Dan Snow's History Hit - Saladin and the Crusades

Episode Date: July 17, 2021

Saladin was one of the greatest Sultans of the middle ages, and the first sultan of Egypt and Syria. He famously defeated the Crusader army at the Battle of Hattin, and recaptured Jerusalem. The Christian armies of the west never recaptured the Holy City. Saladin's legacy still holds resonance across the middle-east today. In 1917, a French General supposedly marched up to Saladin's tomb in Damascus, kicked it and announced, "We're back," a story that would shape Arabic perceptions of the west in decades to come. In this archive episode, Dan is joined by Professor Jonathan Phillips an expert in the history of the crusades and the author of a biography of Saladin.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History, and I'm just sitting now looking at a beautiful tithe barn. It's a gigantic barn in which the monastic community at Evesham would take one-tenth, that's where the word tithe derives from, one-tenth of the farming produce, the surrounding area, to support the religious community. It was their contribution, you know, the priests are praying for them to have eternal life, and so all the rest of us can do is keep the grain flowing in. Seems reasonable to me. Anyway, it's a gorgeous tithe barn just outside Evesham.

I'm here, as I have been for the last few days, making a TV show for History Hit. This one is about Shakespeare. You'll learn more as we get closer to the date of release, but it's going to be an interesting one, this one. You can always head over to History Hit. We've started the world's best history channel it's going great guns at the moment so head over to historyhit.tv and sign up and you can also listen to all these episodes of the podcast without the ads without any ads on them at all great stuff this episode

of the podcast is one of our best ones from the archive. We showcase one of these every week. This one is with Professor Jonathan Phillips. It is about Saladin and the Crusades. Saladin was the founder of the Abiyah dynasty of Egypt. He was the essential Muslim leader of the military campaigns against the Crusader states that had just been set up so recently in so-called Holy Land. He fought in the 12th century. He fought Richard the Lionheart on the battlefield. He captured Jerusalem. He carved out an empire that spanned not just Egypt, but Syria,

much of what we now know as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and further south into what we call Sudan into Ethiopia as well. He's one of the great military figures of the Middle Ages. He's also given his name to my favorite castle in the world, which I've mentioned before on this podcast, Saladin's Castle. He captured this crusader castle and it is one of the most strongly fortified castles I've ever seen. The moat is just one deep, deep chasm hewn from the living rock. It's an extraordinary place. deep, deep chasm hewn from the living rock.

It's an extraordinary place. It is as extraordinary as the man who gave his name to it. I hope you find it as fascinating as I do. Enjoy this podcast with Professor Jonathan Phillips. Thanks for coming on the podcast, man. Pleasure. Listen, I've got to say something. This is a dark day for my family.

My dad's weird dream has always been to write a biography of Saladin. And you've gone and done it. I'm very sorry. So, Dad, if you're listening, that 30-year aspiration, that's dead in the water now. Because yours is not going to be bettered. Brilliant. Why Saladin? I wrote the book because I was in Damascus in 2009. Where his tomb is.

Yeah, well, I was walking through the streets and I saw an advert for Saladin the ballet. Can you resist Saladin the ballet? I mean I certainly couldn't and so I went along it was in the main opera house where Assad still gives his speeches downtown Damascus and it was the opening night press night big crowds TV stuff there and it really was about Saladin defeating the often drunken crusaders and the recovery of Jerusalem. And no surprises in the show. By the end of it, everybody's clapping along. They know what's going to happen.

It's a celebration of an aspiration to recover Jerusalem. And I was sort of really sort of struck by the fact that that could have sort of a two-week run in downtown Damascus. So it set me thinking, well, OK, maybe it's not a surprise that Saladin is represented by some of these people. But how did his memory and legacy last this long? Who has aspired to use it? What elements of it have been taken, used, misused, remembered, or sometimes forgotten, I suppose. And how does that a little bit match up to the best we can understand as to what happened back in the 12th century?

You're right, because actually, if you're looking for heroic military leaders in the history of, well, say, early Islam, you've got a very, very strong pool of, you know, you've got the drawn sword of Allah, who never lost a battle. You've got the man who conquered North Africa and charged his horse into the Atlantic Ocean. I mean, and yet Saladin now feels like the sort of preeminent Islamic military hero, doesn't he? He is. He's a hero to so many people and has been down the centuries. And in part, or the major part, is of course because he got Jerusalem back from the Crusaders. That is the triumph for the people of Islam to throw the Westerners out and recover Islam's third most important city. So that, in a sense, is the sort of baseline of it.

