Saladin destroyed a Crusader army in the summer of 1187 and recaptured Jerusalem within months. The battle that broke the Crusader military was?
Hattin, on 4 July 1187. The Crusader army marched through Galilean summer drought to relieve Tiberias; Saladin manoeuvred them onto the waterless Horns of Hattin and destroyed them in a single day. Most of the surviving Templars and Hospitallers were executed; the captured True Cross was carted off. Jerusalem surrendered to Saladin in October. Manzikert was 1071, a century earlier. Damietta was a Crusader target in the Fifth and Seventh Crusades but never the decisive engagement. Acre's fall in 1291 was the end of the Crusader states — also significant, but more than a century after Hattin.
Read the full facts →Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (1137/38–1193), known in the West as Saladin, was a Kurdish-born Muslim sultan who united Egypt and Syria under his Ayyubid dynasty, recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187, and fought the Third Crusade to a negotiated stalemate against Richard the Lionheart. He remained a symbol of Muslim political success and chivalric honour in both European and Middle Eastern memory.
Related questions
- Saladin's senior court physician at Cairo — a man who fled the Almohad persecution in Córdoba as a teenager, ended up in Egypt by way of Morocco and Palestine, and on the side wrote the most influential medieval Jewish philosophical work ever — was?
- How was the Jewish community of Basel killed in the massacre of 9 January 1349?
- In what year did Constantinople fall to the Ottomans, ending the Byzantine Empire?
- Who called the First Crusade, and when?