The changing reputation of Saladin in the Latin West, c. 1170 to c. 1220

ABSTRACT

It is an apparent paradox that the Latin West’s perception of Saladin, the Ayyubid sultan who conquered Jerusalem in 1187, changed so drastically over a few years. From being identified as one of the heads of the seven-headed dragon of Revelation 13, by the end of the Third Crusade Saladin’s image began to take on a much more positive aspect, with the virtues of mercy and especially generosity writ large. The lengthy diplomatic exchanges of the Third Crusade did much to bring these (and other) recognisably chivalric attributes to the attention of the crusaders and thereby effect the transformation noted above. The article closely traces this evolution across a wide range of sources from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

KEYWORDS:

• Saladin
• Third Crusade
• memory
• reputation
• chivalry
• generosity

In its basic outline Saladin’s dramatic change from his appellation in the Latin West as ‘the son of Satan’ immediately after the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 to the seductive figure of thirteenth-century Old French romance is familiar to scholars. As Margaret Jubb convincingly argues, the sultan was said to ‘exemplify the characteristics of the knightly ethos [audiences] would have espoused’.¹ The aim here is not to disagree with this broad analysis, but in contrast to Jubb’s monograph, which utilised a spread of evidence from the late twelfth down to the fourteenth centuries, this paper has a much tighter chronological range. It considers material from both lay and clerical authors in an attempt to discern just how rapidly the transformation noted above took root in many, but not all, quarters, and it discusses which of Saladin’s reported characteristics and actions – real or not – helped to create this largely positive status in the Western sources. In doing so it will emphasise particular aspects of the cultural context in which his post-Third Crusade image emerged. It shows what was known or perceived of him prior to 1187 and the ways in which the battle of Hattin and the loss of Jerusalem impacted upon that. The paper then tracks his image through the preparations, progress and completion of the Third Crusade, ending with the views of the first generation of historians and commentators.

There is a focus on the virtues of mercy and, especially, generosity because these, it will be argued, are key. Outlining the esteem in which they were held in the contemporary West will give a basis for showing how, unwittingly perhaps, Saladin fitted into existing models and in doing so, hit the centre of the target for laymen and, more surprisingly perhaps, some clerics too. That said, it is worth noting that several writers still described him negatively, on occasion twisting or inverting the same broad themes we see used positively.

Generosity and mercy in the culture of the Latin West

Classical and biblical models generated an impressive array of antecedents to deliver generosity and mercy to a position of such high repute within the culture of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe. Classical writings, as Lars Kjær recently demonstrated for England, enjoyed a considerable resurgence in the twelfth century.² Most notable for this present study were multiple copies of Seneca’s De beneficiis while, more significantly, a ‘greatest hits’ format found its way into numerous Florilegium collections to increase its profile further. De beneficiis was often paired with another of Seneca’s works, De clementia – meaning commentaries on gifts and mercy frequently sat together.³ Kjær’s interpretation of gift exchange shows how classical texts were fitted to Christian learnings and thereby acquired a strong charitable aspect. In this way, gift-giving became seen as a virtue and, in the right circumstances, had a moral meaning and an integrity.⁴

This emphasis on generosity as a virtue is expressed frequently in the writings of prominent figures such as John of Salisbury in his advice book for courtiers, Policraticus (1159),⁵ or in a more literary vein, Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s popular Roman de Troie, dated c. 1165 and linked to the court of Henry II of England.⁶ Chrétien de Troyes, likely a cleric at the cathedral of Troyes and author of the romance Cligés (c. 1176), has the emperor of Byzantium advise his son: ‘Largesse alone makes a worthy man, not high birth, courtesy or wisdom, gentility, riches, strength, chivalry, boldness, power, beauty or any other gift. […] largesse surpasses all other virtues.’⁷

Later on, Chrétien dedicated his Story of the Holy Grail to Count Philip of Flanders. In the introduction the author favourably compares the generosity of Count Philip to that of Alexander the Great, a figure known for this behaviour.⁸ For writers such as Seneca, Alexander was at fault because he was marked by vainglory and a lack of real charity. Philip, on the other hand, had pure motives: ‘Let truth be known, the large amount of gifts presented by the count, good Philip, are from charity. None counsels generosity except his good and noble heart which teaches him this virtuous art’.⁹

Andrew the Chaplain’s Latin text De amore was likely composed for the court of Champagne during Countess Marie’s regency in the mid-1180s. As he wrote, ‘Every virtue without generosity is regarded as nothing.’ Likewise, a noble should ‘abound in generosity [and] lavish largesse on all he can.’¹⁰ As Ad Putter has argued, while such texts were written by clerics, they were in close and regular contact with the lay knights as administrators at the comital court, a convergence that helped to formulate the ideal of the courtly knight in the broader culture of a ruling elite.¹¹

Flanders and Champagne were the two regions most committed to the cause of the crusade. Counts of Flanders had been to the Holy Land in 1090/1, 1099, 1110, 1139, 1147, 1157 and 1164. Philip himself went on crusade in 1177–8 and died soon after his arrival at the siege of Acre in June 1191. Countess Marie’s husband was Henry ‘the Liberal’, a crusader and a man so named for his generosity.¹² Count Henry took part in the Second Crusade and went to the Holy Land again in 1179. Coincidentally, at Brindisi he met the great historian of the Latin East, William of Tyre, just as the latter was heading away from the Third Lateran Council.¹³ This period coincided with Saladin’s victory at the castle of Jacob’s Ford (August 1179), a success marked by his destruction of the fortress and the execution of hundreds of prisoners, not an act to enhance his credentials as a merciful man.¹⁴ That aside, the point being made here is that in these courts with a manifest commitment to crusading, there is also evidence of an active admiration of generosity.

Knowledge of Saladin in the Latin world prior to 1187

Now to knowledge of Saladin himself in Latin Christendom. This rests within the broader framework of the understanding of, and attitudes towards, Islam as well as the varying interests, agendas, backgrounds and knowledge available to different authors. Such factors might also differ according to location – consider exposure through longstanding trade links with Muslim lands for Genoa and Pisa, compared to the far more limited contact of northern Europe. Similarly, perspectives of individuals might be different to the collective views of an organisation such as the Templars, or at a macro-level, across a religious divide.¹⁵ Likewise, one can consider the stark gap between, for example, Urban II’s preaching of the First Crusade and the pragmatism of Frankish Jerusalem’s alliances with local Muslim powers in the course of the twelfth century.¹⁶

William of Tyre

The Christians with the most knowledge of Saladin were, of course, the Franks of the kingdom of Jerusalem and it is through the writings of Archbishop William of Tyre that we have a good sense of how one prominent contemporary viewed him. Some of the Franks met Saladin in the summer of 1167 when he was briefly held hostage after the surrender of Alexandria to King Amalric. Even in these difficult circumstances William of Tyre gave a positive impression of the younger man’s leadership:

[Saladin] was active, diligent, and full of solicitude, he went about among all the commanders. With a liberal hand he dispensed money for building engines as well as generous sums for every necessity of warfare. He paid adequate wages to the workmen, he gave gifts to the poor and needy, and above all to the wounded so that they might have proper care. He was liberal also to the fighters, especially to those whom he knew were valiant in battle.¹⁷

Note the usual touchstones of generosity, liberality and gift-giving; in other words, he behaved just as a proper (Western) ruler should.¹⁸ William was back in the Levant by the siege of Alexandria and in constructing his account, Hugh of Caesarea, King Amalric, and Humphrey of Toron were amongst his actual or likely sources.¹⁹

Jubb has emphasised the negative aspects of William’s commentary on Saladin and, in terms of the wider written record, this is important early evidence of the circulation of less than complimentary stories regarding his low birth, his personal responsibility for the death of the Fatimid caliph, and his disloyalty to his master Nur al-Din.²⁰ While these are clearly negative, William refined his views once he had exhausted the more polemical elements.²¹ Most fascinating is his assessment of the sultan placed around the year 1174-5:

Wise in counsel, valiant in war and generous beyond measure. All the more, for this reason, he was distrusted by those nobles who had keener foresight […] there is no better means by which princes can win the hearts of their subjects, or for that matter others, than by showing lavish bounty towards them.²²

It is noteworthy that William places generosity as the foremost of Saladin’s weapons.

By 1175 Saladin was in the process of trying to take over the Zengid empire and had recently besieged the important city of Hims. So keen was the sultan to pursue this strategy without distraction that he offered to release prisoners from Tripoli and Antioch, with Humphrey of Toron being the chief Frankish negotiator. William of Tyre reported that the constable was

accused of having been too closely associated in the bonds of friendship with Saladin. His action was decidedly detrimental to our interests, for this prince who should have been resisted to the utmost, lest his insolence toward us increase his power, won our goodwill, and he whose ever-increasing strength was to the disadvantage of the Christians dared to count on us.²³

Thus, even alongside or intermingled with some of the more negative imagery, there is, running through the text, clear sight of a virtue so admired in contemporary scholarship, literature and actual behaviour. William’s lengthy education in the West certainly included the study of numerous classical authors, an experience that inculcated within him the value of generosity. Equally, as Ivo Wolsing has observed, William was sharply attuned to the opposite of generosity, namely the dangers of greed, not least in respect of the Franks’ failed campaign to Egypt in 1168.²⁴ It is striking that William of Tyre saw what was, plainly, one of Saladin’s most central methods of operating, and grasped how he used it to such tremendous effect to deliver rewards of land, material and wealth and in the patronage of the religious classes and poets. While William was manifestly worried by Saladin he did not write after the disasters of 1187 and this, as well as the author’s careful evaluative style, means the Historia tends to lack what we might describe as more dramatic language. In the thirteenth century William’s text became hugely well-known in the West through multiple continuations produced in Old French; these contained many tales of Saladin’s mercy and generosity.²⁵ How soon William of Tyre’s Latin Historia reached Europe is unclear: perhaps through contemporary pilgrims, appeals for the Third Crusade, or survivors of the expedition?²⁶ The use made of it by the Third Crusader Guy of Bazoches²⁷ is one indication of a possible conduit.

Saladin’s profile across Western Europe

It is important to underscore that the West was far from ignorant of Saladin before Hattin; on the contrary, in fact. As well as the Flemish and Champenois crusaders, Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, led a major German expedition in 1172. Likewise, Constance of France, the daughter of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine, spent over five years in the region from 1174/5–1180.²⁸ Also of note around this time was the journey of Viscount Aimar V of Limoges, whose retinue included the poet Giraut de Borneil, who returned to the Levant during the Third Crusade.²⁹ Walter of Marengiers was a Templar prisoner of war who, on his release by Saladin in 1185, met the pilgrims Aimery le Brun and Guido Chat before their return to France.³⁰ A brief reference has already been made to the Third Lateran Council (1179) and it is worth underscoring the attendance there of churchmen from the Latin East and the likely flood of information they disseminated to this large and influential audience. Similarly, the constant flow of letters and personnel moving around the extensive networks of the military orders in the Levant and the West was a further important conduit for news.