But beyond that, I think a lot of people admired his character, his behaviour, his demonstrations of mercy, justice, generosity. All these things sort of gild that great achievement and are things that people have found attractive to tap into i suppose he's a meritocratic chap he rose under his own merits didn't he from he he rose uh oh you're about to tell me i'm wrong excellent this is good he rose through i mean he's a usurper his patron is a man called neural dean who really propelled the counter crusade the jihad

against the Franks. And Saladin and his family really shoved Nur al-Din's lot aside very effectively. So you can accuse him, and with a lot of accuracy, of just being an empire builder. But he's doing it under the banner, coexisting with the banner of Sunni Islam, I'm your best hope. Resisting with the banner of Sunni Islam, I'm your best hope. I am the man who will recover the holy city for our faith. So those two things are not mutually exclusive to him. He's only doing what everybody else is doing at the time, which is taking over lands and cities where you can.

But he's carrying this under the banner of Islam. And when he gets Jerusalem back in 1187, he says, well, obviously we have divine approval for this because I have succeeded. That's right. Success. It legitimizes everything, buddy. It does. So let's start with, so what do we know, what's our source material like for his life, full stop, but particularly his early life? For his early life, minimal.

Okay. Very, very thin indeed. We know he's Kurdish. He's born in the town of Tikrit, which is up in northern Iraq now on the Tigris River. Does Saddam Hussein like to remind us all the time? Saddam certainly liked to remind us all the time, yeah. He grew up in this Kurdish family who are in the service of the Syrian warlords of the age. And he rises, or his family rises, through the sort of Syrian Turkic princes. So there is not

one great caliphate that spans what we now call the Middle East at this point? In the mid-12th century it's very very broken up. There had been much more powerful groups in the past but it's extremely fragmented. Certainly the time of the first crusade, late 11th, early 12th century, that's one of the reasons it succeeds. But under this man, Nur ad-Din, who's a very pious, holy warrior, successful warrior, also a usurper, he manages to pull together the Near East to some extent, driving jihad. And that's really the environment Saladin is growing up in. He spends quite a lot of time in Damascus in his youth and his sort of early adult life. And Nur al-Din has made that the sort of spiritual intellectual heart of the counter crusade against the Franks or the crusader settlers.

When did he really step onto history stage? He steps onto history stage 1169, 1170 when with his uncle they conquer Egypt from a Shia dynasty and he uses the wealth of Egypt, the fabulous wealth of the Nile Delta, the Fatimid dynasty and his own frankly brilliance in generosity and gift giving to gather and sustain support and religious support. He uses Egypt as a base and then when his patron Nur ad-Din, he takes over his lands in Syria, and he can start applying pressure to the Franks, to the Christians, to throw them out of Jerusalem. It takes him quite a long time to build up what you might say is a sort of fragile confederation of the Near East to take on the Crusaders.

So he's as skilled a politician as he is a battlefield commander, is he? Yeah. If anything, I mean, I think his military record is pretty patchy. He wins the Great Battle of Hattin, which is the great victory that opens Jerusalem. There are a couple of other times that he's thrashed. So I would not say he's the greatest general. What he's good at is propaganda, administration, keeping his family and his supporters largely with him and facing in the same direction. He's a very good diplomat. He's very good at dealing with people.

And it's quite interesting that Frank's contemporary man called William of Tyre says Saladin's pretty dangerous. The people around him are good. He's quite a good military leader, but he's generous beyond measure. And it's interesting that his opponents see this as almost his chief threat. That is fascinating. So he establishes himself in Syria, but also in Egypt. And what's his aim? Is his aim to obliterate the crusader states? His aim is to recover Jerusalem. I mean, that is the primary focus. If he can, in the end, push them right out, then I think, yes, he would have been certainly aiming to do that. But Jerusalem is the absolute priority. And strategically, it is tricky because of

castles, because of why? What was the balance of forces like? The Crusaders are politically in a bit of a mess. There's a lot of infighting. You look at what they do at times, you think, you know, you are so hopeless, you lot. What on earth do you think you're doing? Can you not see the threat that's growing beside you? But they don't or they see it too late. They're tough militarily. As I say, they sort of bloodied Saladin's nose in battle a few times. But really, he is very good at keeping the pressure on them the whole time, just gathering more and more supporters until he forces the Crusaders into a ghastly strategic error at the Battle of Hattin.

