Saladin (part 4): The Lion and the Empty Treasury

After Jerusalem, the Third Crusade arrived. After two years of war with Richard the Lionheart, Saladin signed a peace and went home to Damascus to die.Full Description:This is the closing episode of the four-part Saladin series. After the fall of Jerusalem in October 1187, Saladin made one strategic mistake that the chronicler Ibn al-Athir said was the worst of his career: he could not take the fortress port of Tyre, and Tyre became the bridgehead that brought the Third Crusade to the Holy Land. Three of the most powerful kings in Christendom took the cross. Frederick Barbarossa drowned in a Cilician river in June 1190. Philip Augustus arrived at the siege of Acre and went home. Richard the Lionheart, twenty-nine years old, arrived in June 1191 with siege engines, treasure, and a passion for war that the Mosul-born chronicler Baha al-Din ibn Shaddad, watching him from across the lines, called surpassed every other thing.Saladin and Richard fought for two years and never met in person. The siege of Acre lasted twenty-three months. The Battle of Arsuf in September 1191 was the first pitched battle Saladin lost since Hattin. Richard advanced twice toward Jerusalem and twice turned back. The two kings exchanged gifts even as their armies killed each other, Richard sending knighting ceremonies to Saladin's brother al-Adil, Saladin sending Richard fresh fruit and snow from Mount Hermon when the English king was sick, and two Arabian horses when Richard's mount was killed at Jaffa. The Treaty of Ramla, signed in September 1192, was a compromise neither side liked: Jerusalem stayed Muslim, the coastal cities stayed Frankish, Christian pilgrims received free access to the Holy Sepulchre.Five months later, on the fourth of March 1193, Saladin died in Damascus, attended by Ibn Shaddad, his brother al-Adil, and a Quran reciter who reached the verse "He is God, there is no god but He" at the moment the Sultan's face brightened and he let go. When the household officials opened the treasury to pay for the funeral, they found forty-seven Nasiri dirhams of silver and one Tyrian gold coin. The funeral expenses were paid by borrowing. The shroud was bought on credit.The episode closes by tracing how the West remembered him: Dante placing him in Limbo with Aristotle and Plato, Lessing's Nathan the Wise, Walter Scott's Talisman, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. And how the Islamic tradition has always remembered him: not as a Western gentleman, but as a mujahid, a teacher's student who finished his teacher's work, and a man whose treasury, in the end, was the proof that a Muslim ruler's life is measured by what he gives away, not what he keeps.The boy who had been born in flight from Tikrit died at home in Damascus. The story closes the way it began. A man at the end, with what he carried.Sources: Baha al-Din ibn Shaddad's al-Nawadir al-Sultaniyya (the primary firsthand witness for the entire 1188 to 1193 arc, the source of the forty-seven dirhams, the portrait of Richard, the snow from Hermon, and the deathbed scene), Imad al-Din al-Isfahani's al-Fath al-Qussi, Ibn al-Athir's al-Kamil fi'l-Tarikh, Abu Shama's al-Rawdatayn, with modern scholarship from Lyons and Jackson, Anne-Marie Edde, John Gillingham's Richard I, and Carole Hillenbrand's The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives. Enjoyed this episode? Dive deeper into Islamic history with the Archives app - bite-sized lessons, real stories, and daily adventures you can finish in 5 minutes.📲 Download the Archives app here🌐 Learn more here 📸 Follow Basel on Instagram here If this episode helped you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Assalamu alaykum, and we'll see you in the next one.