While Saladin features, albeit in a limited fashion as ‘the Sultan of Babylon’ in letters from the settlers in the 1170s, his relationship with the German empire was especially significant. He responded to envoys from Frederick Barbarossa in 1173 with a letter and an embassy bearing rare and precious gifts and a proposal to discuss releasing Christian prisoners.³¹ A couple of years later, Bishop Burchard of Strasbourg made a lengthy visit to Egypt and Syria and some sort of alliance was arranged.³² German sources characterise the relationship as amicable; The History of the Pilgrims (dated just before 1200) stated that prior to 1189 ‘the sultan and the emperor had for a long time been friends’.³³

Elsewhere, we see examples of economic ties between Saladin and the Genoese in 1177 and possibly also involving Pisa and Venice, in 1175.³⁴ An interesting episode dates from 1183/4, preserved in the contemporary narrative of Ralph of Diceto, dean of St Paul’s cathedral in London and regarded as a semi-official historian of the crown; he was also well informed about the Third Crusade through his chaplain William, who went on the expedition.³⁵ Ralph was keen to insert documents into his work and, while Henry Bainton has elaborated the care we need to take in handling these forms of evidence, the narrative for the early 1180s incorporated letters, seemingly from Saladin and his brother Saphadin. The subject matter was the exchange of prisoners. The first referenced an embassy from Pope Alexander III and asked that the value of their respective captives be reviewed because Saladin held nobles and knights but the Franks had only rustics. Saphadin’s letter of March 1183 continued this dialogue (now with Lucius III) and it signified that he would confirm the pope’s plans, but indicated that Saladin insisted the Franks of Tyre and Jerusalem should adhere to the agreement for him to be willing to do so as well.³⁶

The picture of Saladin was far from entirely positive, however. As Patrick DeBrosse has rightly highlighted, Lambert of Wattrelos, a canon of Saint Aubert, Cambrai, provides important information in his contemporary Annales Cameracenses. He offered news down to the time of Shirkuh’s death in March 1169, and in showing no knowledge of Saladin’s succession it seems that his source had left the Levant that spring. In this account, Shirkuh killed Shawar at the bidding of the Fatimid Caliph al-Adid who in turn poisoned Shirkuh. The agency of the caliph is likely overplayed, but the key point DeBrosse makes is that Lambert drew attention to the belief that murder and treachery were part of the political scene in the Muslim Near East and very much associated with the Ayyubid family.³⁷

The Chronography of Robert of Torigni, the lord-abbot of Le Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, is another contemporary text and a work that ended in 1185. Robert frequently hosted travellers such as his friend, Bishop Robert of Nantes, who visited him in 1185 on his return from pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The abbot’s work displays a real interest in the Holy Land, but showed some confusion as to the situation in the Muslim Near East. Nur al-Din’s son, for example, was said to have been born by the sister of the count of Saint-Gilles, and Saladin was the emir’s nephew. Robert reported the Christian triumph at Montgisard (November 1177) and told of the presence of a cross in the sky as a sign of divine blessing. He knew of the construction of the castle of Jacob’s Ford and the threat that it posed to Saladin, and he related the aftermath of the sultan’s victory there in August 1179 in lurid (and likely exaggerated) detail with knights being ‘sawn in half through their sides [while] others of lesser rank were beheaded.’³⁸

Another author to express strongly negative sentiments was Geoffrey of Breuil, prior of Vigeois in the Limousin (d. 1184). This was an area with ongoing crusading traditions dating from the First Crusade to contemporary times as men such as Aimar V of Limoges visited the Holy Land in 1180. Geoffrey also fixed upon the themes of murder and intrigue, notably a claim that Shirkuh forcibly married Shawar’s widow who, in turn, poisoned him. After Nur al-Din’s death, Saladin, referencing his own lowly origins, inveigled his way into the confidence of his former master’s widow and assured her of his loyalty to the Zengid line. He then asserted his conjugal rights but left the son with only Baalbek, Aleppo, and Edessa. In crude outline this represents the political reality, albeit garnished with a strong dash of the lurid and a clear sense of Saladin as duplicitous and ambitious.³⁹

As the crisis in the Holy Land intensified, the papacy issued appeals such as that of Alexander III in 1181. This was incorporated into Roger of Howden’s contemporary Gesta, although it expressed broader concern about the danger posed by the Muslims, rather than referencing Saladin himself.⁴⁰

Aside from news provided by pilgrims and crusaders the people of the West were updated by letters and envoys from the Holy Land, most especially that led by William of Tyre’s great rival, Patriarch Heraclius, who travelled to Europe in late 1184.⁴¹ In November he met Pope Lucius III and Frederick Barbarossa at Verona. A council heard of the grave threat that Saladin posed to the Holy Sepulchre and pleaded with the emperor to come to the Levant. In response, Frederick took the Templars and the Hospitallers under his protection and freed them from all exactions, but tensions with the pope soon distracted him from any more meaningful response.⁴²

The embassy moved northwards and met King Philip II in Paris. The French cleric Rigord wrote his chronicle in the city during the 1180s and he described the envoys’ journey and their encounters with the French clergy and Philip himself. The king encouraged the preaching of a new crusade, sent knights, foot-soldiers and some financial help, ‘as I have learned from common report’, but because he was too busy ruling France and at that point lacked an heir, could not go to the Holy Land himself.⁴³

The patriarch then went on to the Angevin realm. The presence of such high-profile figures attracted considerable attention and we know of assemblies in Clarendon, Reading and Clerkenwell. The prolific contemporary writer Gerald of Wales saw Heraclius in person and quoted him in his Expugnatio Hibernica, although Saladin was not mentioned in the account, written up between the summer of 1188 and the summer of 1189.⁴⁴ But in De principis instructione, of which book 1 was published and books 2 and 3 were completed in draft format by 1191, Gerald sets the scene for Heraclius’s visit. He introduced the sultan as ‘great and magnificent among his people’ and explained that he had subjected many kingdoms to his authority ‘more by generosity and courage than by hereditary right’. Thus, another intriguing reminder of Saladin’s generosity was contained in an ‘Advice to Princes’ work, one that elsewhere included a lengthy passage on the virtue of generosity. The aside about the sultan’s ancestry reflects further a theme we have noted already.⁴⁵

Some witnesses, such as Ralph Niger (writing 1188-90), described Heraclius in tones of deep disapproval, taking a dim view of the patriarch’s flamboyant appearance, his perfumes and rich robes. Ralph of Diceto included an appeal from Baldwin IV, wrote at length on the council at Clerkenwell, and reproduced Pope Lucius III’s call for action. The news from Heraclius was almost entirely bad because it starkly outlined the danger posed to Jerusalem. We lack what must have been lengthy spoken analyses of the position from the patriarch and his colleagues, but as far as an image of Saladin is concerned Lucius’s letter to Henry II is especially colourful:

Saladin, the monstrous persecutor of the holy and awesome name, burns so much with the spirit of fury and exercises all the powers of his wickedness towards the slaughter of the faithful people, so that, unless the violent onrush of his savagery […] is checked […] the land, which has been consecrated by the shedding of the life-giving blood, may be polluted by the contagion of his unclean superstition, and, what your glorious and noble predecessors freed […] may again be subjected to the wicked dominion of a most evil tyrant.⁴⁶

In their desperation to engage help, Heraclius offered the kings of England and France the keys to the Holy Sepulchre and the Tower of David and the banner of the kingdom of Jerusalem, but to no avail. The monarchs promised financial support and a few knights are known to have set out, but in essence the mission had failed.

Thus, prior to 1187, we have a complex and, in some respects, contradictory picture of Saladin, perhaps merely a reflection of the possibility of different viewpoints and perspectives noted earlier and the likelihood that over time people can change their minds. Similarly, we should recognise writers referencing positive aspects of his character, most notably in respect of generosity. Some political and economic relationships seemed to generate a better relationship too, but several commentators became sharper and more judgmental, noticeably in regard to Saladin’s birth and morality, as well as the increasing danger he posed to the Holy Land.

The battle of Hattin, Audita Tremendi, and the fall of Jerusalem

By late 1186 and into early 1187, Saladin was in urgent need to deliver on his call to arms across the Muslim Near East. 1 May 1187 saw a heavy Frankish defeat at the Battle of Cresson, news of which came back to the West via a letter to the pope from the master of the Templars, Gerard of Ridefort. Urban III subsequently circulated this information in a letter to Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury and the English Church. The text, preserved in Gerald of Wales’s De principis, contains generic ‘enemies of the cross of Christ’ language, but nothing more specific for Saladin.⁴⁷

Two months later came the calamitous defeat at the battle of Hattin, the loss of the True Cross, and the destruction of the Frankish fighting forces. The scale of this disaster and the sudden vulnerability of Jerusalem itself produced a far more emotive reaction as a series of letters from the East and the papacy shows.⁴⁸ Saladin, as we have seen, needed no particular introduction but given what had just happened we might expect some strong opinions and images to emerge.⁴⁹ The nobles of the Latin East sent appeals to the pope and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in mid-July 1187. The most interesting reference to ‘the tyrant’ Saladin was to describe him in notably aggressive terms when he proposed to test the power of the True Cross by throwing it into a fire, only to be amazed when it immediately sprang back. This story was designed to symbolise the continued strength of the relic even after the defeat, and to show that the Christian faith could endure.⁵⁰ As noted, the military orders provided information too, although in this instance the letter did not assign the sultan a particular role.⁵¹ A missive from the Genoese to Urban III likewise covered Hattin and mentioned the sultan decapitating Prince Reynald, albeit in a very matter-of-fact way.⁵²

Two letters from Patriarch Heraclius, written in early September 1187, described Hattin, the scale of subsequent Muslim conquests, and the imminent siege of Jerusalem. That addressed to Pope Urban presented the battle as an inexplicable catastrophe, related the loss of the True Cross and then listed the territories taken by Saladin as he closed the net on Jerusalem itself. That directed to the leaders of the Latin West was much sharper in tone. It claimed that twenty-five thousand Christians died at Hattin, ‘slain by the sword of Mafumetus the Unbeliever and his evil worshipper, Saladin’. It continued with a desperate plea for help because ‘Saladin himself, the cruel enemy of Christ’ was poised to besiege the Holy City.⁵³

Pope Urban III is said to have died of shock at the terrible news from the Holy Land (20 October 1187), leaving his successor, Gregory VIII, to issue Audita Tremendi, the core appeal for the Third Crusade. This was sent across the Latin West with, as Thomas Smith has shown, multiple iterations emerging over the weeks and months afterwards, further prompted by definitive news of the loss of Jerusalem (2 October) likely received in late November or early December.⁵⁴

Central to the papacy’s explanation of these events was the notion that the sins of the Christian people, both in the Frankish East and across the West, had caused God to permit such a disaster, a reasoning widely followed by clerical commentators, as we will see.⁵⁵ Within this framework, however, Saladin was allocated little agency and was merely an instrument of God’s wrath. The focus of Audita Tremendi is on a Christian understanding of the fall of Jerusalem. The bull has a stirring description of events at Hattin and generic references to Muslims such as ‘savage barbarians thirsting after Christian blood’, but Saladin is not personally demonised to any particular extent.

