Jerusalem: The Biography (42 page)

‘Be quiet,’ snapped Saladin, pointing at the red tent. ‘We haven’t beaten them so long as that tent stands there!’ At that moment, Afdal saw the tent overturned. The Bishop of Acre was killed, the True Cross was captured. Around the royal tent, Guy and his knights were so exhausted that they lay in their armour helpless on the ground. ‘Then my father dismounted,’ said Afdal, ‘and bowed to the ground, giving thanks to God with tears of joy.’

Saladin held court in the lobby of his resplendent tent, which was still being pitched as his amirs delivered their prisoners. Once the tent was up, he received the King of Jerusalem and Reynald of Kerak. Guy was so desiccated that Saladin offered him a glass of sherbet iced with the snows of Mount Hermon. The king slaked his thirst then handed it to Reynald at which Saladin said: ‘You’re the one who gave him the drink. I give him no drink.’ Reynald was not offered the protection of Arab hospitality.

Saladin rode out to congratulate his men and inspect the battlefield, with the ‘limbs of the fallen, naked on the field, scattered in pieces, lacerated and disjointed, dismembered, eyes gouged out, stomachs dis-embowelled, bodies cut in half,’ the carnage of medieval battle. On his return, the sultan recalled Guy and Reynald. The king was left in the vestibule; Reynald taken inside: ‘God has given me victory over you,’ said Saladin. ‘How often have you broken your oaths?’

‘This is how princes have always behaved,’ replied the defiant Reynald.

Saladin offered him Islam. Reynald refused disdainfully, at which the sultan sprang up, drew a scimitar and sliced off his arm at the shoulder. The guards finished him off. The headless Reynald was dragged feet first past Guy and thrown out at the tent door.

The King of Jerusalem was led inside. ‘It’s not customary for kings to kill kings,’ said Saladin, ‘but this man crossed the limits so he suffered what he suffered.’

In the morning, Saladin bought all the 200 Templars and Hospitaller knights from his men, for fifty dinars each. The Christian warriors were offered conversion to Islam, but few accepted. Saladin called for volunteers from the Sufi mystics and Islamic scholars, to whom he gave the order to kill all the knights. Most begged for the privilege, though some appointed substitutes out of fear that they would be mocked for bungling the job. As Saladin watched from his dais, this messy and amateurish butchery now destroyed what remained of the might of Jerusalem. The bodies were left where they fell. Even a year later, the battlefield remained ‘covered with their bones’.

Saladin sent the King of Jerusalem to Damascus along with the True Cross, hung impotently upside down on a lance, along with prisoners so plentiful that one of Saladin’s retainers saw ‘a single person holding a tent-rope pulling by himself thirty prisoners’. Frankish slaves cost just three dinars and one was bought for a shoe.
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The sultan himself advanced to conquer the rest of Outremer, capturing the coastal cities of Sidon, Jaffa, Acre and Ashkelon but failing to take Tyre when the courageous Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat (whose brother had been briefly married to Sybilla) arrived just in time to rescue this key fortress-port. Instead, Saladin’s Egyptian viceroy, his brother, Safadin, advised him to go post-haste towards Jerusalem in case he fell ill before taking the Holy City: ‘If you die of a colic tonight, Jerusalem will stay in the hands of the Franks.’

SALADIN’S SIEGE: SLAUGHTER OR SURRENDER?

On Sunday 20 September 1187, Saladin surrounded Jerusalem, first setting up camp on the west outside the Tower of David then moving to the north-east, where Godfrey had stormed the walls.

The city was crowded with refugees but there were only two knights left to fight under the patriarch and the two queens of Jerusalem, Sibylla and King Amaury’s widow Maria, now married to the magnate Balian of Ibelin. Heraclius could scarcely find fifty men to guard the walls. Fortunately Balian of Ibelin arrived, under Saladin’s safe-conduct, to rescue his wife Queen Maria and their children. Balian had promised Saladin not to fight, but now the Jerusalemites begged him to take command. Balian could not refuse and writing as one knight to another, he apologized to Saladin, who forgave this bad faith. The sultan even arranged an escort for Maria and the children. Giving them bejewelled robes and treating them to feasts, the sultan sat the children on his knees and began to weep, knowing they were seeing Jerusalem for the last time. ‘The things of this world are merely lent to us,’ he mused.

