine the bloody heat there must have been in the dead of July over there in Palestine, to relieve the besieged city of Tiberias. It was not a long march —barely a day, some twenty-five kilometres— but every one of those kilometres was pure parched wasteland with not a single source of water; and so he fell headlong into the deadly error Saladin wanted.
What followed was a masterpiece of strategic cruelty. Under the merciless July sun, with not a single source of water along the way, the Christian knights advanced wrapped in their heavy gleaming armour turned into Bosch convection ovens, towards a thirst that became torture. Saladin's horsemen, fresh and well-watered, harried them without respite, cut off all retreat at the rear and, as if thirst and exhaustion were not enough, also set fire to the dry scrub so that the smoke would choke and blind them. At dawn on 4 July, exhausted, dehydrated and half-asphyxiated, the crusaders glimpsed in the distance the cool waters of Lake Tiberias —but could not reach them. Beside two hills called the Horns of Hattin, the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, hammered by the mounted archers and the Muslim infantry, dissolved like a lump of sugar dropped into boiling water.
It was a total, unmitigated catastrophe. The whole army was annihilated. The True Cross —that is, the wooden cross on which (supposedly) Christ had been crucified 1,187 years earlier, the holiest relic in all of Christendom, which the knights of Jerusalem carried into battle as a talisman of divine protection— fell that day into Muslim hands and was lost forever, probably tossed into some hearth of the Arab military camp to cook the lamb couscous for supper.
King Guy and his brother Aimery, Reynald of Châtillon, the grand master of the Templar Order, Gerard de Ridefort, the Italian marquis William V of Montferrat and the cream of the European crusader nobility were taken prisoner. In a single scorching day, everything that eighty-eight years of crusade had built in those lands lay at the mercy of one man. The Holy Land was, all of a sudden, practically defenceless.
The cup of iced water scented with rose essence
And here, dear readers, it is worth pausing, because what happened next in Saladin's tent after the battle is one of those scenes that seem written by a screenwriter or a novelist, (you're reading one, so I know what I'm talking about), and which, nevertheless, both Muslim and Christian chronicles confirm.
The two chief captives were brought before the sultan: the dolt of a king Guy of Lusignan and the wicked Reynald of Châtillon, the caravan-plunderer, the man Saladin had sworn to kill. King Guy, haggard with thirst, was received with great courtesy; indeed, Saladin held out to him a cup of iced water scented with rose water —the sacred gesture of hospitality, which among the peoples of the desert amounts to a guarantee of life. Guy drank and, grateful, passed the cup to Reynald.
Saladin watched the scene and said, with the calm of one who has already thought it all through, that he had not offered Reynald anything to drink. A seemingly minor remark, and yet a lethal one: because if the cup of water did not come from his own hand, the sacred duty of hospitality neither applied to nor protected that filthy plunderer Reynald. He then reminded him, one by one, of his betrayals and crimes: the caravans raided in peacetime, the broken truces, the expedition against the holy cities. He offered him —according to some chronicles to which I personally give little credit— conversion to Islam, and with it his life. But Reynald, who may be accused of anything except cowardice, answered him with haughty contempt. Saladin then rose, ordered his guards to force him to his knees, and killed him on the spot with a single stroke of his scimitar, thus fulfilling his oath. Guy, on the other hand, he spared, and uttered the famous line that sums up all his greatness: a king does not kill another king. Reynald had been put to death for being a ruthless butcher; Guy kept his life for being a monarch. Even in the execution of an enemy, Saladin left the mark of a moral code.
The Islamic reconquest of Jerusalem (without a massacre)
After Hattin, the Christian cities of the region fell one after another like dominoes, and in October 1187 came the supreme prize: Jerusalem. Almost ninety years after the crusaders had taken it on 15 July 1099 —with that ghastly slaughter in which, according to the chroniclers, blood ran in the streets up to the ankles— the Holy City returned to Muslim hands. Everyone, on both sides, expected a terrible revenge. The law of war of the age would have allowed it, and the memory of the great massacre of Muslims in 1099 almost demanded it… But there was none. And there it is, in that "I do not want any more innocent civilian blood to be shed", that the measure and the moral fibre of the man Saladin can be taken.