The loss of the Holy City generated a further wave of letters from the Latin East. These were primarily channels for information and formulated as anguished appeals for help and as a call to arms. But they were also an opportunity to express an opinion on Saladin at this moment of extreme horror, and in doing so to create or spread an image. What we cannot access, of course, are the spoken contributions of envoys from the Holy Land, such as Archbishop Joscius of Tyre, or the bishops of Jabala and Valania. Given that they were all refugees of war and, at the same time, trying to convince the Christian West to take the cross and aid the Holy Land they had a powerful story to tell.

Around this time, the Patriarch of Antioch, Aimery of Limoges, wrote to Henry II in strong terms. The abominable (nefandi) Saladin had killed Prince Reynald in person and then, suffused with Christian blood, besieged Jerusalem and threatened to shatter the Holy Sepulchre into little pieces and throw it into the sea. In other words, he was a terrible man capable of destroying the most sacred place on earth.⁵⁶

A further letter from Terricus the Templar, likely from January 1188, engaged closely with the sultan. In part, he was given a more positive nod with mention of his allowing ten Hospitallers to remain in the Jerusalem Hospital to care for the sick. On the other hand, his humiliation of the cross taken down from the Templum domini, while largely confirmed by Muslim sources, related it as being dragged through the streets and beaten for two days while the building was purified with rose water, was clearly designed to stir Christian anger.⁵⁷

Other letters are much less pointed. Queen Sibylla of Jerusalem wrote to Frederick Barbarossa in the spring of 1188 to warn him of an alliance between the Byzantines and Saladin. The hostility of Emperor Isaac II Angelos was the focus of the letter, although the sultan was routinely labelled as ‘an enemy of Christ’ and ‘seducer and destroyer of the Christian name’.⁵⁸ Similarly, the Hospitaller missive to Duke Leopold V of Austria of late 1188 nods to convention with ‘the unspeakable Saladin’ as it described his seemingly unstoppable wave of conquests.⁵⁹

The response of the Latin West

After the initial papal appeal, people across the West had to process the news from the Holy Land and to frame a response. For some, this came in the form of taking the cross and beginning to plan for a crusade. With our focus on Saladin, we have to assess what written evidence is available to continue building up a sense of how he was viewed by the crusaders during the preparations and opening stages of the expedition.

Amongst the most dramatic responses to the news from the Holy Land was an anonymous Latin poem that featured Saladin as the central protagonist, probably written in late 1187 or 1188 and surviving in a single manuscript from the abbey of Echternach, today in Luxembourg.⁶⁰ This lurid tale opens with the bloodthirsty Sanguin (Zengi), a man succeeded by Neradin, ‘or rather Nero’, and then the worst of the three, Saladin, ‘born illegitimately, he was of the tree of Nur al-Din’. There is a reference to Joseph, surely a sign of knowing that Saladin’s given name was Yusuf. He was accused of sleeping with Nur al-Din’s wife, thereby giving a further downward twist to the theme of disloyalty we noted earlier, although apparently his master did not suspect this and instead advanced his career (in reality, Saladin married ‘Ismat al-Din in September 1176, two years after her first husband died). He was then denounced for deceiving and killing the Fatimid caliph and enriching his own followers. Next, to compound his actions, because he loved Nur al-Din’s wife, Saladin apparently poisoned his former master, and then killed his son to further benefit himself. The poet underlined the sultan’s power by stating that he held seven kingdoms, and after being overcome by the Christians six times in the past, now he prevailed in battle (Hattin), with ‘the filthy right hand’ of one of Saladin’s family taking the True Cross captive, as well as the king and the heroic Templars. While the poem is unfinished, the editor regarded it as not likely to cover the fall of Jerusalem itself. Jubb described this work as ‘forming first impressions’ of Saladin, but as we have observed, this is not quite the case; as Jubb herself noted, one or two of the themes such as the sultan’s low birth can be discerned in, for example, William of Tyre and Geoffrey of Vigeois, suggesting they were starting to become common currency in parts of the Latin West.⁶¹ Thus the motifs of greed, immorality, low birth and treachery all surface, themes that tend to disappear or be submerged beneath more positive views later on. This is the only tract specifically devoted to the sultan.

Another immensely powerful text became the majority of the work known as the Libellus de expugnatione terrae santae per Saladinum. The author of the pertinent section, which covers September 1186 to October 1187, was present in Jerusalem during the siege and, the editors argue, wrote his narrative between 1188 and c. 1191 to provide a report of these terrible events and to encourage a response.⁶² Muslims are repeatedly described as violent, greedy, and locust-like in their overwhelming numbers.⁶³ Saphadin was credited with allocating protection to Frankish refugees leaving Mirabel, but then condemned for revelry, drinking, and wantoness as he personally polluted the holy places of Mount Zion.⁶⁴ Saladin is usually labelled a tyrant, and was ascribed a haughty speech to the defenders of Acre and as promising riches to any who would convert to Islam. Then, ‘drenched in gore and still thirsting for the blood of the Christians’ he departed Acre for Jerusalem.⁶⁵ Outside the Holy City, he reportedly wanted it cleansed with Christian blood. His offer to the defenders to ransom themselves was deeply condemned by the writer who saw this as a shameful course of action for the Christians.⁶⁶

A prominent figure in the West’s reaction to news from the Holy Land was Peter of Blois, a well-travelled Paris master and secretary to Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury. Peter was at the papal court when messages from the East began to arrive and he wrote to King Henry in the autumn of 1187 to report that Jerusalem was unlikely to be able to resist ‘the filthy dogs’ that threatened it.⁶⁷ Soon afterwards he returned to England, probably to join both Baldwin and his colleague Gerald on their preaching tour of Wales from early March to the end of April 1188. He may have given sermons, although this is not certain. We do, however, have the Passio Raginaldi and the Conquestio, the former, as Alexander Marx argues, a sermon, seemingly written in late 1187 prior to the news of the fall of Jerusalem, that took as its central pillar the death of Reynald of Châtillon at the hands of Saladin. The Conquestio emerged once the loss of the Holy City was known.⁶⁸ Given their narrow window of active use, these works can show how one notable churchman chose to depict the sultan and, presumably, to then disseminate such a view. Central to Peter’s reasoning was the notion that God was punishing the Christians for their sins; Reynald was to be admired for being prepared to fight and die for his faith. Confronted by Saladin, ‘hammer of the faithful of Christ’, uttering terrible threats to him, Reynald had defended himself with the name of Christ and the shield of his faith. At the point of his death, forced to the ground by Saladin, the prince raised himself up a little and, without fear, received the sultan’s sword on his neck. Thus he achieved salvation, as could the Christian people if they fulfilled their duty and took the opportunity afforded by the crusade. Reynald’s death also had an eschatological aspect and Saladin was characterised as the profane, impious, and barbaric Antichrist; labels such as ‘the dog of Babylon, the son of perdition’, and a ‘brutal beast’, were used of him; he was an unfaithful and treacherous prince; most inhuman and most cunning tyrant.⁶⁹ The Anonymous poem, the Libellus, and the Passio Raginaldi thus form a powerful trio of contemporary works that presented Saladin in a deeply unfavourable light.

Gerald of Wales accompanied Archbishop Baldwin on his preaching tour of Wales in Lent 1188. As Peter Edbury points out, we lack actual copies of the sermons delivered, but with his customary modesty Gerald tells us of his considerable success in attracting recruits. Hints of his approach – unsurprisingly one that dovetails with the themes of Christian sin in Audita Tremendi and the writings of Henry of Albano and Peter of Blois – are found in the brief statement that ‘God, in His judgement, which is never unjust, permitted Saladin, the leader of the Egyptians and the men of Damascus, to win a victory’.⁷⁰ The first version of the Itinerarium Kambriae was written in the spring or summer of 1191.⁷¹

Another contemporary writer was Walter Map, a cleric in the service of Henry II. His work, known as De nugis curialium, contains a number of contemporary additions to the core text of c. 1181-2, while a section on the fall of Jerusalem seems to have been written soon after news of the disaster reached the West, meaning probably early 1188. Walter described 1187 as a year of gloom and misfortune because ‘Saladin has wholly annihilated and blotted out every Christian there’, and the sultan condemned those ransomed at Jerusalem not to freedom but to life as chattels of his soldiery.⁷²

Berter of Orléans composed a twelve-verse Lament on the Holy Land that Roger of Howden included in his contemporary Gesta. The loss of Jerusalem and the True Cross are the key themes, and there is a strong sense of a need to respond rapidly because ‘the scorner of the cross is trampling on the cross’.⁷³

Of far greater prominence stands the figure of Henry of Albano, a Cistercian monk who became a papal legate and one of the main preachers of the Third Crusade until his death on 1 January 1189. In 1188 he wrote a powerful letter to the leading men of Germany, mourning the loss of the Holy Land to the ‘filthy pagans’ and ‘unbelievers’, although he made no specific reference to Saladin. As above, he framed recent events as a punishment from God for the sins of the Christian peoples.⁷⁴

Henry’s lengthy tract on Jerusalem, De peregrinante civitate Dei, is another important text.⁷⁵ Within this, events of 1187 are included, notably in treatise XIII, the so-called ‘crusading treatise’. The work as a whole was addressed to the monks of Clairvaux and written in the summer or autumn of 1188. It covered the Old Testament, the loss of the True Cross, and the political troubles that plagued Europe in 1188. Henry regarded the crusade as ‘a literal journey back to God’; he believed the Apocalypse was imminent and considered the expedition a journey to the End of Times and to the heavenly Jerusalem. Within this framework, Saladin had a clear, albeit passive profile. He was an agent of the Devil who persecuted Christians and sought their destruction; it was the Devil who gave the True Cross to Saladin. A comparison of Judas (Christians) and Pilate (Saladin) argued that the former was worse, because he was Christ’s friend and disciple. Yet, all of this was a punishment for the sins of the Christians and taking the cross was a test and an opportunity for salvation. In other words, God allowed Jerusalem to fall not because of the power of Saladin and the Ayyubids, but because of the sins of the Christians.

Lyrics in Old French, Occitan, Latin, and Middle High German offer another whole genre of material. Saladin featured little in those contemporary to the Third Crusade. For the troubadour Bertan de Born, ‘Lord Saladin and his vile troops’ are merely a reference point to castigate Richard and Philip for their failure to assist Conrad of Montferrat in his defence of Tyre: ‘Would that they were now both in Sir Saladin’s chains, for they are cheating God: they have taken the cross and do nothing about leaving’.⁷⁶ Latin poetry concerning the crusades after 1187 focused largely on the need for repentance and the role of God in punishing the Christians for their sins. That said, one text from 1188 vividly described Saladin’s victory at Hattin, his execution of 300 Templars and his devastation of the Holy Land. Another wondered why God had allowed the Prince of Darkness (‘princeps tenebrarum’ – Satan or Saladin) to achieve such success in the Holy Land. The Middle High German crusade poems of this time are very inward-looking. They show a profound attachment to home and in one case, Hartmann von Aue wrote that even Saladin and his army ‘would not move me one foot out of Franconia’ (northern Bavaria). Beyond that, there is little of relevance to us here.⁷⁷

Perhaps harder to pin down is the obvious link with the ‘Saladin tithe’, the contemporary name for the 10% tax initiated by the rulers of England and France. This was profoundly unpopular as narratives and songs show, and simple name-association can hardly have been positive in terms of shaping an image.⁷⁸

It would be a distortion to make too much of Saladin’s absence from Henry of Albano’s letter to Germany, his low profile in Audita Tremendi, and his anonymity in Gerald of Wales’s narrative, but it seems worth noting that there is not a blanket and repetitive character assassination. We are not, of course, to know what preachers said in front of a crowd as they tried to work up a response – and the Passio Raginaldi is a possible hint here, but even in that case, the dominant focus is on the sins of Christians, rather than the strength of the Muslims and the wickedness of their leader.

