Muslim accounts differ only in slight details. In one, Saladin denounced Reynald for attacking pilgrims on the way to the holy places of Islam. But all agree that Saladin himself executed Reynald, and then spared the life of the king of Jerusalem and the others.
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The victory at Hattin opened the way for the subsequent fall of Jerusalem, which in turn aroused another wave of European Crusader armies determined to reclaim the city. Neither the occupation of Jerusalem not the vengeful killing of Reynald sullied Saladin’s reputation. Instead, Reynald received the brunt of history’s ire. Though some contemporary Christian polemicists denounced Saladin and described him as the devil incarnate, in time the picture born of wartime propaganda faded and a softer version emerged.
In the nineteenth century, Sir Walter Scott turned the execution of Reynald into a metaphor for Saladin’s nobility. In
The Talisman
, Reynald is the grand master of the Templars and a duplicitous schemer loyal only to his own twisted greed. His death is presented not as an act of vengeance but as a heroic deed. The scene begins with Saladin entertaining Richard the Lionheart and his retinue in a battlefield tent replete with “carpets of the richest stuffs with cushions laid for the guests,” along with whole roasted lambs, sweetmeats, “and other niceties of Eastern cookery.” Then, as the guests are enjoying their iced sherbet, Saladin suddenly unsheathes his scimitar and slices off the head of the grand master of the Templars. Before his horrified guests can draw their swords, Saladin explains that the dead man has been plotting against Richard’s life. In this telling, therefore, Scott recast the execution as the selfless act of a prince who treasured honor and chivalry.
Noble character notwithstanding, in taking Jerusalem, Saladin had seized the jewel of the Crusader crown. The kings of Europe, urged on by the pope, responded with the Third Crusade. Richard the Lionheart of England, Philip Augustus of France, and Frederick Barbarossa of Germany prepared for war. By now, the crusading idea had been woven into the fabric of Western and Central Europe. No longer a movement attractive primarily to younger sons, crusading became a central focus of both the church and the nobility. The armies of the Third Crusade were the elite of Germany, France, and England, and they might have succeeded
but for the misfortune of Frederick Barbarossa drowning in a river after a convincing victory over the Seljuks of Anatolia. The rivalry between Richard and Philip hardly helped, and Richard’s bullheadedness, while an advantage on the battlefield, did not make him an easy ally.
The Third Crusade is remembered, if remembered at all, for the epic struggle between Richard and Saladin. Militarily, the two were evenly matched, but Saladin, aging, with his acute skill as a general in decline, still outmaneuvered Richard. The only thing worse than defeat and stalemate on the battlefield is reputational defeat off it. Here Richard lost. Though each had court historians and partisans, Saladin emerged the undisputed champion in the propaganda war.
Except for a glowing aura in the story of Robin Hood, King Richard survives as a fearless and crude ruler driven by avarice, lust, and rage. Though we will never know what he was truly like, there is probably more than a grain of truth in the image that survives. The child of Henry II and the even-then-legendary Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard developed an early and lasting reputation as a leader for whom subtlety and statecraft were alien concepts. This was not a question of wartime ethics, though here too, Richard managed to offend even the callous sensibilities of his day. It was a question of culture. England was barely removed from illiterate tribal confederations, and English society had only the slightest overlay of Christianity with a smattering of literacy confined to the monasteries. Saladin’s Egypt and Syria, on the other hand, had experienced six centuries of Muslim rule and had benefited from the high culture of Damascus and Baghdad. That culture, which prized literature, art, science, medicine, astronomy, engineering, law, and agriculture, had been built on the foundations of Greece, Rome and Byzantium, and then blended with the courtly tradition of ancient Persia. The Crusaders did surpass the Muslims in certain areas—especially in the building of castles and, not coincidentally, the construction of siege engines to capture them. But in most respects, the contest between Richard and Saladin, much like the initial fighting between the Crusader armies and the Muslims of the Near East a century before, pitted brawn against brain.