What is more, the last Christian defender of the city, Balian of Ibelin, warned Saladin that if they were not offered honourable terms and the chance to depart unharmed towards the sea, the crusaders would destroy every Muslim holy place in Jerusalem and would kill all their own Arab prisoners before falling. Saladin, who could have answered with an assault of fire and blood, chose to negotiate. He agreed to a surrender and a moderate ransom for each inhabitant, and then —this is what left Christian Europe astonished— he was lenient with those who could not pay. He freed numerous poor folk without charging them a thing; it is said that he and his brother al-Adil paid out of their own pockets the ransom of hundreds of captives so they could go free. He let the Christians leave the city with their goods, later guaranteed pilgrims' access to the holy sites, and did not shed the blood he could so easily have shed. The conqueror behaved better than those who, a century earlier, had prayed over the corpses. The irony escaped no one then, and it should not escape us now.
The duel with the famous Richard the Lionheart, the English king from the Robin Hood tale
The fall of Jerusalem shook Europe like an earthquake and unleashed the Third Crusade, which brought to the East the most powerful monarchs of the continent. Among them, the most celebrated of all: Richard the Lionheart, king of England, a formidable warrior and, it must be said, a rather awkward neighbour. And so came about one of the most legendary duels in history: Saladin against Richard, the knight of Islam against the lion of the West.
They clashed on the field with tremendous ferocity —make no mistake: that was a war, not a tournament of good manners— and yet, between the two enemies a mutual respect was born that has passed into legend. The chronicles record anecdotes that, true or embroidered, say a great deal about the renown both men forged. That when Richard's horse fell in combat, Saladin sent him two splendid mounts as a gift, because he did not think it fitting that a king should fight on foot. That when Richard fell ill with fevers, the sultan sent him fresh fruit and snow from the mountains to cool him, and even his own personal physician. There were negotiations, proposals of marriage between their families to seal the peace, courteous messages exchanged between one assault and the next. Two men who would have killed each other without blinking on the field and who, off it, treated one another with a chivalry that fascinated —and bewildered— medieval Europe.
In the end, neither could wholly defeat the other, and in 1192 they signed a sensible truce: the Christians kept a strip of the coast, Jerusalem remained in Muslim hands, and pilgrims —strictly unarmed— were guaranteed access to the Holy City. Richard left without having recovered Jerusalem; Saladin kept it, but exhausted. A peace of chess players who have understood, at the same moment, that neither will ever give the other checkmate.
The legend of the noble enemy
Saladin died in Damascus in 1193, a few months after that truce. And here comes the final detail, the one that crowns the legend: it is said that he left barely enough money to pay for his own funeral, because he had given away almost all of it in alms, gifts and ransoms. The man who had been master of Egypt, Syria and Jerusalem —one of the most powerful on earth— died practically a pauper. Some men hoard empires; he hoarded gestures.
But the truly astonishing thing is not how he died, but how his enemy remembered him. Instead of demonising him, as one might expect of the mortal adversary of Christendom, medieval Europe did exactly the opposite: it turned him into a model of chivalric virtue. He appeared in poems and legends, was given invented Christian ancestors and even an imaginary knightly lineage, and Dante, no less, placed him in his Divine Comedy not among the damned, but in Limbo, in the honourable company of the great virtuous spirits of Antiquity. Centuries later, Walter Scott would make him the admired protagonist of The Talisman, and Lessing would turn him into a symbol of tolerance in Nathan the Wise. Few enemies in history have been so beloved by those they defeated.
And that, dear readers, is the lesson Saladin leaves us, precious and rare as few are: that even amid religious hatred and the cruellest of wars, nobility, generosity and honour can shine; and that true respect is not won with propaganda, but with deeds. An enemy who made himself loved even by his enemies. That is no small thing. No small thing at all.
If the world of the Eastern Crusades, with its great Christian and Muslim figures, has always fascinated you, you will find it all in my saga of the Eight Crusades. The Great History of the West, told as it was never, ever told to you before.
Per Aspera, Ad Astra.
Ibiza, 16 June 2026