Within all of this understandable fury and fear, Saladin had done something remarkable. The massacre of the Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099 was widely reported, indeed celebrated, in the Latin West. But rather than taking revenge for this event, Saladin had shown mercy in accepting a ransom for the surrender of Jerusalem; why, exactly, he made this choice is irrelevant.⁷⁹ Mercy, as Cicero reminds us, is a form of power; it is also a virtue, often found alongside generosity. As we will see, the ransom agreement was criticised by some (the sultan’s alleged greed for money, or a moral failing by the defenders of Jerusalem), but at the heart of his capture of Jerusalem, this most savage blow to the Christian faith, Saladin delivered an unexpected twist in behaviour that underpinned one facet of his later reputation.

Preparations for the crusade

As the crusade looked to set out, in light of the obviously transformative circumstances, the previously positive relationship between Frederick Barbarossa and the Ayyubids had to end. As noted, the History of the Pilgrims stated, ‘the most serene emperor and Saladin had for a long time been friends’.⁸⁰ In May 1188 Count Henry II of Diez led an embassy to the sultan.⁸¹ A letter, purportedly from Frederick to Saladin appeared in the text known as IP1, the first and earlier part of the composite narrative known as the Itinerarium peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi,⁸² and then in multiple other texts. While the existence of the embassy is highly likely, the actual text itself is regarded as a forgery, produced in England.⁸³ In one sense the authenticity of the letter is not especially important because it forms a further part of the representation of Saladin in the West, although in terms of timing, and given the narratives it is found in, this dates to 1191 onwards. Because the letter is a representation of a diplomatic exchange (presumably giving it greater credibility), it has a suitable formality and lacks the powerful register of a sermon or crusade appeal. Thus, the sultan was ‘a formerly illustrious man’, but also a person of audacious and criminal daring who had profaned the holy places. Frederick asked him to restore the Holy Land or else he would fight ‘through the power of the life-giving cross and in the name of the true Joseph’, presumably another sarcastic play on Yusuf.

IP1 (and Gerald of Wales and the Libellus) included Saladin’s reply, the veracity of which is disputed by scholars. The sultan politely indicated that he had many more men than the crusaders and promised to defeat the Christians. He noted his victories over Western forces in Egypt in 1169 and 1174. He argued that he had obtained Jerusalem through God’s strength and offered to return the True Cross, to free prisoners, and to allow a priest in the Holy Sepulchre, if there was no crusade and if Antioch, Tripoli, and Tyre surrendered. In essence, a very firm response, underlain with a sense of threat and manifest confidence.⁸⁴

News from the front: letters home

In light of the events of 1187-88, the image of Saladin had darkened considerably, ranging from a bloodthirsty tyrant to a key player in the End Times. As the crusade got underway, we can see how and when perceptions of the sultan evolved further. A first seam of material is the letters sent once the expedition set out.

As we saw above, sometimes the authority of these texts is open to question. Correspondence that nominally dated from 1188 was included in the Chronicle of Magnus of Reichersberg (itself written between spring 1191 and 1195) and concerned the relationship between the Byzantine Empire and the Ayyubids. Jonathan Harris persuasively argues that this is anti-Byzantine propaganda and suspicion of the Greek relationship with Saladin may well lie behind this letter. Emperor Isaac II Angelos, who came to cause such trouble for Frederick on his march to the Holy Land, was said to have proposed working with the Muslims to conquer Jerusalem.⁸⁵ When, unexpectedly, Saladin took the Holy Land, despoiled the cross, condemned women to slavery, and polluted the holy sites, the letter claimed the sultan sent over 1,000 warhorses, weapons and an elephant to Isaac. The emperor reciprocated with armour, furs, and cloth for Saladin and Saphadin, who, in the spring of 1188, confirmed the friendship in the expectation that the Greeks would obstruct Frederick. To accompany the second embassy, Saladin sent an extraordinary array of gifts. These included an ostrich, five leopards, caskets of precious stones and woods, as well as ‘an idol’ for public worship (likely a minbar). He also revealed a more lethal side with casks of poisoned wine, flour and wheat, presumably intended to be given to the crusaders.⁸⁶ So, while noting that the priority here was to show how treacherous the Greeks were, Saladin displayed deviousness and duplicity, along with enormous and exotic wealth; his interest in poison surfaces once more as well.

The siege of Acre began in August 1189. The status of many of the nobles and churchmen present generated a steady stream of letters back and forwards across the Mediterranean. Such material constitutes a large body of information but in many cases it was simply prosaic or demonstrated other priorities.⁸⁷ Of greater interest is Guy of Bazoches, a canon of Châlons-sur-Marne, a man of noble origins and crusading ancestry who wrote letters, poems, an apologia, and a world chronicle which included the Third Crusade. He took part in the expedition alongside Count Henry of Troyes and arrived at Acre in July 1190. In a lengthy letter (partly incorporated into his chronicle as well) he told of his journey to the East and presence at Acre. Once at the siege, however, he fell into a gravi langore which prompted him to write a lament and to pray that he might survive to witness the crusaders victorious at Jerusalem. Saladin was ‘the prince of the pagans – a prince indeed and, save only that he were outside the flock of the faithful, illustrious’, a grudging acknowledgement from a man much attuned to a leader’s character.⁸⁸

Richard the Lionheart sent home dozens of letters as he continued to run his kingdom. One from October 1191 was unemotional in his account of the massacre of the Muslim prisoners at Acre, stating simply that Saladin had missed the deadline for returning the True Cross and the Frankish captives. Richard then delighted in his victory at Arsuf and described the sultan as cowed by the loss and lurking ‘like a lion in his den, intent on killing friends of the cross like sheep led to the slaughter’. He conveyed a sense of Saladin’s fear of the crusade in his panicked razing of Ascalon, all of which gave the king grounds to believe that the expedition was on track. Another letter from the same month described Saladin as ‘bereft of any help or plans’ and allowed Richard to express optimism that Jerusalem would fall to the crusaders early in 1192.⁸⁹

Early narrative accounts of the siege of Acre

The near-two-year duration of the siege of Acre (August 1189 to July 1191) presented an obvious forum for the emergence of narratives.⁹⁰ An important, if often neglected, account is the Latin poem Carmen de Accone Oppugnatione, written by a participant and covering events from Saladin’s conquest of the kingdom through to the autumn of 1190 in over 1400 lines. It was dedicated to Archbishop Thierry of Besançon, who died in November of that year. This lively and in many respects highly informative text is, on the subject of the sultan, fairly limited. There is little character development of the Muslim leader, although the author mocked Saladin for giving ‘false hope’ to the garrison of Acre, and noted his shame in failing to take Tyre. We see a flicker of positivity when he is praised for prudent liberality towards his men after the surrender of Jerusalem. The wish for Saladin’s associates to wear yellow (the Ayyubids’ colour) to be similar to their leader is a nice observation too.⁹¹

The first prose narrative to survive is probably the Latin text known as IP1, an eye-witness text, produced, as Helen Nicholson recently argued, by a cleric in the entourage of Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, written in late 1190 or very early 1191, and intended to encourage Richard the Lionheart’s crusading endeavours. The account finishes with the death of Archbishop Baldwin at Acre on 19 November 1190.⁹² Nicholson observes distinct changes in style across the text with chapters 1–18 standing as one particular section. Within this, it is relevant to note that Saladin is depicted very negatively indeed, but he barely features in the remainder of IP1. We hear an account of Saladin’s origins as a humble man, not one of fine birth. He is, in essence, the manager of highly profitable Damascene brothels, although even then, through ‘lavish giving’ he wins the favour of commoners. This may be an echo of his real role as de facto police chief in Damascus, albeit with a more lurid aspect; there is also a flavour of the views of William of Tyre and the ‘Poem of Saladin’.⁹³

IP1 drops in that Saladin had been knighted by Humphrey of Toron, so we see an early tradition of this story evident in the crusader camp and then in circulation in the West; it is not a substantial leap from the ‘close friendship’ mentioned in William of Tyre either.⁹⁴ But the largely hostile tone persists as IP1 decries Saladin’s rise as the caprice of Fortune; he succeeds through trickery and force of arms; he is a greedy tyrant; he delights in the executions after Hattin; he is repulsed shamefully on his first approach to Tyre; and he is an insatiable plunderer when attacking Ascalon. IP1 may have reached England by the spring of 1191 and it circulated fairly rapidly, potentially being used by Gerald of Wales in his early version of De principis.⁹⁵

A text ascribed to Haymar, a monk of Florence who was present at the siege of Acre, is an 896-line Rithmus (a poem designed to be sung) that ended with the fall of the city and his witnessing the execution of the Muslim prisoners. While Haymar expressed great horror at this event, he was quite clear that he viewed Saladin as being at fault. He accused the ‘hardened heart of the evil dog’ as not wanting to pay the agreed ransom and return the True Cross, and of speaking false words to spin things out. After he described the executions and the disembowelling of the bodies to search for gold coins, Haymar restated the ‘betrayal of the treaty’ and he concluded: ‘Moreover, Saladin will enjoy less trust with his people, for out of greed he let them perish’, a damning assessment of the sultan’s behaviour and character.⁹⁶ In essence, therefore, views from within the crusader camp in the summer of 1191 were all pretty negative.