Brawn sometimes had a distinct advantage. Richard, a physically imposing redhead who would sooner rush into the fray than command from the heights, stormed the Near East by sea, captured Cyprus as an advance post, and then took Acre after a tortuous siege. The commander of the Acre garrison surrendered before receiving Saladin’s orders not
to, and Richard found himself in control of a large number of captives. The rules governing prisoners of war were straightforward: a ransom would be set, high enough to be profitable for the victors and punitive for the losers but not so high that it couldn’t be paid. Richard, however, was anxious to maintain momentum and wanted to advance inland. He could go nowhere until the fate of his prisoners was resolved. The negotiations bogged down, and Richard decided he didn’t need the money or the hassle. He ordered his soldiers to kill the three thousand men, women, and children of Acre who had been so unfortunate as to be captured. Said one Christian apologist, the soldiers—looking to avenge the Christians who had died at Saladin’s hands—happily carried out the task of beheading the captives.
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Massacre was juxtaposed with camaraderie. For many months, Richard’s armies and Saladin’s fought to a standstill. Camped near each other, the knights and commoners of each side fraternized during the long periods of inactivity. According to some accounts, the combatants would even stop fighting in the midst of a battle if they perceived that neither side had the upper hand. Arms would be laid down; there would be conversation and storytelling; one side would extend an invitation to dinner. At other times, contests were held to see who had more prowess in the arts of war, and then all would celebrate the winners.
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These scenes hardly square with the image of fierce warriors of God confronting one another with the fervor of true believers. Rather than generating rage and hatred, Saladin’s faith often produced compassion. He respected the Christian willingness to fight and die for Jerusalem, and simultaneously deployed armies to kill as many of them as possible. And with the exception of Reynald, he could do all of this without hate. His faith, if we are to believe that it was as genuine as the chroniclers claim, was grounded in humility. His Islam was the Islam of submission, based on the recognition that all humans are fallible and all are sinners. God is the path, and only God is the judge. Saladin waged a jihad for the glory of God and for Islam, not a jihad against his enemies. They were obstacles, but they were not the object.
The Christians also defy easy characterization. They could speak of the evils of the infidels and glory in their slaughter. They could travel thousands of miles to restore the Holy Sepulchre to Christian control and to cleanse the Holy Land of the impurity of Muslim rule. Yet not only were they willing to fraternize with these infidels on slow days during
a hot summer war, but by the fall of 1191, they were also willing to call the whole thing off and get married.
It wasn’t the most obvious solution, but after less than two years, Richard’s armies were stretched, and the Frankish advance was stalled. Saladin had absorbed the most intense blows without crumbling, and other than his bloody victory at Acre, Richard had done little more than secure the coast that had until recently been firmly under the control of the kingdom of Jerusalem. With Frederick Barbarossa dead, the Germans in disarray, and Philip Augustus having fallen ill and returned to France, it was left to Richard to challenge Saladin alone. But word reached him that back in England, his brother John was attempting to usurp his throne, and Richard needed to make an exit. He had no wish to win in Palestine only to lose his throne in England.
What Richard did made perfect sense to him, though it surprised his contemporaries. He wrote to Saladin, “I am to salute you, and tell you that the Muslims and Franks are bleeding to death, the country is utterly ruined and goods and lives have been sacrificed on both sides. The time has come to stop this. The points at issue are Jerusalem, the Cross, and the land.” Richard declared that he could not leave without securing the right of Christians to worship freely in Jerusalem, nor could he depart without the True Cross that had been taken by Saladin at the battle of Hattin. Saladin responded quickly, “Jerusalem is ours as much as yours; indeed it is even more sacred to us than to you, for it is the place from which our Prophet accomplished his nocturnal journey and the place which our community will gather on the Day of Judgment. Do not imagine that we can renounce it…. The land was originally ours, whereas you have only just arrived and have taken it over only because of the weakness of the Muslims living there at the time.” As for Richard’s other demands, Saladin did not say yes and he did not say no.
