Jerusalem lost again
Saladin retakes Jerusalem
Saladin — Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub — is the ruler of Egypt and Syria, and in 1187 AD he defeats the Crusader army at the Horns of Hattin in one of the most decisive battles in medieval history. The Crusader army is destroyed. The True Cross — the relic venerated by the Crusaders as a fragment of Christ's actual cross — is captured.
Jerusalem falls to Saladin on October 2, 1187 AD.
The contrast with 1099 is deliberate and documented. Where the Crusaders massacred the population when they took Jerusalem, Saladin allows the Christian and Jewish inhabitants to ransom themselves and leave. Those who cannot pay are released anyway. He restores the Jewish community to the city they have been banned from for centuries.
His mercy is noted, puzzled over, and in some cases resented by his own commanders, who expected the reciprocal treatment the Crusaders had given their predecessors.
Saladin's behavior demonstrates something the Crusaders could not: that Jerusalem could be governed without massacre, that the city holy to three faiths could be treated with something approaching justice.
The news reaches Europe and produces the Third Crusade — Richard the Lionheart, Philip of France, Frederick Barbarossa. Richard wins back some coastal cities but not Jerusalem. He and Saladin negotiate a truce. Christians are allowed to make pilgrimage.
The city that the Crusaders had bathed in blood to take is now administered with mercy by the man who took it back.
“Do not punish the inhabitants of Jerusalem for the fault of others.”
— Saladin, attributed, upon entering Jerusalem, 1187 AD
“He has showed you, man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
Saladin's mercy at Jerusalem in 1187 is one of the most uncomfortable facts in the Crusade narrative for Christians to reckon with.
The Muslim general behaved more humanely than the Christian army. The man the Crusaders were fighting demonstrated virtues the Crusaders were supposed to embody.
This is not a simple lesson. Saladin was not without violence — the Crusade was brutal on all sides. But his treatment of Jerusalem's population on October 2, 1187 stands as a rebuke to the theology that assumed Christian armies fought in a uniquely holy and therefore humane cause.
The God who requires justice and kindness requires them from everyone — including those who fight in his name. Especially those who fight in his name.
What does it mean to you that a Muslim general, in 1187, treated a holy city more justly than the Christian army that preceded him?