Balian
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knighted every noble boy over sixteen and thirty bourgeois, armed every man, launching sorties. As Saladin started to attack, the women prayed at the Sepulchre, shaving their heads in penance, and monks and nuns paraded barefoot under the walls. By 29 September, Saladin’s sappers were undermining the wall. The Franks prepared to die as holy martyrs, but Heraclius discouraged them, saying that this would leave the women to be harem slaves. Syrian Christians, who resented the Latins, agreed to open the gates for Saladin. On the 30th, as the Muslim forces attacked the city, Balian visited Saladin to negotiate. The sultan’s flag was even raised on the walls, but his troops were repulsed.

‘We shall deal with you just as you dealt with the population of Jerusalem [in 1099] with murder and enslavement and other savageries,’ Saladin told Balian.

‘Sultan,’ replied Balian, ‘there are very many of us in the city. If we see death is inevitable, we shall kill our children and our wives, and pull down the Sanctuary of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque.’

At this, Saladin agreed on terms. He graciously freed Queen Sibylla and even the widow of Reynald, but the rest of the Jerusalemites had to be either ransomed or sold into slavery.
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SALADIN: THE MAN

Saladin was never quite the liberal gentleman, superior in manners to the brutish Franks, portrayed by Western writers in the nineteenth century. But by the standards of medieval empire-builders he deserves his attractive reputation. When he gave one of his sons advice about how he had built an empire, he told him: ‘I have only achieved what I have by coaxing people. Hold no grudge against anyone for Death spares nobody. Take care in your relations with people.’ Saladin did not look impressive and lacked vanity. When his silken robes were spattered by a courtier riding through a puddle in Jerusalem, Saladin just burst out laughing. He never forgot that the twists of fate that had brought him such success could just as easily be reversed. While his rise had been bloody, he disliked violence, advising his favourite son Zahir: ‘I warn you against shedding blood, indulging in it and making a habit of it, for blood never sleeps.’ When Muslim raiders stole a baby from a Frankish woman, she crossed the lines to appeal to Saladin who, moved to tears, immediately had the baby found and returned it to its mother. On another occasion, when one of his sons asked to be allowed to kill some Frankish prisoners, he reprimanded him and refused, lest he get a taste for killing.

Yusuf ibn Ayyub, son of a Kurdish soldier of fortune, was born in 1138 in Tikrit (today’s Iraq – Saddam Hussein was also born there). His father and his uncle, Shirkuh, served Zangi and his son Nur al-Din. The boy grew up in Damascus, enjoying the life of wine, cards and girls. He played nocturnal polo by candlelight with Nur al-Din, who made him police chief of Damascus. He studied the Koran but also the pedigrees of horseflesh. In the struggle for Egypt, Nur al-Din despatched Shirkuh, who took along his nephew, Yusuf, now aged twenty-six.

Together, leading a mere 2,000 foreign horsemen and overcoming desperate odds, this Kurdish uncle and nephew managed to steal Egypt from the armies of the Fatimids and Jerusalem. In January 1169, Yusuf, who took the honorific name Saladin,
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assassinated the vizier whom his uncle then succeeded. But Shirkuh died of a heart attack. At thirty-one, Saladin became the last Fatimid vizier. In 1071, when the last caliph died, Saladin dismantled the Shiite caliphate in Egypt (which has remained Sunni ever since), and massacred the overmighty Sudanese guards in Cairo, while adding Mecca, Medina, Tunisia and Yemen to his growing realm.

When Nur al-Din died in 1174, Saladin headed north and took Damascus, gradually expanding his empire to embrace much of Iraq and Syria as well as Egypt, but the link between the two territories was today’s Jordan, which was partly controlled by the Crusaders. War with Jerusalem was not just good theology, but good imperial politics too. Saladin preferred Damascus, regarding Egypt as his cash-cow: ‘Egypt was a whore,’ he joked, ‘who’d tried to part me from my faithful wife [Damascus].’

Saladin was no dictator.
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His empire was a patchwork of greedy amirs, rebellious princelings and ambitious brothers, sons and nephews, to whom he doled out fiefdoms in return for loyalty, taxes and warriors. He was always short of cash and soldiers. Only his charisma held it all together. Frequently defeated by the Crusaders, he was not an outstanding general, but ‘shunning his womenfolk and all his pleasures’, he was tenacious. He spent most of his life fighting other Muslims but now his personal mission, the Holy War to win back Jerusalem, became his ruling passion. ‘I’ve given up earthly pleasures,’ he said. ‘I’ve had my fill of them.’