The negotiations then took an interesting turn. It’s not clear who proposed what, but the proposal was simple: Richard’s sister Joanna of Sicily would marry Saladin’s brother Sayf ad-Din, and the two would become joint monarchs ruling from Jerusalem. All prisoners held by both sides would be freed; the True Cross would be restored to the Holy Sepulchre; and Richard would sail home to England.
When Saladin heard the terms, he instructed his delegates to say no, apparently because he thought it was either a trap or a joke. His brother took the idea more seriously, and tentatively agreed. Unbeknownst to
Richard, one of his erstwhile allies was also negotiating terms with Sal-adin, and Saladin, therefore, knew he had the luxury to bargain from a position of strength. But Richard’s offer of his sister’s hand was genuine, and to him at least, made good strategic sense. Wars between princes in Europe often ended with intermarriage between rival families. Having campaigned vigorously against a worthy enemy, he decided it was time to stop and move on. Marriage seemed a natural, and necessary, component to secure a lasting peace.
Other Crusaders were less ecumenical. Richard found that not only was his sister opposed to the idea, but she had rallied others to her side. He was pressured to retract the offer. Instead, he wrote to Saladin to amend the initial proposal. “The Christian people disapprove of my giving my sister in marriage without consulting the Pope,” Richard wrote. “If he authorizes the wedding, so much the better. If not, I will give you the hand of my niece, for whom I shall not need Papal consent.”
Saladin, for his part, may have been reluctant to sign a truce, given that the struggle to which he had dedicated his life was still short of its ultimate aim of evicting the Franks from Palestine. But he saw the ravages that the wars were causing, and with Jerusalem secure in the Muslim fold, he agreed to end hostilities. He was reminded by one learned judge that even the Quran advised making peace when it was advantageous. “If they incline to peace, you too should incline to it.” According to Imad ad-Din, Saladin had to be convinced by his commanders that peace was needed, even though he had committed his life to jihad. It was a convenient portrayal, whether it was strictly true or not, because it allowed him to preserve his reputation as a warrior but not one so blinded by fervor that he could not do what was best for his subjects.
The result of these negotiations was a truce leaving the Franks in control of Antioch, Tripoli, and much of the coast. Merchants—regardless of their creed or country of origin—were permitted to keep trading without being subject to onerous duties. And most important of all, Saladin promised that any Christian who wished to make the pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem would be granted safe passage and unhindered access.
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With that, the Third Crusade came to an end.
And so, what are we to make of a jihad waged by a devout Muslim against a Crusade prosecuted by Christians that included massacres and beheadings but nearly ended with a wedding between the families of the two leading adversaries? How are we to interpret Saladin, who was at
once the holy warrior par excellence and the noble adversary of Western imagination for centuries thereafter? And most perplexing of all, how do we square contemporary ideas about war, religion, and Islam with the world of the twelfth century?
Today’s image of the jihadist as an individual whose entire identity is subsumed to an ideology bears only passing resemblance to Saladin. Indeed, the very notion of an ideology that dominates all aspects of life has been alien to most cultures throughout history. In the twelfth century, the daily realities of farming, transportation, shelter, surviving disease, and fighting arduous, labor-intensive wars usually trumped ideas.
Religion and beliefs were one part of a kaleidoscope. At times, the words of the Quran and the hadith (traditions) drove men like Saladin to act as they did. At times, the words of the Bible and the pope spurred men like Richard to fight, or not to fight. But at other times, family issues, dynastic challenges, health problems, and political rivalries mattered more. Sometimes men fought with the words of a holy text ringing in their ears; and sometimes they met on the battlefield, slapped each other on the back, and played games.
Before the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, the Crusader states governed over and coexisted with a large local Christian population and with an even larger Muslim population. The result was hardly equivalent to Córdoba, but neither was it a period of conflict defined by faith. The war between Saladin and Richard had the markings of a religious conflict, but in the end, it was just a struggle between rulers that ended in a stalemate and nearly in a peace secured by marriage. The root of conflict in the modern world can be found in the Crusades, but only by forgetting much of what actually happened.