On crusade with Richard I

Roger of Howden was a clerk at the court of Henry II and then Richard I. He accompanied the latter on crusade from Marseille to Sicily, then to Cyprus, and to the siege of Acre, although he returned home soon after the city fell and probably left for the West with Philip Augustus in late August 1191. The Gesta runs from 1169, with one manuscript stopping in 1177, and then continues through Henry’s reign into that of Richard, to be drawn together on Roger’s return from the crusade in the spring of 1192. The Chronica, written between 1192–1201 is, for the years 1169-92, based on the Gesta, sometimes verbatim, sometimes with changes, and sometimes with additional information and a shuffling of sequences.⁹⁷ The Chronica was produced with the knowledge of the outcome of the crusade and that affected the treatment of issues such as Joachim of Fiore’s prophecies that Saladin would be driven out of Jerusalem, or the question as to whether Richard actually laid siege to Jerusalem at the end of 1191. As John Gillingham noted, however, the Gesta is ‘an excellent place to look’ in order ‘to learn what well-informed men believed about these events […] it shows us the kind of information available in and around the Angevin court’.⁹⁸

Saladin first featured in the entry for 1177 when his large army was crushed at the battle of Montgisard, a Frankish victory assisted by the presence of the True Cross, a story initially seen in Robert of Torigni.⁹⁹ Four years later, in the Chronica, the sultan is credited with registering the weakness of the leprous Baldwin IV and the Franks’ lack of manpower, points which prompted him to invade. Roger also related a more gossipy story involving Saladin and the tale of a Templar who apostatised and allegedly married one of the sultan’s nieces.¹⁰⁰

The Gesta reported Heraclius’s plea to King Henry at Reading in early 1185 and then included the letter of Pope Lucius III noted above.¹⁰¹ By way of reflecting contemporary understanding, this embassy meant the cleric was well briefed on political matters within Jerusalem leading up to Hattin, such as Raymond of Tripoli’s pact with Saladin. Around this time, he also included numerous letters from the Holy Land, Berter of Orléans’ lament for the loss of Jerusalem, and papal crusade appeals, some of which, as we have already seen,¹⁰² are understandably emotive. In contrast, Roger’s accounts of, for example, the executions after Hattin and the fall of Jerusalem are without comment. In other words, sharper commentary appears in the letters, rather than from the cleric himself. Roger also related Saladin’s diplomacy with the sultan of Iconium, his apparent alliance with Byzantium, and Frederick Barbarossa’s letter declaring war on Saladin. The siege of Acre received close coverage, with Richard’s journey to the Holy Land naturally getting even more detail.

En route to the East, an especially remarkable episode took place at Messina, in late 1190, when Richard met the influential thinker and monk Joachim of Fiore. Roger, who was present, recorded Joachim’s prophecies of crusader victory in his Gesta. As Henry of Albano suggested back in 1188, Joachim also believed that Saladin’s actions had precipitated momentous events. He spoke of the beast of the Apocalypse as a great seven-headed red dragon confronting a woman (representing the Church) about to give birth; a male child was born, a son raised towards God in heaven. Joachim named the seven heads and number six was Saladin. As the monk said: ‘One of these heads is certainly Saladin who today oppressed the Church of God and reduces it to slavery, along with the Sepulchre of Our Lord and the Holy City of Jerusalem, and with the land once trodden by the feet of Christ’. He indicated that Saladin would soon lose the kingdom and be killed by Richard, beginning the Last Age. This was a powerful stimulus to the king and a strong steer as to the evil of his opponent.¹⁰³ Beyond a willingness to report it at length, Roger refrained from endorsing this view. More importantly, it is an indication of at least one form of the imagery concerning Saladin that was fed to Richard and his nobles just as they left for the Holy Land.

Roger’s account of the end of the siege of Acre included reports of Saladin initiating diplomatic efforts through the sending of pears and plums to Richard and Philip, an approach said to be triggered by tensions within Muslim ranks. A couple of Richard’s letters home are copied in but, as noted above, from September 1191 onwards, detail faded. The closing phases of the expedition, namely the battle of Jaffa and the final peace treaty were dispensed with very abruptly, indeed with no overall assessment of the crusade. In other words, Roger left the Levant before the really intensive diplomacy between Richard and Saphadin began, although one interesting chivalric touch, present only in the later Chronica, is Saphadin sending a horse back to the king after it had escaped during the latter’s near-capture outside Jaffa in late September 1192.¹⁰⁴

Most important of the eye-witness accounts for us is Ambroise, the Norman cleric who took part in the Third Crusade as a member of Richard the Lionheart’s forces and authored a lengthy and vivid vernacular verse chronicle, probably before 1196.¹⁰⁵ It is Ambroise who provides much of our written information about what the English crusaders made of Saladin and Saphadin. The author’s main concern was to demonstrate the heroism of Richard the Lionheart not least by contrasting him with the dire performance of Philip Augustus. Muslims are usually covered by the reflex phrase ‘cursed people’, an expression that peppers the text, but Saladin and Saphadin are largely set above this and play their part in the crusade by helping to illuminate Richard’s greatness. Their fine behaviour and character fit generic aspects of the verse genre, an issue that may be of some concern to us. We cannot tell if all of Ambroise’s stories are true, but they do reflect the broad pattern of Saladin’s mercy and generosity we see in Muslim sources.¹⁰⁶ Of course, these too can be argued as having an element of literary creativity and convention therein, but if the actions of Saladin and Saphadin were entirely at odds with what had taken place, the images were far less likely to have stuck, not least with returning crusaders, who as we will see, were a powerful source of information to those in the West.

As Marianne Ailes indicates, in Ambroise, Saladin was blamed for treachery in his dealings after the surrender of Acre. It was, therefore, the sultan who triggered Richard’s massacre of the prisoners, an atrocity that needed to be shifted from the English king’s plate, although as already noted, this was a judgement shared by other Western eye-witnesses.¹⁰⁷ Saladin was also (earlier) shown to be unwilling to fight in person, a contrast with Richard. Ambroise omitted much of the detailed diplomatic contact, probably because he was not of the status to have been involved. He mentioned repeated gift-giving at one point but noted that Richard was criticised by some for accepting these presents because they felt it compromised him.

It was not until the final stages of the crusade, from late July 1192 onwards, that Ambroise begins to provide a sustained treatment of Saladin, describing him, slightly out of the blue, as a ‘generous and valiant Saracen’. Such a figure is the literary configuration of a noble Saracen warrior, but in the context of the sultan’s actions it seems appropriate. As Ambroise set the scene for Richard’s departure, the sultan reportedly conceded that if, in future, he had to lose the Holy City, then it would be to Richard that he could tolerate doing so. By the same token, therefore, the king had to concede it to someone (i.e. Saladin) who was worthwhile as well.¹⁰⁸

After the Treaty of Jaffa Ambroise engaged even more closely with the sultan, recording that he honoured his word in protecting Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem when it seems they had failed to give due notice of their coming and, as a consequence, could have been subject to assault. The author completed his own pilgrimage in safety, and then reported on the experiences of another contingent, that of Hubert Walter. As the most senior crusader to visit Jerusalem, Saladin rendered him the appropriate courtesies and gave the bishop fine gifts. Hubert complimented Richard and Saladin, with special emphasis on the king’s bravery. The sultan reportedly replied: ‘but I should prefer to exercise generosity and judgement in moderation than boldness without moderation’. Such sentiments would chime very nicely with Seneca’s about a lack of excess and also echoed the views of others that Richard was a touch reckless. In other words, Saladin – in contrast to much of the material in the early pages of this paper – was now shown to represent the best of virtues. This is demonstrated directly with his ‘I will grant you one wish’ offer to Hubert who, upon sleeping on it for a night, cleverly asked for Latin clerics to have a presence in the churches of the Holy Sepulchre, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. This was a bold request, but one that Saladin granted, neatly adding one more achievement to the crusaders’ slate and simultaneously burnishing his own image as an honourable and generous man.¹⁰⁹ Given what we saw of depictions of Saladin in the West down even to 1191, the character whom the crusaders encountered in this final phase of the crusade was not likely to have been the one they expected.

Versions of this behaviour surely ran through to the West. Of course, we can never know the impact and volume of stories from returning crusaders, each of whom had their own tale to tell, reflecting both the broader experience of being in the Near East for at least fifteen months, as against (for some) the intensity of high-level diplomatic interaction. Writing after the 1167 siege of Alexandria, William of Tyre gave a useful perspective when he noted that the two sides mingled and the Franks, ‘by diligent observation, collected material from which, on their return home, they might often weave stories for their friends and refresh the minds of listeners with agreeable conversation’.¹¹⁰ The crusading adventures of Guy III of Senlis, the French royal butler, could provide an example of this. Guy was amongst those captured immediately after the marriage of Conrad of Montferrat and Isabella, heiress to Jerusalem in November 1190. IP1 and Ambroise did not know his fate, but Guy survived and returned to France where he may have related something akin to Beha al-Din’s eye-witness account of the captives’ reception: Saladin ‘honoured the nobles amongst them’ and gave them gifts of a fur robe, provision of food, a tent close to his own, and ‘at all times he treated them generously’.¹¹¹

Towards the end of the crusade Beha al-Din also described interaction between the two sides. In doing so he gives us a glimpse of Richard’s star quality amongst Saladin’s men with the comment that after the siege of Jaffa ‘several of the mamluks got to meet him and there was much conversation and merriment between them’. The king also knighted several elite mamluks: ‘he was on very good terms with them as they had met with him on numerous occasions. He [Richard] also made friends with several emirs […] when the group came before him he was serious and light-hearted’. In other words, we see mutual chivalric recognition and acknowledgement on both sides. After the conclusion of the Treaty of Jaffa the same author noted that the two armies fraternised and many Muslims went to Jaffa to trade, again generating material for stories back home.¹¹²

The first decade after the crusade

Of considerable influence is the text known as IP2, a Latin prose work based on a translation of Ambroise and created by an author, possibly a crusader himself, who also used IP1 and other written and oral sources. The composite is familiar as the Itinerarium peregrinorum, a text widely circulated. The purpose here was to preserve and enhance Richard’s crusading achievements. It was produced, as Stephen Spencer persuasively argues, probably c. 1197–1201 by a compiler, likely overseen by prior Peter of Cornwall from Holy Trinity, London.¹¹³ While IP2 is very much based on Ambroise, it is interesting to see where the (marginally) later compiler chose to deviate from the vernacular text. In general, this happened relatively rarely, but the instances involved are intriguing in regard to Saladin and Saphadin.

At Easter 1192 when Richard was back in Acre, IP2 tells us that ‘King Richard magnificently honoured Saphadin’s son with the belt of knighthood. He had been sent to King Richard for this purpose’ – a section entirely absent from Ambroise.¹¹⁴ Of course, the latter may not have been present, or judged this of insufficient note, but IP2 – again with the proviso that this looks good for Richard – is generating a sense of Ayyubid family engagement with marks of chivalric behaviour.