Yes, let's talk about that. So the Crusaders are faced with a choice, aren't they? Do they mass and try and go for the decisive battle or do they just fight defensively everywhere and rely on their strong castles and it was to talk me through the choice they made yeah that you're absolutely right that is the choice i mean if you sort of stay off just out a sort of punching range of saladin you will you'll watch him destroy your lands take your crops and and your cattle and things like that very very dispiriting, but he won't knock you out.

Because you've got the world's greatest castles. You've got great castles. You've also got time on your side because he can only hold his forces in the field for so long every year. And in the end, it's almost like, you know, keep the clock ticking, sort of like playing out time in a rugby match if you're ahead. And so there is that choice. On the other hand, a battle is a matter of honour. And in the case of the King of Jerusalem, a few years before the Battle of Hattin, he had taken the staying out of range approach,

which everybody said was a good idea. Then they turned on him because they didn't like him and said, actually, that was cowardly. You're out. So the second time he's faced with that situation and he's advised not to fight, he's going to say, no. In a very late decision, in a tent in Galilee, the evening of the 2nd of July 1187, he makes the decision to fight or to march to try and relieve the castle of Tiberias.

The lure of the decisive battle. How many commanders over the years have come to regret that? If you like, they sort of denude, they gather everyone who is available for the defence of this crusade and try and bring it into battle effectively. They do. I mean, they've pulled everybody out of the castles and towns. It's a bit of a ragtag army in some respects, which is part of the problem because people like that morale is going to go down pretty quickly. And they're trying to march from their nice well-watered springs at a place called Safaria over to a castle called Tiberias.

It's about 20 miles, 32 kilometres, something like that. In early July, temperature is in the mid to high 30s. You are wearing some kind of protective clothing. The Muslims are from time to time setting fire to the incredibly dry, bone-dry grass around you because they know the wind is going to take the smoke into your lungs. And Saladin has, again showing his skills, has got huge amounts of water available for his own people. They can pour it out in front of the Franks just to really, really, really upset them.

And he's putting pressure on them with drums, trumpets, and the skill of his mounted warriors who are harassing them. So he, having sprung this trap and built up this pressure over the years on the Franks and having sort of said to his own people, I am the best ruler, we're going to get Jerusalem back, he was under a lot of pressure to deliver, and the Franks fell for it. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about Saladin. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History,

we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Tell me about the battle that ensued.

The battle took place over a couple of days. The Franks are marching. I especially think of it as a big train slowing down. I mean, 20,000 people, just the size of their army, is going to be strung out over a long distance. And they're just worn down by the noise, by the heat, by the lack of water. They're going across a largely waterless plateau and the constant arrow fire of Saladin's men. There's an overnight stop again there, sort of worked over a bit during the night time.

stop again there sort of worked over a bit during the night time and then on the 4th of july um there's a an old volcano there um with a sort of a broken rim and that creates the horns of hatin which is the sort of the feature and where the battle ends and they end up sort of camping in this extinct volcano and there's a couple of charges down the hill. They try and get Saladin, but they fail. And then the king's tent is taken and the true cross, Frank's great talisman, is captured and victory is Saladin's. And after that, is Jerusalem deeply vulnerable? Yes. I mean, that was the whole field strength of the Frankish forces. Saladin goes around mopping up a few other towns and castles, but really his focus is on Jerusalem. He gets there in early, sort of mid-September

and sort of looks around a little bit and works out where to attack it best. And then there comes a point where negotiations start. And I think this is where I suppose Saladin's reputation really escalates in terms of his afterlife, if you see what I mean. Because he could have done what the first crusaders did in reverse, in a sense, and massacred the defenders. And he opens negotiations by saying, well, if you don't surrender, I will kill all the men and enslave the womenfolk.

