Saladin

I've covered two participants in the crusades so far, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Reynald de Châtillon, so it's only fair to cover at least one person on the other side, so entry #26 in #EuropeanBios is Saladin, first Sultan of Egypt and Syria who solidly kicked crusader ass.

This thread is going to be very short because the only audio bio I could find of Saladin was just an hour long. This happens pretty frequently, and it's unfortunate, but if I reverted to written bios I would never find the time to finish them, so audio-only remains the rule.

Saladin was born in 1137, making him 12 years younger than Reynald de Chatillon, whose ass he kicked, and 20 years older than Richard Lionheart, with whom he made a truce, and who we'll be covering in the next thread.

Saladin, at least according to this bio, has a strong cultural reputation across the middle east to this day (lemme know if it's wrong!) as a noble leader, a fierce warrior, and a pious man, and as is usual with historic figures a lot of this turns out to not be true.

Saladin was born in Tikrit in Iraq. This may come as a surprise to some Saladin fans, since a big part of his reputation is as a leader of Egypt, where he gained a reputation early in his life as a military leader.

Fun fact: Tikrit is also where Saddam Hussein was from, and Saddam made a big deal about the ties between him and Saladin, since he also wanted to be seen as a noble dude who could kick the west's ass.

Saladin rose to power in Egypt through a series of extremely conveniently timed deaths of his superiors. It's speculated that some of them were poisoned, possibly by Saladin himself. He was also, until he rose to power, noted for being a drinker and not especially pious.

His next big move was to conquer Syria, uniting Egypt and Syria into a single caliphate under him. He then pushed further, annexing more territory until he had most of the middle east with only a few tiny Christian holdouts, like this map (Antioch was Reynald's territory).

Note that to conquer all this territory, Saladin was by no means exclusively fighting Christians. A lot of this territory was only ever in Muslim hands, and Saladin spent as much time conquering fellow Muslims as he did Christians, another fact modern fans overlook.

At this point the third crusade happened under Richard Lionheart. The Christian invaders came in force and Saladin suffered some reverses, but Richard eventually realized he didn't have anything like the strength to hold Jerusalem (his goal) even if he did manage to take it.

The result was a truce between Richard and Saladin that allowed Christian pilgrims access to Jerusalem but left it in and much of everything else in Saladin's hands, leaving Richard free to run back to Europe to get his throne back from various plotters back home.

Saladin was your standard world-conquering general, which is to say things fell apart almost immediately after his death. In fact, the middle east was not much of a fan of Saladin at the time of his death, even though he gave enormous amounts to charity before he died.

What kept Saladin's reputation alive was the west. To save face after getting their asses handed to them, their strategy was to embellish Saladin's reputation as an amazing warrior and leader, so that getting to a stalemate with him would seem like a bigger deal.

It wasn't until several centuries later that Saladin's reputation, kept alive in the west, made it back to the east and the legend the west created of Saladin as unstoppable force of nature was a lot more popular than the messy, compromised truth had been.

So Saladin's legacy is that he pretty much permanently kicked invading, rapacious Christians who were nakedly running the crusades to get rich out of the middle east, and in return they kept his memory alive forever. Not bad going, Sal!