The treatment of Saphadin in the closing stages of the crusade also bears scrutiny. IP2 repeated the story of Saphadin (via an agent this time) giving Richard a horse during the battle of Jaffa in 1192 and wrote of ‘Saphadin of Arcadia […] a very noble and munificent man, who would have been worthy to be compared to the best of men if he had not rejected the creed and faith of the Christian religion’.¹¹⁵ When the king, stricken by serious illness, decided to approach Saphadin to sue for peace, we see another change. From Ambroise’s Saphadin simply being a man who respected Richard and worked hard to bring about a peace, IP2 wrote: ‘Saphadin was a man of exceptional liberality who had also frequently demonstrated that he thought the king worthy of much honour because of his unique prowess’.¹¹⁶ A compliment to Richard, of course, but one that required Saphadin to be of sufficient standing to deliver it. There follows a near-verbatim version of Ambroise’s account of Hubert Walter’s visit to Jerusalem.¹¹⁷ Saladin (with the helpful blur of Saphadin), thus moves from the demon of IP1 to the courteous, generous, and honourable host of IP2.¹¹⁸

A positive picture of Saphadin also emerged in the Cronicon of Richard of Devizes, a monk of St Swithun’s, Winchester. This text covered the period from Richard’s coronation to the end of the crusade; it relied largely on oral testimony and was written between 1192 and c. 1198. Saladin himself is mentioned only in the most matter-of-fact way, but his brother had the task of making a lengthy speech on the fame and astonishing military skills of the English monarch. The fact that Richard and Saphadin met on several occasions provided the cue for such an exposition, although the words are plainly fabricated. To underpin the value of Saphadin’s assessment, the Muslim was described as ‘a man of long military experience, very polished and wise, who the king’s magnanimity had won over to his friendship and favouring his side’. Some fine chivalric virtues in other words.¹¹⁹

Matters are not all good, though. An interesting assessment was given by William of Newburgh, an Augustinian monk based in Yorkshire who wrote his Historia Anglorum between 1196 and his death in the spring of 1198.¹²⁰ The English monk gave full weight to Saladin’s low birth, cunning, and treachery, as well as his pride and arrogance. Even the sultan allowing the sick to remain in the Hospital of St John in Jerusalem was questioned as being either for his humanity or his own glory.¹²¹

More useful for the purposes of this paper is an entry for the year 1195 which William included within an extensive diatribe on Islam. A long anecdote concerned two Cistercian monks who had been captured and presented to Saladin. The sultan plied the monks with sufficient wine for them to forget their vows and sleep with female attendants, a transgression which enabled him to mock St Benedict for allowing the monks to consume alcohol. William castigated Saladin for his arrogance and argued that the moderate use of wine, as the Rule prescribed, was good. William also deployed Saladin to emphasise the injustice of King Henry VI of Germany’s imprisonment of King Richard, a man who had fought so hard against the Muslims, yet was now held ‘by a more hostile Saladin, in that he was even more avaricious’.¹²²

Soon after William of Newburgh wrote, a Latin continuation of William of Tyre appeared. Likely first produced in England in the first decade of the thirteenth century, it used IP1, Roger of Howden’s Chronica, and a version of Ambroise. It includes the familiar, scathing account of Saladin’s lowly and dubious origins and his treachery. The Third Crusade ends with the sultan demolishing or profaning the holy places.¹²³

In many senses, the actual content of such tales is irrelevant. What they show is that stories about the sultan circulated in the West within a few years of the Third Crusade and that he was being adopted by writers and poets, for good or ill, as a figure to represent particular ideas or attitudes.

Another northern European writer to express a negative viewpoint was Arnold of Lübeck, based at the abbey of St John in the prosperous north-German port. The demise of the German crusade (early 1191) left him little opportunity to include less pernicious material and, even though Arnold completed his work shortly prior to 1210, his fury at the events of 1187 remained apparent.¹²⁴

A more positive view emerged from the Chronicon of Robert of Auxerre (d. 1211).¹²⁵ There is not the usual invective of letters (‘evil Saladin’, etc.), he was just matter of fact and descriptive, but then, at the end of the siege of Acre in 1187, he made some positive statements: ‘truly the generosity of Saladin may be praised, that when no one could bear the pressure of the siege, he agreed to the payment of tribute to those who wished to stay, that he was a man of his word’, and ‘a man of the greatest character and lavish generosity so that only with difficulty’ could he deny the requests of those that petitioned him. He also wrote of Saladin letting off the poor and women from the ransom for Jerusalem. Robert’s account of the crusade is fairly detailed down to 1191 but once Philip Augustus departed for home, matters tailed off quickly.¹²⁶

Perhaps a sharper, if unsurprising, indication of a negative image within ecclesiastical circles is from Innocent III. He was, famously, utterly dedicated to the recovery of Jerusalem – and Saladin, as the man who had taken it from the Christians, was never likely to feature well. The pope made numerous factual references to the sultan, but one especially cutting comment is worth noting. He regarded Markward of Anweiler, the imperial representative in southern Italy, as a heretic and, in a letter of November 1199, sought to gather support against him. The pope argued that Markward was a threat to the patrimony of St Peter and to Christendom as a whole. He likened the German’s supporters to Muslims in the Near East, while Markward himself was ‘another Saladin’ and a possible ally for the Muslims.¹²⁷

More positively, Saladin made an important appearance in the work of Walther von der Vogelweide, a composer of love poetry, political and didactic pieces, who wrote this verse in 1200–1208 and addressed it to King Philip of Germany (Philip of Swabia). Walther argued that the act of giving gained admiration and honour, while generosity was a marker of lordship, a practice in which he clearly felt Philip was falling short in:

King Philip, those who observe you closely accuse you of not being generous voluntarily;

It seems to me that you lose much more than that.

You might more gladly give a thousand pounds voluntarily than thirty thousand involuntarily.

You do not know how one acquires esteem and honour through giving.

Think of generous Saladin: he said that a king’s hands should have holes in them;

In that way they would be feared and also loved […]

One loss is good if it brings two gains.

Walther was, therefore, representing Saladin’s behaviour as something to be admired, and around a decade after the sultan’s death such was his reputation for generosity in Europe that his virtue in this regard could be cited as a benchmark of esteem in the Christian West.¹²⁸

Conclusion

It should be underlined that not all authors, especially ecclesiastical writers, felt inclined towards a more positive take on the man who captured Jerusalem. Likewise, some chronicles into the 1220s and beyond (such as those produced in St Albans) simply remained hostile. A few later texts came to use his image in a selective fashion, both good and bad. Jacques de Vitry, for example, railed against Saladin’s victories over the Christians and claimed that he murdered the Fatimid caliph and all his family, yet he also described the sultan as ‘liberalis valde et munificus’ and praised Saladin’s austerity and humility at his death. Other preachers, such as the Dominican Stephen of Bourbon, took up this latter theme and repeated it.¹²⁹ It is also important to remember that many authors chose to ignore the sultan entirely.

This paper has tried to sharpen the focus beyond a simple sentiment that the West admired Saladin, to suggest more precisely the channel down which this flowed and to show how rapidly this occurred. Generosity was hugely valued in the twelfth-century West through a classical and Christian heritage, a standing that was underscored across both knightly and clerical writing, not least because of the close interaction between these two groups. By the same token, avarice was deeply frowned upon in contemporary Europe. Saladin’s generosity may well have been known in the West before 1187 and then, by the end of the Third Crusade, far more so; in conjunction with this we have his decision to ransom, rather than slaughter, the prisoners in Jerusalem, meaning that alongside the image of generosity stands an act of mercy – the same association we see in Seneca’s texts. The preaching of the crusade was, in parts, understandably aggressive towards Saladin, an attitude that continued through early reports from the siege of Acre. Yet the Church's explanation for the fall of Jerusalem laid great emphasis on the sins of the Christians, taking Saladin (or his agency in these events) away from the very centre of the target. As it became increasingly apparent that the Christians would not recover Jerusalem, Saladin’s behaviour demonstrated generosity and mercy in considerable measure, especially remarkable in the context of a holy war. In doing so, he pressed the perfect buttons for some Western participants and writers to absorb and reflect his achievements within the literary and cultural conventions that they – and their own heroes – operated, thereby leaving us a more positive image of him. It is also worth noting that with Jerusalem remaining in Muslim hands, for writers such as Ambroise, Saladin could not continually be denigrated because to do so would reflect very badly on, for example, Richard the Lionheart. With the sultan an honourable, admirable, and, in many ways, a more familiar enemy, he became a suitable opponent for the crusader king. Furthermore, with the end of the crusade, the context, the purpose, and, often, the profile of writers changed from needing to motivate and inspire a response from an audience (likely requiring a strongly negative image) to reporting the more earthly and secular reality of the crusade itself. Knights and nobles who survived the Third Crusade lived well into the thirteenth century; indeed, as we know, several went on the Fourth Crusade.¹³⁰ If they all adhered to the ‘son of Satan’ line because Saladin had displayed none of these various markers of virtue, it is hard to see how a positive image could have taken root; the soil, so to speak, would simply have been too dry.¹³¹

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Margaret A. Jubb, The Legend of Saladin in Western Literature and Historiography (Lewiston NY, 2000), 167–83.

2 Lars Kjær, The Medieval Gift and the Classical Tradition: Ideals and the Performance of Generosity in Medieval England, 1100–1300 (Cambridge, 2019).

3 Ibid., 44–8, 56–65.

4 Ibid., 35–9.

5 Ibid., 68–74.

6 The Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Douglas Kelly (Woodbridge, 2017), 1–3, 106.

7 Chrétien de Troyes, ‘Cligés’, in Arthurian Romances, trans. William A. Kibler (London, 1991), 125. Several other texts are discussed in Kjær, Medieval Gift, such as those of Aimon of Varennes, at 139–40.

8 Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, or The Story of the Grail, trans. Ruth H. Cline (Athens GA, 1983), ix-xvii.

9 Ibid., 3; Kjaer, Medieval Gift, 138–9.

10 Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and trans. Peter G. Walsh (London, 1982), 82–3, 304–5; Theodore Evergates, Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, 1145–1198 (Philadelphia, 2019), 59–62.

11 Ad Putter, ‘Knights and Clerics at the Court of Champagne: Chrétien de Troyes’s Romances in Context’, in Medieval Knighthood V, ed. Stephen Church and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge, 1995), 243–66, esp. 244, 264.

12 Mary A. Rouse and Richard A. Rouse, ‘The Florilegium angelicum: Its Origin, Content, and Influence’, in Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame, 1991), 101–8; Theodore Evergates, Henry the Liberal, Count of Champagne, 1127–1181 (Philadelphia 2016), 95–6; Kjær, Medieval Gift, 60–2.

13 WT, 2: 1003; translated as: William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, trans. Emily A. Babcock and Augustus C. Krey, 2 vols. (New York, 1948), 2: 443–4; Robert of Auxerre, Chronicon, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger, MGH SS 26 (Hanover, 1882), 243–4; Evergates, Henry the Liberal, 160–3, n. 75, 265.

14 Jonathan P. Phillips, The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (London, 2019), 124–32.

15 Brian A. Catlos, The Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050–1614 (Cambridge, 2015), 526.

16 Michael A. Köhler, Alliances and Treaties between Frankish and Muslim Rulers in the Middle East: Cross-Cultural Diplomacy in the Period of the Crusades, trans. Peter M. Holt, ed. and introduction Konrad Hirschler (Leiden, 2013).

17 WT, 2: 901–9; trans. A History of Deeds, 2: 334–42, quote at 339; Phillips, Saladin, 47–50.

18 WT, 2.908; trans. A History of Deeds, 2: 342.

19 Peter W. Edbury and John G. Rowe, William of Tyre: Historian of the Latin East (Cambridge, 1988), 55.

20 The first of these points presumably reflected his position as a Kurdish outsider to the Zengid, Turkic elite. The veracity of the second accusation is less certain – some Muslim sources say the same. The main aspect of the third was true and caused much controversy in the Muslim Near East. Jubb, Legend of Saladin, 6–13.

21 WT, 2: 925, 970–1; trans. A History of Deeds, 2: 359, 408.

22 WT, 2: 968, see also 2: 970–1; trans. A History of Deeds, 2: 405, 407–8. WT, 2: 925 (trans. A History of Deeds, 2: 359) mentions Saladin’s generosity as profligate, a trait in rulers that was criticised by the classical authors.

