Saladin continued to use cold-blooded retaliation when he thought the situation demanded it, but often he adopted more subtle, piecemeal methods to deal with his opponents. Once in office as Fatimid vizier, Saladin faced repeated pressure from the caliph in Baghdad, and from Nur al-Din in Damascus, to depose Egypt’s Shi‘ite caliph, a heretic in the eyes of Sunni orthodoxy. But Saladin resisted, making no incautious move to topple al-Adid, cultivating instead a mutually beneficial alliance with the young ruler–one that may even have been shaded by a degree of real friendship. Saladin’s position in the Nile region was far too precarious to risk direct dynastic revolution. To endure as vizier he recognised that, to begin with at least, he needed the measure of stability, and, even more importantly, the bounteous financial benefaction attendant upon caliphal support.

This policy proved its worth in late summer 1169. Still smarting from the humiliation of his retreat from Egypt the preceding winter, King Amalric of Jerusalem chose this moment to launch another assault, this time targeting the port of Damietta, in the eastern reaches of the Nile Delta, with the assistance of a massive Byzantine fleet. This attack posed a grave threat to Saladin, yet he proved more than capable of meeting the challenge. He raised and equipped a huge army, funded by a truly colossal grant of 1,000,000 gold dinars from al-Adid’s treasury. Rather than command the relief of Damietta in person, leaving Cairo prey to revolt, Saladin wisely deputised his nephew, Taqi al-Din, while he remained in the capital. When this force linked up with Syrian troops sent by Nur al-Din, Amalric found himself outnumbered and, unable adequately to coordinate Latin–Greek military operations, his offensive collapsed. This Muslim victory effectively brought to an end the contest for control of Egypt, waged against the Latins throughout the 1160s. The Franks continued to dream of the Nile’s conquest, but for now that region remained in the grasp of Islam, and Saladin.³⁰

Having withstood the early challenges of his first year as vizier, Saladin–echoing Nur al-Din’s approach to the exercise of power–initiated programmes of civil and religious rejuvenation. Alexandria’s fortifications were strengthened, while in Cairo and its southern suburb of Fustat new centres of Sunni Islamic law were erected. Saladin later abolished non-Koranic taxation of trade in Egypt (although he did hike up other forms of levy in order to make up for the shortfall in state income). In November 1170 he also appeared to take up the mantle of mujahid, leading his first invasion of Frankish Palestine. At the head of a sizeable army, Saladin overran the small Latin fortress of Darum, just south of Gaza, and skirmished with King Amalric’s hastily assembled relief force before marching to the shores of the Red Sea to occupy the port of Aqaba. While blows were evidently struck against the Christians during this campaign, Saladin’s primary objective may have been to shore up the land route between the Nile region and Damascus, and it would probably be wrong to regard this venture as the first blossoming of his dedication to the holy war.

LIEUTENANT OR COMMANDER

As Saladin’s control of Egypt solidified, his continued lack of independence came ever more sharply into focus. He was a Sunni warlord, possessed of growing power and resources, yet still only second in command to a Shi‘ite caliph and bound by ties of subservience to Nur al-Din. Caution had served Saladin well to this point, but by late summer 1171, with his hold over Cairo secured, he was ready to oust the Fatimids. Even now, however, he moved with marked restraint, largely forsaking the traditional aberrations of Egyptian politics–bloody coup d’état and wholesale murder. This approach was, in part, made possible by the young Caliph al-Adid’s failing health. Around the end of August he contracted a severe illness and, though barely twenty years old, was soon at death’s door.³¹

On Friday 10 September 1171, Saladin took his first guarded step towards autonomy. For centuries, the name of the Shi‘ite caliph had echoed through Egypt’s mosques during Friday prayer, recited in honorific recognition of Fatimid authority. On this day, however, in Fustat, al-Adid’s name was replaced with that of the Sunni Abbasid caliph of Baghdad. Saladin was testing the water, gauging whether open rebellion would follow, before showing his hand in Cairo itself, but no uprising ensued. The next day he presided over an imposing military parade in the capital, as virtually the entire might of his armies marched through the streets, prompting his secretary al-Fadil to record that ‘no king of Islam had ever possessed an army to match this’. For his Egyptian subjects, and the Latin and Greek ambassadors who happened to be visiting Cairo at that point, the message was unambiguous. Saladin was now lord of Egypt. News of these events reached the dying al-Adid and he implored Saladin, still nominally his vizier, to come to his bedside, hoping to beg for the lives of his family. Fearing a plot, Saladin refused–although it was said that he later regretted this hard-hearted decision–and the caliph died on 13 September. Saladin made a great show of accompanying his body to its burial and took no steps to eliminate his offspring. Instead they were housed and cared for within the caliphal palace, but forbidden from having children so that their line would die out. Regardless of its piecemeal nature, the consequences of this revolution were dramatic. The days of the Fatimids were at an end; the religious and political schism that had divided Egypt from the rest of the Muslim Near East since the tenth century receded, leaving Saladin to pose as a champion of Sunni orthodoxy.

Given the caliph’s near-legendary reputation for fabulous wealth, one of the immediate benefits of al-Adid’s death for Saladin should have been a massive influx of hard cash. But upon occupying the Fatimid palace Saladin found a surprisingly small store of money, much of the reserves having been used to fund the late Vizier Shawar’s exorbitant tributes to Jerusalem and Damascus, and Saladin’s own defence of Damietta in 1169. What treasures he did find–a ‘mountain’ of rubies, a huge emerald and an assortment of giant pearls–were quickly auctioned off.

Saladin’s abolition of the Fatimid caliphate and subjection of Egypt in 1171 were, at least in theory, not merely personal victories; they were also a triumph for his overlord, Nur al-Din, whose realm could now be said to stretch from Egypt to Syria and beyond. Certainly, both men were sent splendid ceremonial robes of victory by the caliph of Baghdad that autumn. But behind the façade of Sunni unity and ascendancy, signs of strain between the lord and his ever more powerful lieutenant were becoming apparent. With the unification of Aleppo, Damascus and Cairo and the resultant encirclement of the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem, Nur al-Din might have expected to draw upon the Nile’s wealth and resources, and Saladin’s military support, to launch an all-out offensive on Palestine. From autumn 1171, however, as the new lord of Egypt, Saladin began to act as a sovereign ruler in his own right. Since the days of Shirkuh’s North African adventures, Ayyubid involvement in the region had always been gilded with a self-serving edge and, ultimately, Egypt’s conquest had depended above all upon Saladin’s own qualities: his acute political and military vision; his patience, guile and mercilessness. Now he might arguably claim to be Nur al-Din’s equal and ally rather than his servant.

Open conflict was, in part, averted by Nur al-Din’s preoccupations elsewhere in his realm. Syria and Palestine were struck yet again by a series of damaging earthquakes in the early 1170s, forcing the diversion of resources into extensive rebuilding programmes. In Iraq, the death of his brother, followed by the Abbasid caliph’s demise, prompted Nur al-Din once more to involve himself in Mesopotamian affairs, while in the Jazira and Anatolia, new opportunities for territorial expansion similarly commanded his attention. Then, in 1172, a dispute with the Franks over trading rights along the Syrian coast triggered a number of punitive raids against Antioch and the county of Tripoli.