Once when walking by the sea during the war, he told his minister Ibn Shaddad, ‘I have it in my mind that, when God has allowed me to conquer the rest of the coast, I shall divide my lands, make my testament and set sail on this sea to pursue them there until there no longer remain on the face of the earth any who deny God – or die in the attempt.’ But he enforced Islam more strictly than the Fatimids. When he heard of a young Islamic heretic preaching in his lands, he had him crucified and left hanging for days.

He was happiest sitting up at night with his entourage of generals and intellectuals, receiving messengers while chatting. He admired scholars and poets, and his court was not complete without Usamah bin Munqidh, now ninety, who recalled how ‘he sought me out across the land. By his goodwill, from misfortune’s fangs was I snatched. He treats me like family.’ Saladin was lame and often ill, cared for by twenty-one doctors – eight Muslim, eight Jewish (including Maimonides) and five Christian. When the sultan rose for prayer or ordered the candles, his courtiers recognized the sign that the evening was over. If he himself was above reproach, his hedonistic and ambitious relatives more than made up for his restraint.

DANCING-GIRLS AND APHRODISIACS: THE COURT OF SALADIN

The young princes, according to the satirist al-Wahrani, held orgies where the hosts ran naked on all fours howling like dogs and sipped wine from the navels of singing girls while cobwebs took over in the mosques. In Damascus, the Arabs grumbled about Saladin’s rule. The writer Ibn Unain mocked Saladin’s Egyptian officials, particularly the black Sudanese: ‘If I were black with a head like an elephant, bulky forearms and a huge penis, then you would see to my needs.’ Saladin exiled him for this impertinence.

Saladin’s nephew Taki al-Din was his most talented general, but also the most ambitious and debauched of the princes. His hobbies were so notorious that it was said his words were ‘sweeter than a beating with a prostitute’s slipper’. The satirist Wahrani suggested ironically, ‘If you resign from the government, you could turn away from repentance and collect the prostitutes of Mosul, the panders of Aleppo and the singing-girls of Iraq.’

Such was Taki’s priapic over-indulgence that he started losing weight, energy and erection. He consulted his Jewish doctor Maimonides, who advised his own community against excessive ‘eating, drinking and copulation’ but treated his princely patients differently. The royal doctor wrote Saladin’s nephew a special work entitled
On Sexual Intercourse
, prescribing moderation, limited alcohol, women not too old nor too young, a cocktail of oxtongue plant and wine and, finally, a ‘wondrous secret’ of medieval Viagra: massage the royal penis for two hours before intercourse with oils mixed with saffron-coloured ants. Maimonides promised the erection would last long after the act.

Saladin loved Taki, whom he promoted to viceroy of Egypt, but was then exasperated by his nephew’s attempt to create his own fiefdom. He moved him to rule swathes of Iraq instead. Now this exuberant nephew and most of Saladin’s family arrived to enjoy the liberation of Jerusalem.
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SALADIN’S CITY

Saladin watched the Latin Christians leave Jerusalem for ever: the Jerusalemites had to pay a ransom of ten dinars per man, five per woman, one per child. No one could leave without a receipt of payment, but Saladin’s officials made fortunes as bribes were paid and Christians were lowered from the walls in baskets or escaped in disguise. Saladin himself had no interest in money and, though he received 220,000 dinars, much of the cash went astray.

Thousands of Jerusalemites could not afford their ransom. They were led away into slavery and the harem. Balian paid 30,000 dinars to ransom 7,000 poor Jerusalemites, while the Sultan’s brother Safadin asked for a thousand unfortunates and freed them. Saladin gave five hundred each to Balian and to Patriarch Heraclius. The Muslims were shocked to see the latter pay his ten dinars and leave the city laden with carts of gold and carpets. ‘How many well-guarded women were profaned, nubile girls married, virgins dishonoured, proud women deflowered, lovely women’s red lips kissed, untamed ones tamed,’ recalled Saladin’s secretary Imad al-Din with a rather creepy glee. ‘How many noblemen took them as concubines, how many great ladies sold at low prices!’

Under the eyes of the sultan, the two columns of Christians looked back one last time and wept at the loss of Jerusalem, reflecting, ‘She who was named the mistress of other cities had become a slave and handmaid.’