By the summer of 1176 the combination of tempered military aggression and incessant propaganda seemed to have run its course. Gumushtegin remained in control of Aleppo, alongside al-Salih, while Saif al-Din continued to govern Mosul, but these allies were forced, by steps, to agree to some concessions. Saladin’s right to rule the Syrian territory he held to the south of Aleppo was acknowledged in May 1175, and this position was formalised subsequently by a caliphal diploma of investiture issued in Baghdad. When peace was settled in July 1176, Saladin recognised that he could no longer claim to be al-Salih’s sole legal guardian (although the sultan did continue to present himself as the Zangid’s servant), but by this point Aleppo had agreed, albeit in rather vague terms, to contribute troops to the holy war.

Throughout this period, Saladin had tried, with some success, to damage Gumushtegin’s and Saif al-Din’s reputations by repeatedly accusing them of negotiating with the Latins. Saladin often wrote to the caliph complaining that they had forged treacherous pacts with the Christians sealed by the exchange of prisoners. This echoed his condemnation of the submissive truce agreed with Jerusalem by Ibn al-Muqaddam in 1174. The sultan was trying to present his Syrian campaigns as a heartfelt, ideological struggle to unite Islam against a foreboding Frankish enemy. In fact, this was pure rhetorical invective, for Saladin himself agreed two truces with the Latins in this period.³⁹

The Old Man of the Mountain

Saladin’s attempts to subdue Syria in the mid-1170s were complicated by entanglements with the Assassins. By this time the Syrian wing of this secretive order was firmly ensconced in the Ansariyah Mountains and was flourishing under the leadership of a formidable Iraqi, Rashid al-Din Sinan, popularly known as the Old Man of the Mountain. Ruling the order for close to three decades in the later twelfth century, Sinan’s reputation as a man of ‘subtle and brilliant intelligence’ gained wide currency among Muslims and Christians alike. William of Tyre believed that Sinan commanded the absolute loyalty and obedience of his followers, noting that ‘they regard nothing as too harsh or difficult and eagerly undertake even the most dangerous tasks at his command’.⁴⁰

The Assassins were an embedded, independent and largely unpredictable force in Near Eastern affairs; and their chief weapon–political assassination–continued to prove highly effective. Saladin’s drive to dominate Syria, and more specifically his campaigns against Aleppo, brought him into the Assassins’ orbit. In early 1175, Sinan decided to target Saladin, probably at least in part on the prompting of the Aleppan ruler Gumushtegin. With the sultan stationed outside Aleppo, a group of thirteen knife-wielding Assassins managed to penetrate the heart of his camp and launch an assault. Saladin’s bodyguards came to his aid, cutting down one assailant even as he leapt to strike the sultan himself. Although the plot was foiled, there were still fatalities among the Salahiyya. Soon afterwards, Saladin wrote warning his nephew Farrukh-Shah to be watchful at all times, and before long it became standard practice to place the sultan’s own tents within a fortified and heavily guarded enclosure, isolated from the rest of the camp.

In spite of these precautions, the Assassins managed to strike again in May 1176. While Saladin was visiting one of his emir’s tents four Assassins attacked, and this time came perilously close to completing their murderous task. In the first sudden flurry of movement, the sultan was struck and only his armour saved him from a severe wound. Once again his men pounced on the killers, butchering them to a man, but Saladin was left bloodied by a cut to his cheek and badly shaken. From this point onwards, any members of his entourage whom he did not personally recognise were dismissed.

In August 1176 Saladin decided to deal with this troublesome threat. He laid siege to the major Assassin castle of Masyaf, but after less than a week he broke off the investment, retreating to Hama. The motive for the sultan’s departure and the details of any deal brokered with Sinan remain mysterious. A number of Muslim accounts repeat the story that, under the threat of an unwavering Assassin campaign to murder members of his Ayyubid family, Saladin agreed to a pact of mutual non-aggression with the Old Man. One Aleppan chronicler offered an even more chilling explanation, describing how the sultan was visited by Sinan’s envoy. Once searched for weapons, this messenger was granted an audience with Saladin, but insisted upon conferring with him in private. The sultan eventually agreed to dismiss all but his two most skilful and trusted bodyguards–men he regarded as his ‘own sons’.

The envoy then turned to the pair of guards and said: ‘If I ordered you in the name of my master to kill this sultan, would you do so?’ They answered yes, and drew their swords saying: ‘Command us as you wish.’ Saladin was astounded, and the messenger left, taking them with him. And thereafter Saladin inclined to make peace with [Sinan].⁴¹

The reality of this tale may be doubted–if the Assassins had indeed had agents so close to Saladin they surely would have succeeded in killing him in 1175 or 1176–but the story’s implicit message was accurate. It was all but impossible to protect oneself permanently from the Assassins. By whatever means, Saladin and Sinan evidently achieved some form of accommodation in 1176, because the sultan never again attacked the order’s mountain enclave and no further attempts were made on his life.

SALADIN’S AYYUBID REALM

In late summer 1176 Saladin brought almost two years of campaigning against Aleppo to an end. With a truce in place enshrining his possession of Damascus and the bulk of Syria, he willingly perpetuated the fiction of subservience to al-Salih. Across Saladin’s dominions, the young ruler’s name continued to appear on coinage and to be recited in Friday prayer. But the sultan did seek further to legitimise his own authority by marrying Nur al-Din’s widow Ismat, daughter of Unur, the long-dead ruler of Burid Damascus. This was, first and foremost, a political union, for her hand allowed Saladin to connect himself to that city’s two historic ruling dynasties, but real friendship, perhaps even love, seems to have blossomed between the couple.* By this time, the sultan had taken other steps to appropriate the machinery of Zangid government. Nur al-Din’s secretary, Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, was taken into service and, alongside al-Fadil, soon became one of the sultan’s closest confidants.

In September 1176 Saladin returned to Egypt. This move offered him something of a respite from the dangers and confrontations of recent months–he paused in Alexandria with his six-year-old son al-Afdal for three days in March 1177 to listen to tales of the Prophet Muhammad’s life–but it was also reflective of a new reality in the sultan’s life. Presiding over a realm that stretched from the Nile to the Syrian Orontes, he now faced all the practical difficulties attendant upon governing a geographically expansive kingdom in the medieval age. One overriding issue was communication. Facing the same problem, Nur al-Din had supplemented his network of horse-borne couriers and messengers with the extensive use of carrier pigeons, and Saladin now followed suit. He also maintained spies and scouts in Syria and Palestine to garner intelligence. Even so, no matter how they were transported, messages were always subject to possible enemy interception, and the sultan sometimes resorted to writing in code. A significant truth of living through this era, for Muslims and Christians alike, was that even within allied groups the transfer of information was hugely imprecise, while knowledge of enemy intentions and movements was often based upon pure guesswork. Ignorance, error and disinformation all served to shape decision making and, in the years to come, Saladin always struggled to maintain knowledge of events across the Muslim world, and to retain even a partial understanding of Frankish plans and actions. In this situation, al-Fadil’s and Imad al-Din’s roles as correspondents, communicators and propagandists were of paramount importance.