AANNCCIIEENNTT WWOORRLLDD LLEEAADDEERRSS ALEXANDER THE GREAT ATTILA THE HUN JULIUS CAESAR CHARLEMAGNE GENGHIS KHAN SALADIN AANNCCIIEENNTT WWOORRLLDD LLEEAADDEERRSS SALADIN John Davenport Philadelphia Frontispiece:Aportrait of Saladin, the Kurdish sultan of Egypt and Syria who would go on to be one of the greatest Muslim leaders of all time. CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS VP,NEWPRODUCTDEVELOPMENT Sally Cheney DIRECTOROFPRODUCTION Kim Shinners CREATIVEMANAGER Takeshi Takahashi MANUFACTURINGMANAGER Diann Grasse Staff forSALADIN ASSOCIATEEDITOR Benjamin Xavier Kim PRODUCTIONEDITOR Jaimie Winkler PICTURERESEARCHER Pat Holl SERIESDESIGNER Takeshi Takahashi COVERDESIGNER Takeshi Takahashi st LAYOUT 21 CenturyPublishing and Communications,Inc. ©2003 byChelsea House Publishers,a subsidiary ofHaights Cross Communications. All rights reserved.Printed and bound in the United States ofAmerica. http://www.chelseahouse.com First Printing 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davenport,John C.,1960– Saladin / John Davenport. p.cm.—(Ancient world leaders) Includes index. Summary:Examines the life ofthe very powerful and influential Muslim sultan,Saladin, who led his people in an attempt to regain holy lands in and around Jerusalem that had been lost during earlier Crusades. ISBN 0-7910-7223-1 1.Saladin,Sultan ofEgypt and Syria,1137–1193—Juvenile literature.2.Egypt— Kings and rulers—Biography—Juvenile literature.3.Syria—Kings and rulers— Biography—Juvenile literature.4.Crusades—Juvenile literature.[1.Saladin,Sultan of Egypt and Syria,1137–1193.2.Kings,queens,rulers,etc.3.Crusades.4.Christianity— Relations—Islam—History—To 1500.5.Islam—Relations—Christianity— History—To 1500.] I.Title.II.Series. DS38.4.S2 D285 2002 956'.014'092 dc21 2002014874 TTAABBLLEE OOFF CCOONNTTEENNTTSS Foreword: On Leadership Arthur M. Schlesinger, jr. 6 1 A Tale of Two Conquests 12 2 Saladin’s World 20 3 Rise to Power 28 4 The Sultan 40 5 Victory and Beyond 52 6 The Siege of Acre 64 7 Showdown at the Holy City 74 8 War and Peace 84 9 The Sultan’s Last Days 94 10 Remembering Saladin 100 Chronology 108 Bibliography 110 Further Reading 111 Web Sites 112 Index 113 ON LEADERSHIP Arthur M. Schlesinger, jr. Leadership, it may be said, is really what makes the world go round. Love no doubt smoothes the passage;but love is a private transaction between consenting adults.Leadership is a public transaction with history. The idea ofleadership affirms the capacity ofindividuals to move,inspire, and mobilize masses of people so that they act together in pursuit of an end. Sometimes leadership serves good purposes, sometimes bad; but whether the end is benign or evil,great leaders are those men and women who leave their personal stamp on history. Now, the very concept of leadership implies the proposition that individuals can make a difference. This proposition has never been universally accepted. From classical times to the present day, eminent thinkers have regarded individuals as no more than the agents and pawns oflarger forces,whether the gods and goddesses ofthe ancient world or, in the modern era,race,class,nation,the dialectic,the will ofthe people, the spirit of the times,history itself.Against such forces,the individual dwindles into insignificance. So contends the thesis of historical determinism. Tolstoy’s great novel War and Peaceoffers a famous statement of the case.Why,Tolstoy asked,did millions ofmen in the Napoleonic Wars,denying their human feelings and their common sense, move back and forth across Europe slaughtering their fellows? “The war,” Tolstoy answered,“was bound to happen simply because it was bound to happen.” All prior history determined it. As for leaders, they, Tolstoy said,“are but the labels that serve to give a name to an end and,like labels,they have the least possible connection with the event.” The greater the leader,“the more conspicuous the inevitability and the predestination of every act he commits.”The leader,said Tolstoy,is “the slave of history.” Determinism takes many forms. Marxism is the determinism of class.Nazism the determinism of race.But the idea of men and women as the slaves of history runs athwart the deepest human instincts.Rigid determinism abolishes the idea of human freedom—the assumption of free choice that underlies every move we make, every word we speak, every thought we think. It abolishes the idea of human responsibility, 6 since it is manifestly unfair to reward or punish people for actions that are by definition beyond their control. No one can live consistently by any deterministic creed.The Marxist states prove this themselves by their extreme susceptibility to the cult of leadership. More than that,history refutes the idea that individuals make no difference.In December 1931 a British politician crossing Fifth Avenue in New York City between 76th and 77th Streets around 10:30 P.M.looked in the wrong direction and was knocked down by an automobile— a moment, he later recalled, of a man aghast, a world aglare:“I do not understand why I was not broken like an eggshell or squashed like a gooseberry.”Fourteen months later an American politician,sitting in an open car in Miami,Florida,was fired on by an assassin;the man beside him was hit. Those who believe that individuals make no difference to history might well ponder whether the next two decades would have been the same had Mario Constasino’s car killed Winston Churchill in 1931 and Giuseppe Zangara’s bullet killed Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Suppose, in addition, that Lenin had died of typhus in Siberia in 1895 and that Hitler had been killed on the western front in 1916.What would the 20th century have looked like now? For better or for worse, individuals do make a difference. “The notion that a people can run itselfand its affairs anonymously,”wrote the philosopher William James, “is now well known to be the silliest of absurdities.Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors,great or small,and imitation by the rest of us—these are the sole factors in human progress.Individuals of genius show the way,and setthe patterns,which common people then adopt and follow.” Leadership,James suggests,means leadership in thought as well as in action.In the long run,leaders in thought may well make the greater difference to the world.“The ideas of economists and political philoso- phers,both when they are right and when they are wrong,”wrote John Maynard Keynes, “are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.Practical men,who believe them- selves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences,are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. . . . The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.” 7 8 FOREWORD But,as Woodrow Wilson once said,“Those only are leaders ofmen,in the general eye,who lead in action....It is at their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.”Leaders in thought often invent in solitude and obscurity, leaving to later generations the tasks of imitation. Leaders in action—the leaders portrayed in this series—have to be effective in their own time. And they cannot be effective by themselves. They must act in response to the rhythms of their age.Their genius must be adapted,in a phrase from William James, “to the receptivities of the moment.” Leaders are useless without followers.“There goes the mob,” said the French politician, hearing a clamor in the streets.“I am their leader. I must follow them.”Great leaders turn the inchoate emotions of the mob to purposes oftheir own.They seize on the opportunities oftheir time,the hopes,fears,frustrations,crises,potentialities.They succeed when events have prepared the way for them,when the community is awaiting to be aroused, when they can provide the clarifying and organizing ideas. Leadership completes the circuit between the individual and the mass and thereby alters history. Itmay alter history for better or for worse.Leaders have been respon- sible for the most extravagant follies and most monstrous crimes that have beset suffering humanity.They have also been vital in such gains as humanity has made in individual freedom,religious and racial tolerance, social justice,and respect for human rights. There is no sure way to tell in advance who is going to lead for good and who for evil. But a glance at the gallery of men and women in ANCIENT WORLDLEADERSsuggests some useful tests. One test is this: Do leaders lead by force or by persuasion? By command or by consent? Through most of history leadership was exercised by the divine right of authority. The duty of followers was to defer and to obey.“Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die.” On occasion,as with the so-called enlightened despots ofthe 18th century in Europe,absolutist leadership was animated by humane purposes.More often,absolutism nourished the passion for domination,land,gold,and conquest and resulted in tyranny. The great revolution of modern times has been the revolution of equality.“Perhaps no form of government,”wrote the British historian James Bryce in his study ofthe United States,The American Commonwealth, “needs great leaders so much as democracy.” The idea that all people ON LEADERSHIP 9 should be equal in their legal condition has undermined the old structure ofauthority,hierarchy,and deference.The revolution ofequality has had two contrary effects on the nature of leadership. For equality, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in his great study Democracy in America, might mean equality in servitude as well as equality in freedom. “I know ofonly two methods ofestablishing equality in the political world,”Tocqueville wrote.“Rights must be given to every citizen,or none at all to anyone . . . save one, who is the master of all.”There was no middle ground “between the sovereignty of all and the absolute power of one man.”In his astonishing prediction of 20th-century totalitarian dictatorship,Tocqueville explained how the revolution of equality could lead to the Führerprinzip and more terrible absolutism than the world had ever known. But when rights are given to every citizen and the sovereignty of all is established,the problem ofleadership takes a new form,becomes more exacting than ever before.It is easy to issue commands and enforce them by the rope and the stake, the concentration camp and the gulag. It is much harder to use argument and achievement to overcome opposition and win consent.The Founding Fathers ofthe United States understood the difficulty.They believed that history had given them the opportunity to decide, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the first Federalist Paper, whether men are indeed capable ofbasing government on “reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend . . . on accident and force.” Government by reflection and choice called for a new style of leadership and a new quality of followership. It required leaders to be responsive to popular concerns,and it required followers to be active and informed participants in the process. Democracy does not eliminate emotion from politics; sometimes it fosters demagoguery; but it is confident that, as the greatest of democratic leaders put it, you cannot fool all ofthe people all ofthe time.It measures leadership by results and retires those who overreach or falter or fail. Itis true that in the long run despots are measured by results too.But they can postpone the day of judgment, sometimes indefinitely, and in the meantime they can do infinite harm.It is also true that democracy is no guaranteeof virtue and intelligence in government,for the voice of the people is not necessarily the voice of God. But democracy, by assuring the right of opposition, offers built-in resistance to the evils