Saladin - Ioakim Ioakim

He took Jerusalem without a massacre. This is the fact that the medieval world found most difficult to process - that the man who retook the Holy City from the Crusaders in 1187, who undid in a single campaign what the First Crusade had achieved in a century of settlement, did not do what the Christian tradition had done when it took Jerusalem in 1099. He did not massacre the population. He ransomed them. He wept for the poor who could not pay the ransom and paid it himself.

He is Saladin.

Saladin: The Sultan Who Took Jerusalem enters the consciousness of the greatest military and political figure of the medieval Islamic world - the Kurdish general who became Sultan of Egypt and Syria, who spent fifteen years unifying the Muslim Near East before he could fight the Crusaders, who destroyed the military force of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin in a single afternoon, who entered Jerusalem on October 2, 1187 weeping, who held the city against Richard the Lionheart for eighteen months, who negotiated the treaty that preserved Muslim control of Jerusalem while giving Christian pilgrims access to the holy sites, and who died in Damascus in March 1193 without enough money for his own funeral because he had given everything away.

The book follows the full arc of a life organized around a single obligation. The Kurdish world and the Zengid court that formed him. Nur ad-Din’s shadow - the ruler whose jihad ideology Saladin absorbed and whose project he completed and surpassed. The twelve years of the unification - the campaigns against the Zengid princes and the Fatimid caliphate and all the Muslim powers that stood between Saladin and the unified sultanate that Jerusalem required. The Kingdom of Jerusalem in its final years - the factional competition, Guy of Lusignan, Reynald of Châtillon, the specific recklessness that provided Saladin with the pretext for the campaign.

Hattin - the masterpiece, the operation that cut the Crusading army off from water on a waterless plateau in the July heat and destroyed it in a single afternoon. Jerusalem - the entry on October 2, the weeping, the rosewater poured on the Dome of the Rock, the ransom paid for the poor. The Third Crusade - the arrival of Richard the Lionheart, the fall of Acre, Arsuf, the two approaches to Jerusalem, the battle outside Jaffa, the treaty. The death without personal wealth.

The book also enters the worlds that surrounded him - the Islamic tradition that organized his piety and his governance, the chivalric legend that the Christian world built around the noble enemy, the modern political tradition that made him the model of Arab nationalism, the Dome of the Rock that stands in Jerusalem as the monument to what he achieved.

Saladin is the seventh book in I. Ioakim’s Warriors series - full-length literary historical fiction that enters the minds of history’s greatest warriors and stays there long enough to understand what it cost, and what it meant, to be that particular person in that particular world.