Jerusalem. The Biography

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 evenarranged 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 * 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. 15
    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 beenbloody, 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, * 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