And it has to be said that the people inside the city play a poor hand pretty well and they say well okay unless you release us we've got a lot of muslim prisoners that we'll slaughter the dome of the rock third most important site islam we will break up and we will also fight for our lives and take down so many of you that it's not worth your while. And Saladin and his advisors see that this is clearly likely to happen, and so they take a much more prudent course of action and agree to a surrender and to show mercy to the Christians inside the holy city, a lot of whom are Eastern Christians as well as Latin Christians, and the city is surrendered on those terms. And I think that act, if anything, is something that really is the cornerstone for Saladin's later reputation down the centuries.

He showed mercy to the defenders of Jerusalem. Yeah, and the Christian population were allowed to leave, weren't they? They had to pay, which has enabled Saladin to reward his troops, but he gets the holy city back in good condition, and he hasn't lost many men doing so. So it's very much a success for him. But he's also aware of the reputational benefit of showing mercy. I mean, it really is something that resounds well for him. I think from a very short interruption from then until 1917, Jerusalem is under Islamic rule, isn't it? And doesn't the French general, after the First World War,

march straight into the city, march up to Saladin's two? Oh, that's Damascus, isn't it? March up to Saladin's two and says, we're back. This is one of those, did it happen, did it not happen? In some ways, it doesn't matter, because it's one of those phrases that has sort of echoed down the decades, not the centuries. It's in Syrian school books still, I understand. I tracked down an account of a French journalist in about 1923 who went there. And this man was clearly angry about the French being in Syria. It felt like the way that some journalists were writing about the Iraq war.

He said, what are our people, what are our lads doing here? They're being killed. about the Iraq war. He said, what are our people, what are our lads doing here? They're being killed. We have no plan as to what we're going to do here in the long run. Our leaders are hopeless. This man, Gouraud, thinks he's a crusader. And it was a really sort of eye-catchingly sort of almost modern thing. But he did also report that Gouraud was said to have gone up to the tomb and given it. That's a near contemporary source. Yeah. But also, regardless of whether he did it or not, and this in a sense is something that's interesting to me, how and why people invoke the past. I mean, they do it for present reasons.

You're looking for the past to provide you an exemplar of something that you want. And you can find Palestinian poems in the 1920s and the 1930s, 50s, 60s. Saladin, we have returned. Saladin, we have returned. It's a great beat to one of the sort of poems that's there. And so, yeah, it's really used in speeches by Nasser in the 60s. Yeah, it's true, inverted commas.

So after taking Jerusalem, what does Saladin do? What state is the Crusader States in after losing Jerusalem? After the conquest of Jerusalem, which is obviously the high point of Saladin's career, the apex of achievement, he has recovered the holy city for Islam. And before he sort of sets about mopping up more of the Crusader States,

the group of people around him write endless letters. I mean, Saladin is good at PR. He wants to get the message out that, the group of people around him write endless letters. I mean, Saladin is good at PR. He wants to get the message out that you thought I was a usurper, and you thought I wasn't the right man. Well, God has approved. We have the holy city back for Islam. So his secretary sort of complained, I've written so many letters, 70 letters tonight. So he gets the message out there. He then moves back to the coastal regions. The city of Tyre is a place that holds out. And then after a few months, the remnants of the Franks make a very striking move. And the coastal city of Acre, which is now northern Israel, they attack, they besiege the city of Acre, which actually Saladin holds.

And this is a real shock. It's a very striking move, very aggressive move. But they dig in outside the city of Acre. And then Saladin has to besiege the besiegers. So you've got almost a sort of layers of an onion situation. And this epic siege, which lasts almost two years, one of the longest sieges in medieval history, is what becomes the focus for the Third Crusade. Richard I, Richard the Lionheart, etc. Exactly. Because the moment

that Saladin captured Jerusalem, in one way he's sort of in a slightly waiting for the bomb to drop situation because he knows that will trigger a huge response from Western Europe. I mean the Pope was said to have died of a heart attack when he heard the news. Everybody has to respond as a matter of Christian honour to this terrible event. The son of Satan has taken our city. And the fighting in the Third Crusade is indecisive, isn't it? Yeah, I suppose I think of the Third Crusade, not putting it in terribly academic terms, as a nil-nil draw. the Third Crusade, not putting it in terribly academic terms as a nil-nil draw. It goes, you know, two years, epic encounter.

