In January, Saladin dictated his will and, by mid-February, al-Adil had arrived from Aleppo to lend his support, but also to be on hand to take up the reins of power should that prove necessary. Meanwhile, another Ayyubid slipped away from Harran to foment rebellion. Nasir al-Din, Shirkuh’s son, seems to have harboured a cancerous jealousy of his cousin Saladin’s rise to power in Egypt, a region which he himself might have claimed as Shirkuh’s heir back in 1169. The gift of Homs had bought grudging loyalty in the 1170s, but with the sultan’s demise seemingly imminent, Nasir al-Din now saw a chance for his own advancement. Quietly amassing troops in Syria, he laid furtive plans for the seizure of Damascus. His timing proved disastrous. In the final days of February, the sultan’s condition turned a corner and he began to make a slow but lasting recovery. By 3 March Nasir al-Din was dead. Officially he had succumbed to a disease that worked ‘faster than the blink of an eye’, but rumour had it that he had been poisoned by one of Saladin’s Damascene agents.

Saladin had been brought face to face with his own mortality in early 1186. It has often been suggested that he emerged a changed man, having paused to consider his life, his faith and his achievements in the many wars fought against the Franks and his fellow Muslims. Certainly some contemporaries represented this as a moment of profound transformation in the sultan’s career, after which he dedicated himself to the cause of jihad and the pursuit of Jerusalem’s recovery. At the height of his illness, he apparently vowed to commit all his energy to this end, regardless of the human and financial sacrifice exacted. Imad al-Din wrote that this affliction had been divinely appointed, ‘to wake [Saladin] from the sleep of forgetfulness’, and noted that the sultan subsequently consulted Islamic jurists and theologians about his spiritual obligations. Al-Fadil, who had lobbied against the Mosul campaign in the first place, now looked to convince Saladin to renounce aggression against Muslims. In practical terms, Saladin’s infirmity forced him to accept a compromise with Mosul in March 1186. The Zangid ruler Izz al-Din remained in power, but recognised the sultan as overlord, including his name in the Friday prayer and promising to contribute troops to the holy war.⁶⁰

Saladin’s career to 1186

For modern scholars–most notably in the classic political biography of Saladin by Malcolm Lyons and David Jackson published in 1982–Saladin’s brush with death proved revelatory in another regard, for it raised the pointed question of how Saladin might be regarded by history had fate’s course transected a different path, bringing his life to an end at Harran in early 1186. Lyons’ and Jackson’s swingeing conclusion that Saladin would be remembered as ‘a moderately successful soldier [and] a dynast who used Islam for his own purposes’ is instructive, if somewhat blunt. Up to this point, the sultan had made only a limited contribution to the jihad, spending some thirty-three months fighting against Muslims since 1174 and only eleven combating the Franks. He was a usurper with an obvious appetite for power and a marked facility for its accumulation–an aggressive autocrat who repeatedly seized Muslim territory to which he had no rightful claim and made fulsome use of propaganda to justify his actions and blacken the names of his opponents. Of course, not all historians have accepted this view of Saladin. Some still persist in suggesting that he was obsessed with the holy war against the Franks throughout his career–always building towards a full-scale attack on the kingdom of Jerusalem and ever seeking to bring his Christian enemies to battle–but, on balance, the contemporary evidence suggests that they are wrong.⁶¹

It is not surprising that Saladin’s aims up to 1186 continue to be debated, because even contemporaries disputed this issue. Some praised the sultan. Writing shortly before his death (probably in 1185), William of Tyre believed that the Ayyubid ruler posed a grave and immediate threat to the continued survival of Outremer, but nonetheless commended him as ‘a man wise in counsel, valiant in battle and generous beyond measure’.⁶² Nevertheless, other opponents and supporters–from the pro-Zangid Iraqi chronicler Ibn al-Athir to the sultan’s personal secretary al-Fadil–knew only too well that Saladin’s lack of wholehearted dedication to the jihad left him dangerously exposed to accusations of self-serving empire building. Had the sultan died in early 1186 the question of his intentions would have remained unanswered. As it was, he lived on, with the call to holy war harkening in his ears.

12

HOLY WARRIOR

In the spring of 1186, with the worst of his illness behind him, Saladin–now some forty-eight years old–returned to Damascus. Much of the remainder of that year was given over to his protracted convalescence, and the calmer recreations of theological debate, hawking and hunting, as his physical vitality slowly rekindled. That summer, one marked distraction was provided by the prediction of an impending apocalypse. For decades, astrologers had foretold that, on 16 September 1186, a momentous planetary alignment would stir up a devastating wind storm, scouring the Earth of life. This bleak prophecy had circulated among Muslims and Christians alike, but the sultan nonetheless thought it ridiculous. He made a point of holding a candlelit, open-air party on the appointed night of disaster, even as ‘feeble-mind[ed]’ fools huddled in caves and underground shelters. Needless to say, the evening passed without event; indeed, one of his companions pointedly remarked that ‘we never saw a night as calm as that’.

While his health gradually improved, Saladin looked to reorganise the balance and distribution of power within what could now be termed his Ayyubid Empire. One priority was the promotion of his eldest son al-Afdal as primary heir. The young princeling, now around sixteen, was brought north from Egypt to Syria. Entering Damascus to celebrations fit for a sultan, al-Afdal became nominal overlord of the city, although in the years to come Saladin often kept him by his side, tutoring him in the arts of leadership, politics and war. Two of Saladin’s younger sons were similarly rewarded. Uthman, aged fourteen, was appointed ruler of Egypt, and the sultan’s trusted brother al-Adil returned from Aleppo to the Nile region to act as the young boy’s guardian and governor. Aleppo itself passed to the thirteen-year-old al-Zahir. The only problem spawned by this extensive reshuffle was Saladin’s nephew Taqi al-Din. As governor of Egypt since 1183, he had shown worrying tendencies towards independent action. With the aid of Qaragush (whom Saladin had appointed to oversee the Cairene court in 1169), Taqi al-Din had laid plans for a campaign westwards along the North African coast that would have deprived the sultan of valuable troops. Rumours also abounded that, during the sultan’s illness, Taqi al-Din had been preparing to declare his autonomy. In autumn 1186, Isa, ever the consummate diplomat, was tasked with the delicate mission of persuading him to relinquish his hold on Egypt and return to Syria. Arriving unexpectedly at Cairo, Isa was initially greeted with prevarication, but then apparently advised Taqi al-Din to ‘Go wherever you want.’ This seemingly neutral statement possessed an icily threatening undertone, and Saladin’s nephew soon left for Damascus, where he was welcomed back into the fold and rewarded with his former lordship at Hama and further lands in the newly subdued region of Diyar Bakr.⁶³