Early life
Salah ad-Din (“the Righteousness of the Faith”) was born around 1137 or 1138 in Tikrit, in modern Iraq, into a Kurdish family of military officers in service to the Zengid sultan Imad ad-Din Zengi of Mosul. His uncle Asad ad-Din Shirkuh was a senior Zengid commander; Saladin entered Zengid military service in his teens and accompanied Shirkuh on three Zengid expeditions to Egypt between 1164 and 1169.
Egypt at the time was nominally ruled by the Fatimid Caliphate — the rival Shia Ismaili dynasty that had broken from the Sunni Abbasid caliphate at Baghdad in 909 — but was effectively governed by a succession of military viziers. The Zengid sultan Nur ad-Din used the Egyptian situation as a strategic opportunity to extend Sunni Syrian influence south. Shirkuh was installed as Fatimid vizier in 1169 and died two months later. The 31-year-old Saladin succeeded him as vizier.
Sultan of Egypt and Syria
Saladin spent the next decade consolidating personal control of Egypt. He abolished the Fatimid Caliphate on 13 September 1171, formally restoring Egypt to Sunni Abbasid allegiance (with Saladin as effective ruler under nominal Zengid suzerainty). After Nur ad-Din’s death in 1174, Saladin moved north into Syria, taking Damascus in October 1174 and progressively consolidating control of the Zengid territories of Syria through the 1170s and 1180s. By 1186 he had united Egypt and most of Muslim Syria under his personal rule — the political precondition for a serious challenge to the Crusader states.
The new state — the Ayyubid Sultanate — was founded on a substantial military reform combining Egyptian wealth (the Nile agricultural base), Syrian Turkish cavalry, and the political-religious framework of restored Sunni orthodoxy. It was substantially more militarily and economically capable than the Crusader states facing it.
Hattin and Jerusalem
The decisive military engagement was the Battle of Hattin on 4 July 1187. The combined army of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem — approximately 20,000 troops, including the field forces of the Templars and the Hospitallers — marched through summer drought to relieve the besieged town of Tiberias. Saladin maneuvered them into a waterless position on the Horns of Hattin, west of the Sea of Galilee. The Crusader army was destroyed in a single day’s fighting. King Guy of Lusignan was captured. Reynald of Châtillon — a particularly aggressive Crusader prince who had raided a Muslim pilgrim caravan in violation of a Saladin truce — was personally beheaded by Saladin. Most of the surviving Templars and Hospitallers were executed. The True Cross relic carried by the Crusader army was captured.
Saladin spent the rest of 1187 systematically reducing the Crusader fortresses left undefended after Hattin. Acre fell on 9 July, Sidon on 27 July, Beirut on 6 August, Ascalon on 4 September. Jerusalem surrendered on 2 October 1187. Saladin’s terms were comparatively generous by Crusader-era standards: the Christian population was allowed to ransom themselves (the Patriarch and other notables negotiated reductions for the poor), and the city was occupied without the systematic massacre that had accompanied the Crusader capture of Jerusalem in 1099. By the end of 1187 only Tyre, Antioch, and Tripoli remained in Crusader hands.
The Third Crusade
The fall of Jerusalem produced the Third Crusade (1189–1192), the largest Western military expedition to the Holy Land. The crusade was led by King Richard I of England (Richard the Lionheart), King Philip II of France, and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (who drowned in a river in Anatolia en route). Philip returned to France in 1191; Richard continued the campaign in the Holy Land for another year.
The military engagements were largely inconclusive. The Crusaders recovered Acre after a two-year siege (July 1191). Richard defeated Saladin’s army at Arsuf (September 1191) but could not bring it to a second decisive engagement. The Crusader army marched twice toward Jerusalem and twice withdrew without attempting an assault, on the calculation that the city could not be held without a sustained Crusader territorial presence in Palestine that the army could not sustain.
The crusade ended in the Treaty of Jaffa (September 1192). Christians retained the coastal strip from Tyre to Jaffa and were guaranteed pilgrimage access to Jerusalem. Saladin retained Jerusalem and the interior. The settlement effectively recognized that neither side could militarily eliminate the other in the immediate term.
Death
Saladin died on 4 March 1193 in Damascus, several months after the Treaty of Jaffa, probably of typhus or a similar fever. He was approximately 55. He left an empire that began to fragment under his sons but was reunified by his able brother Al-Adil (“Saphadin” in Western sources), who continued the Ayyubid sultanate to about 1218. The Ayyubids ruled Egypt and Syria until 1250, when the Mamluk military elite they had built took power directly.
Legacy
Saladin’s posthumous reputation in both Western and Middle Eastern political memory is unusual. Medieval European writers (most influentially Dante, who placed Saladin in the limbo of virtuous pagans in the Inferno) treated him as a model of chivalric virtue and military honour. Modern Arab nationalist movements — most prominently in the 20th century — have used Saladin’s image as a symbol of unified Muslim political success against Western intervention. His tomb in the Mausoleum next to the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus remains a pilgrimage site.