You know, the major leaders of the day, Frederick Barbarossa of Germany dies en route to the Holy Land. Luckily for... Very luckily for Saladin. Philip Augustus of France doesn't really enjoy crusading, shall we say. Unless he's fighting King Bloody John of England. Well, he certainly does that later, yeah. Richard is a game changer, and he breaks the siege of Acre to the advantage of the Crusaders. But ultimately, over the next couple of years, Saladin is able, while he concedes some

places on the coast, to hold him off. And when Richard goes home, okay, Saladin might, you could criticise him for saying, well, the Crusaders have got a toehold on the coast. He would say, yeah, but I have Jerusalem. They threw their best, their greatest heroes at me, but we still have Jerusalem for Islam. And what about apart from his battle against Crusaders, in terms of him building a lasting legacy, political dynastic legacy, how should we judge Saladin's record? His dynasty did not actually last that long. In contrast, perhaps, to some Western monarchs at the time, well, essentially, in his lifetime,

his family is extraordinarily loyal. Go to England at the time, Henry II has problems, problems with the lads. Plantagenets are problems, let's be honest. Love them, but they're a nightmare. They don't stick together. Saladin's family really do back him. They are extraordinarily loyal.

I mean, he rewards them well. But in the course of his life, he has 16 or 17 sons, which... We'll see where this is going. Yeah, while that's a few more than many Western rulers manage, shall we say, it does create problems in and of itself. And it's clearly in part his force of personality that's held things together. And so when he dies, his lands fragment to some extent. One or two senior figures do take over from time to time.

But really you're looking at then more of a confederation of the Near East. There's not one sort of big figure who can sort of stand astride it. And they start fighting one another from time to time, fighting the Christians. And really by the time you get to 1250, when the last of the Ayyubid rulers of Egypt

is murdered on the banks of the Nile by an up-and-coming group called the Mamluks. And Baibars and the Mamluks will be the force for another couple of centuries. So it really is not a great dynastic legacy that he leaves. So how should we remember Saladin? I mean, did Baibars, who famously captured Crac de Chevalier and his Mamluks, did they do more to destroy the Crusader states? Or is Saladin's reputation justified in terms of this figure

who welded this giant empire of the Near East and delivered the fatal blow to the Crusader project? I mean, Baibars in many respects really breaks the Crusader states to pieces in the end. He's the man who is such a brilliant general that he sort of does sweep through most of them in the 1260s, 1270s and puts them at a sort of terminal point. And he is a great folk hero in the Near East and was so down the centuries.

Many street performers performing a life of bye-bars. You know, it was extremely popular. So he is not to be discounted. But Saladin recovered Jerusalem. In a sense, that gives him the edge. And also, in a sense, as a ruler, perhaps as an individual, he certainly got a lot more range than baibars in a sense of Saladin delivering justice, mercy, generosity, a sort of courtly culture that goes around him. And he also had a lot of people who wrote on his behalf. He had a lot of loyal supporters who wrote in praise of him

and were very good at getting that message out. Got to get the right spin doctors, man. Yeah. Every... Never mind. I was going to make an early modern parallel there, but I won't bother. No, but in a sense, to talk about spin doctors or to talk about people managing your reputation sounds very modern.

Oh, you know, you shouldn't be doing that if you're fighting for your place. But it's true. You need to do it. And Saladin's people are very, very good at it. That's right. Thank you so much for the podcast. The book is...

Thank you for absorbing all that in your head and firing it out of me. Well, I just wonder what the book is. The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin. Brilliant. Go out and buy it, everybody. In fact, don't buy it. Don't buy it in a bookshop.

I know that's unfashionable to say. Buy it on history.com slash books, where all the books are available for sale that you hear on this podcast. Thank you very much for coming on. Pleasure. Thank you. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All the books are available for sale that you hear on this podcast. Thank you very much for coming on. Pleasure. Thank you.

I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know

it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors, that's flying high in the charts. We've got medieval podcast gone medieval the brilliant matt lewis and cat jarman we've got the ancients with our very own tristan hughes and we've got warfare as well dealing with all things military please go and check those out ready to get your pods Thank you.