23 WT, 2: 973; trans. A History of Deeds, 2: 410; Edbury and Rowe, William of Tyre, 55.

24 Ivo Wolsing, ‘William of Tyre, Orientalism and the (De)Construction of Latin Identity in Twelfth-Century Jerusalem’, Medieval Encounters 28 (2022): 501–2, 513–4. Scholars came to regard avarice as a particularly repugnant vice during this period and, as Lester Little noted, ‘it is often paired with generosity’, hence the latter came to the forefront as the positive opposite: Lester K. Little, ‘Pride Goes before Avarice: Social Change and the Vices in Latin Christendom’, The American Historical Review 76 (1981): 16–49, quote at 23.

25 These did much to enhance Saladin’s image, although given that the surviving texts date from the 1230s they are beyond the scope of this present paper. See Peter W. Edbury, ‘Ernoul, Eracles and the Collapse of the Kingdom of Jerusalem’, in The French of Outremer: Communities, and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean, ed. Laura Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul (New York, 2018), 44–67; John France, ‘Saladin, from Memory towards Myth in the Continuations’, in Deeds Done Beyond the Sea: Essays on William of Tyre, Cyprus and the Military Orders Presented to Peter Edbury, ed. Susan B. Edgington and Helen J. Nicholson, Crusades Subsidia 6 (Farnham, 2014), 69–82. Margaret Jubb shows how the Eracles version softens and modifies William of Tyre’s negative comments and has Saladin exemplifying ‘the knightly ethos which his audience would have espoused’: Margaret Jubb, ‘Saladin vu par Guillaume de Tyr et par L’Eracles: changement de perspectives’, in Autour de la première croisade, ed. Michel Balard (Paris, 1996), 450.

26 Edbury and Rowe, William of Tyre, 2–4; Robert Huygens, ‘Introduction’, in WT, pp. 76–87.

27 See below, p. 17.

28 The Chronicle of Arnold of Lübeck, trans. Graham A. Loud (Abingdon, 2019), 39–53; Myra M. Bom, Constance of France: Womanhood and Agency in Twelfth-Century Europe (Cham, 2022), 201–31.

29 On Giraut and Aimar, see John B. Gillingham and Ruth Harvey, ‘Le troubadour Giraut de Borneil et la troisième croisade’, Rivista di Studi Testuali 3 (2005): 51–72.

30 The story is neatly summarized in Bernard Hamilton’s ‘Our Lady of Saidnaiya: An Orthodox Shrine Revered by Muslims and Knights Templar at the Time of the Crusades’, in The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History, ed. Robert N. Swanson, Studies in Church History 36 (Woodbridge, 2000), 210–1.

31 John B. Freed, Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth (London, 2016), 355; Martin Wagendorfer, ‘Eine bisher unbekannte (Teil-)Überlieferung des Saladin-Briefs an Kaiser Friedrich I. Barbarossa’, Deutches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 65 (2009): 565–84.

32 Chronicle of Arnold of Lübeck, 272–83.

33 ‘History of the Pilgrims’, in The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa, trans. Graham A. Loud (Farnham, 2010), 144–5; Ottonis de Sancto Blasio chronica et Annales Marbacenses, ed. Adolf Hofmeister, Hermann Bloch, and Franz-Josef Schmale (Darmstadt, 1998), 174–5.

34 Ottobono Scriba, ‘Annals [of Genoa]’, in Caffaro, Genoa and the Twelfth-Century Crusades, trans. Martin A. Hall and Jonathan P. Phillips (Farnham, 2013), 143; Phillips, Saladin, 99.

35 Michael Staunton, The Historians of Angevin England (Oxford, 2019), 67–81: Ralph of Diceto, Opera, ed. William Stubbs, RS 68, 2 vols. (London, 1876), 2: 81.

36 Ralph of Diceto, Opera, 2: 25–7; Hannes Möhring, ‘Zwei aiyubidische Briefe an Alexander III. und Lucius III. bei Radulf de Diceto zum Kriegsgefangenenproblem’, Archiv für Diplomatik 46 (2000): 197–216; Henry Bainton, History and the Written Word: Documents, Literacy and Language in the Age of the Angevins (Philadelphia, 2020), 19–30.

37 Patrick DeBrosse, ‘The First Draft of a Saladin Legend: Saladin’s Reputation in the Latin West prior to 1187’, Viator 54, no. 1 (2023) [forthcoming]; Lambert of Wattrelos, Annales Cameracenses, ed. George Pertz, MGH SS 16 (Hanover, 1859), 548–9.

38 Robert of Torigni, The Chronography, ed. and trans. Thomas Bisson, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2020), 1: xxx, xliv-xlv, liii, 282–5, 314–5, 330–1, 346–7, 350–1.

39 Geoffrey of Vigeois, La chronique de Geoffroi de Breuil, prieur de Vigeois, ed. Pierre Botineau and Jean-Loup Lemâitre (Paris, 2021), 70–1; DeBrosse, ‘First Draft of a Saladin Legend’, [forthcoming].

40 Roger of Howden, Gesta regis Henrici secundi, Benedicti abbatis: The Chronicle of the Reigns of Henry II and Richard I, AD 1169-1192, ed. William Stubbs, RS 49, 2 vols. (London, 1867), 1: 272–5.

41 Benjamin Z. Kedar, ‘The Patriarch Heraclius’, in Outremer: Studies in the History of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem presented to Joshua Prawer, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar, Hans E. Mayer and Raymond C. Smail (Jerusalem, 1982), 191–4; Jonathan P. Phillips, Defenders of the Holy Land: Relations between the Latin East and the West, 1119–1187 (Oxford, 1996), 251–63; Staunton, Historians, 228–35.

42 Freed, Frederick Barbarossa, 454–5; Ottonis de Sancto Blasio chronica et Annales Marbacenses, 123.

43 Rigord, The Deeds of Philip Augustus: An English Translation of Rigord’s Gesta Philippi Augusti, trans. Larry F. Field, ed. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Sean L. Field (Ithaca, 2022), 74–5.

44 Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica, The Conquest of Ireland, ed. and trans. A. Brian Scott and Francis X. Martin (Dublin, 1978), xvi-xvii, 200–5.

45 Gerald of Wales, Instruction for a Ruler: De principis instructione, ed. and trans. Robert Bartlett (Oxford, 2018), xiii-xix, 98–109, 518–27. Book 2 takes the story down to 1186. The final version of the text dates from 1216–17.

46 Ralph Niger, De re militari, et triplici via peregrinationis Ierosolimitane, ed. Ludwig Schmugge (Berlin, 1977), 193–4; translated by John D. Cotts, On Warfare and the Threefold Path of the Jerusalem Pilgrimage: A Translation of Ralph Niger's De Re Militari et Triplici via Ierosolimitane peregrinationis (Abingdon, 2023), 150–1. Lucius III’s letter in Gerald of Wales, Instruction for a Ruler, 526–9; Roger of Howden, Gesta, 1: 332–3. Also in William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, 3: 245–6. For Clerkenwell, see: Ralph of Diceto, Opera, 2: 33–4.

47 Papsturkunden für Kirchen im heiligen Lande, ed. Rudolf Hiestand (Göttingen, 1985), no. 148, pp. 322–4; Gerald of Wales, Instruction for a Ruler, pp. 520–3.

48 Helen Birkett, ‘News in the Middle Ages: Communications and the Launch of the Third Crusade, 1187–88’, Viator 49 (2018): 23–61.

49 Extensive coverage of the response and preaching of the crusade in: Penny J. Cole, The Preaching the Crusades to the Holy Land: 1095–1270 (Cambridge MA, 1990), 63–79; Sylvia Schein, Gateway to the Heavenly City: Crusader Jerusalem and the Catholic West, 1099–1187 (Aldershot, 2005), 159–87; Matthieu Rajohnson, L’Occident au regret de Jérusalem, 1187-fin du xiv siècle (Paris, 2021), 47–115; Katrine Funding Højgaard, ‘Narrating the Defeat: The Loss of Jerusalem in Western Historical Writing, 1187–1229’ (PhD Dissertation, The Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, 2020), 55–150.

50 Translated in Letters from the East: Crusaders, Pilgrims and Settlers in the 12th-13th Centuries, trans. Malcolm C. Barber and Keith Bate (Farnham, 2010), 75–7. See also the comments by Penny J. Cole, ‘Christian Perceptions of the Battle of Hattin (583/1187)’, Al-Masaq 6 (1993): 10–15.

51 History of the Expedition of the Emperor Frederick, in The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa, trans. Graham A. Loud (Farnham, 2010), 33–5; Roger of Howden, Chronica magistri Rogeri de Houedene, ed. William Stubbs, RS 51, 4 vols. (London, 1868–71), 2: 324–5; trans. Letters from the East, 78.

52 Roger of Howden, Gesta, 2: 11–13; trans. in Letters from the East, 82–3, and in Caffaro, Genoa and the Crusades, 213–5.

53 Letter to Urban III: Benjamin Z. Kedar, ‘Ein Hilferuf aus Jerusalem vom September 1187’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 38 (1982): 112–22. Letter to the leaders of the West: Nikolas Jaspert, ‘Zwei unbekannte Hilfsersuchen des Patriarchen Eraclius vor dem Fall Jerusalems (1187)’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 60 (2004): 483–516. Both these texts are translated in Letters from the East, 79–81.

54 Thomas W. Smith, ‘Audita Tremendi and the Call for the Third Crusade, 1187–1188’, Viator 49, no. 3 (2018): 63–101. Urban’s death is in Roger of Howden, Gesta, 2: 14, and Audita Tremendi follows at 2: 15–19. There are many translations, see for example, Louise and Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095–1274 (London, 1981), 64–7.

55 See also the letter of Peter of Blois calling for help for the Latin East in 1185–86: Peter of Blois, ‘Epistolae 98’, PL, 207: 306–8.

56 Roger of Howden, Gesta, 2: 36–8; trans. Letters from the East, 84–6.

57 Roger of Howden, Gesta, 2: 40–1; trans. Letters from the East, 83–4.

58 Dated to 1188 by Helen J. Nicholson in her Sibyl, Queen of Jerusalem, 1186–90 (Abingdon, 2021), 146–7.

59 ‘History of the Expedition of the Emperor Frederick’, in The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa, 35–6.

60 Anonymous, ‘Un poème latin contemporain sur Saladin’, ed. Gaston Paris, ROL 1 (1895): 433–44.

61 Jubb, Legend of Saladin, 7.

62 The Conquest of the Holy Land by Salah al-Din: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Anonymous Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum, ed. and trans. Keagan Brewer and James H. Kane (Abingdon, 2019), 9–11.

63 Ibid., for example, see: 113, 169, 193, 217.

64 Ibid., 163–7, 219.

65 Ibid., 178–83. Perhaps a slightly contradictory image at this point given that Acre had surrendered with minimal fighting.

66 Ibid., 202–12. James H. Kane, ‘“Blood and Water Flowed to the Ground”: Sacred Topography, Biblical Landscapes and Conceptions of Space in the Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum’, Journal of Medieval History 47 (2021): 379.

67 Roger of Howden, Gesta, 2: 15

68 Alexander Marx, ‘The Passio Raginaldi of Peter of Blois: Martyrdom and Eschatology in the Preaching of the Third Crusade’, Viator 50 (2019): 197–32. Reynald was not a universally popular figure. See Philip Handyside, ‘Differing Views of Renaud de Châtillon: William of Tyre and L’Estoire d’Eracles’, in Deeds Done Beyond the Sea: Essays on William of Tyre (see note 25 above), 43–52.

69 Peter of Blois, Tractatus Duo, Passio Raginaldi principis Antiochie, ed. Robert B. C. Huygens, CCCM 194 (Turnhout, 2002), 40, 46, 50–2, 57–8. In the Conquestio Saladin features as execrable; a son of perdition, latter immediately after a reference to Joseph. He is the King of Babylon and had churchmen put to the sword and took young men and virgins into captivity. Ibid, 75, 83–4.

70 Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London, 1978), 74; Peter W. Edbury, ‘Preaching the Crusade in Wales’, in Germany and England in the High Middle Ages, ed. Alfred Haverkamp and Hanna Vollrath (Oxford, 1996), 221–33.

71 Gerald of Wales, Journey, 16, 38, n. 116.

72 Walter Map, De nugis curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. Montague R. James, revised Christopher N. L. Brooke and Roger A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), 40–5.

73 Roger of Howden, Gesta, 2: 26–8.

74 ‘History of the Expedition of the Emperor Frederick’, in The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa, 41–3.

75 Alexander Marx, ‘Jerusalem as the Travelling City of God’, Crusades 20 (2021): 83–120; idem., ‘Constructing and Denying the Enemy: Cistercian Approaches to Preaching the Third Crusade, 1187–92’, Citeaux – Commentarii cistercienses 70 (2019): 47–69.

76 Bertran de Born’s songs are in: Linda Paterson, Singing the Crusades: French and Occitan Lyric Responses to the Crusading Movements, 1137–1336 (Woodbridge, 2018), 57–8, along with important context.

77 Goswin Spreckelmeyer, ed., Mittellateinische Kreuzzugslieder: Texte und Melodien (Göppingen, 1987), 18–20, 27. William E. Jackson, Ardent Complaints and Equivocal Piety: The Portrayal of the Crusader in Medieval German Poetry (Lanham, 2003), 10–7, 22–46, Hartmann’s quote at 24–5.

78 Rigord, Deeds of Philip Augustus, 102.

79 Phillips, Saladin, 192–5.

80 ‘History of the Pilgrims’, in The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa, 144–5.

81 Chronica regia Coloniensis, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS in usum scholarum 18 (Hanover, 1880), 18: 140; History of the Pilgrims, in The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa, 144–5.

82 See below, p. 22**.

83 The text is in IP1, Das Itinerarium peregrinorum. Ein zeitgenössische englische Chronik zum dritten Kreuzzug in ursprünglicher Gestalt, ed. Hans E. Mayer, Schriften der MGH 18 (Stuttgart, 1962), 278–82; translated in Chronicle of the Third Crusade, A Translation of the Itinerarium peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, trans. Helen J. Nicholson (Aldershot, 1997), 49–51. See also Gerald of Wales, Instruction for a Ruler, 634–41; Roger of Howden, Gesta, 2: 62–3; Chronica, 2: 356–8; Ralph of Diceto, Opera, 2: 56–7; Libellus, 238–41. The letter’s authenticity is firmly rebutted by Mayer, ‘Das Brief Kaiser Friedrichs 1. an Saladin’, 488–94, and Hannes Möhring, Saladin und der Dritte Kreuzzug (Wiesbaden, 1980), 93–8. It is important to note that the Carmen de Accone Oppugnatione, dated from the late summer of 1190, also includes snippets of a purported letter from Frederick to the sultan outlining the change from ‘firm peace and trustworthy love’ to a declaration of war. See note 93 below.

84 IP1, Das Itinerarium, 282–8; trans. Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 51–4; Gerald of Wales, Instruction for a Ruler, 638–41; Libellus, 243–5. Möhring, Saladin und der Dritte Kreuzzug, 98–125 argues the text is a forgery. Anne-Marie Eddé, Saladin, trans. Jane M. Todd (Cambridge MA, 2011), 244–5, nn. 23–24, 553–4, is much less persuaded and is prepared to see a genuine letter at the root of this text.

85 Jonathan Harris, ‘Collusion with the Infidel as a Pretext for Western Military Action against Byzantium (1180–1204)’, in Languages of Love and Hate: Conflict, Communication and Identity in the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. Sarah Lambert and Helen J. Nicholson (Turnhout, 2012), 99–117.

86 The Chronicle of Magnus of Reichersberg, in The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa, trans. Graham A. Loud (Farnham, 2010), 153–5.

87 See the letters in IP1, Das Itinerarium, 333; trans. and IP2 in: Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 98, 135. Letters in: The Conquest of Jerusalem, 171–2.

88 For the letter, see: Guy of Bazoches, Liber epistularum Guidonis de Basochis, ed. Herbert Adolfsson (Stockholm, 1969), 153.

89 Conquest of Jerusalem, 180–1; Roger of Howden, Chronica, 3: 129–32, translated in Letters from the East, 91.

90 John D. Hosler, The Siege of Acre, 1189–1191: Saladin, Richard the Lionheart and the Battle that Decided the Third Crusade (London, 2018).

91 The text is in a nineteenth-century edition, but a modern translation (with minor changes) is being produced by Dr Patrick DeBrosse of Fordham University. For the original, see: Anonymous, ‘Ein zeitgenössiches Gedict auf der Belagerung Accons’, ed. Hans Prutz, Forschungen zur Deutschen Geschichte 21 (1881): 449–94. DeBrosse discusses aspects of the text in his ‘A Song of the Siege of Acre (1189–91): Depictions of Conrad of Montferrat and the Carmen de Accone oppugnatione’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 66 (2022): 99–135.

92 Helen J. Nicholson, ‘The Construction of a Primary Source: The Creation of Itinerarium peregrinorum 1’, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 37 (2019): 143–65, at 159–60.

93 Phillips, Saladin, 45.

94 This knighting is central to the early thirteenth-century L’Ordene de Chevalerie, showing how such stories evolved: Le Roman des Eles and the Anonymous Ordene de Chevalerie, ed. and trans. Keith Busby (Utrecht, 1983).

95 Nicholson, ‘Construction’, 155–60.

96 Monachus of Florence, Der ‘Rithmus de expeditione Iersolimitana’ des sogenanten Haymarus Monachus Florentinus, ed. Sascha Falk (Florence, 2006), 84, 87–8.

97 Staunton, Historians, 52–5.

98 John B. Gillingham, ‘Roger of Howden on Crusade’, in Medieval Historical Writing in the Christian and Islamic Worlds, ed. David O. Morgan (London, 1982), 64.

99 The Chronica describes the Muslims having a vision of the cross extending up to heaven and its arms embracing the world: 2: 132–3.

100 Ibid., 3: 255–9, 307.

101 Roger of Howden, Gesta, 1: 331–3.

102 See above, pp. 9–11**.

103 Jean Flori, Richard the Lionheart: King and Knight (Edinburgh, 2006), 102–4; Jay Rubenstein, Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: The Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy and the End of History (Oxford, 2019), 181–202.

104 Roger of Howden, Chronica, 3: 133.

105 Ambroise, The History of the Holy War: Ambroise’s Estoire de la guerre sainte, ed. and trans. Marianne J. Ailes and Malcolm C. Barber, 2 vols. (Woodbridge, 2003), 2: 1–3.

106 Phillips, Saladin, 256, 271–2, 291–2.

107 Marianne J. Ailes, ‘The Admirable Enemy? Saladin and Saphadin in Ambroise’s Estoire de la guerre sainte’, in Knighthoods of Christ: Essays on the History of the Crusades and the Knights Templar presented to Malcolm Barber, ed. Norman Housley (Aldershot, 2007), 51–64.

108 Ambroise, The History of the Holy War, 2: 177, 187.

109 Ibid., 2: 188–91.

110 WT, 2: 907; trans. A History of Deeds, 2: 341

111 Itinerarium peregrinorum, in Chronicle of the Third Crusade (see note 83 above), 124–5; Ambroise, The History of the Holy War, 2: 89; Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, trans. Donald S. Richards (Aldershot, 2001), 139–40; John W. Baldwin, Knights, Lords and Ladies: In Search of Aristocrats in the Paris Region, 1180–1220 (Philadelphia, 2019), 39 and n. 120. Guy was captured at Damietta on the Fifth Crusade too.

112 Baha al-Din, The Rare and Excellent History, 223, 232.

113 My thanks to Dr Stephen Spencer for letting me see his invaluable paper ‘The Composition Date of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi (IP2) Reconsidered’ in advance of publication in English Historical Review (2024) [forthcoming].

114 Itinerarium peregrinorum, in Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 295.

115 Ibid., 364.

116 Ambroise, The History of the Holy War, 2: 186; Itinerarium peregrinorum, in Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 371.

117 Itinerarium peregrinorum, in Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 377–9.

118 Ibid.

119 Richard of Devizes, The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes from the Time of Richard the First, ed. and trans. John T. Appleby (London, 1963), 74–9; Staunton, Historians, 128–34, 238–40.

120 Staunton, Historians, 82–4.

121 William of Newburgh, Historia, ed. Richard Howlett, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, RS 82, 4 vols. (London, 1884–5), vols. 1 and 2; Bk 3.11, 3.14, 3.19, 4.30.

122 Ibid., 3.34. My thanks to Professor Graham Loud for this reference.

123 Die Lateinische Fortsetzung Wilhelms von Tyrus, ed. Marianne Salloch (Griefswald, 1934). For the dating, see: James H. Kane, ‘Between Parson and Poet: A Re-examination of the Latin Continuation of William of Tyre’, Journal of Medieval History 44 (2018): 56–82.

124 Chronicle of Arnold of Lübeck, 2–6, 18–26, 30–2, 138, 141–5, 159–63.

125 Robert of Auxerre, Chronicon, MGH SS 26: 246–56; Carol Neel, ‘Man’s Restoration: Robert of Auxerre and the Writing of History in the Early Thirteenth Century’, Traditio 44 (1988): 253–74.

126 Robert of Auxerre, Chronicon, 240–1.

127 Innocent III, Die Register Innocenz’ III, 2. Pontifikatsjahr, 1199/1200, ed. Othmar Hageneder, Werner Maleczek and Alfred Strnad (Rome and Vienna, 1979), no, 212, 411–14.

128 Martin H. Jones, ‘Richard the Lionheart in German Literature in the Middle Ages’, Richard Coeur de Lion in History and Myth, ed. Janet L. Nelson (London, 1992), 85–7.

129 Jacques de Vitry, Historia Orientalis, ed. Jean Donnadieu (Turnhout, 2008), 144, 422; idem., Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry, ed. Thomas F. Crane (London, 1890), 54–5; Jubb, Legend of Saladin, 43–4.

130 Jean Longnon, Les compagnons de Villehardouin: Recherches sur les croisés de la quatrième croisade (Geneva, 1978), 11–3, 79–84, for example.

131 My thanks to the journal’s peer-reviewers for their thoughtful, detailed and highly valuable suggestions.