Saladin: The Kurd Behind the Legend

At a Glance

Saladin was born in 1137 or 1138 in Tikrit. His given name was Yusuf; Saladin (Salah al-Din, "the good of the faith") is an honorific.
His family had come to Tikrit from the north: from Dvin, a medieval city in today's Armenia. Most sources bind the line to the Rewadi Kurds.
He grew up in Damascus, in the service of Nur al-Din Zengi. He went to Egypt with his uncle Shirkuh; in 1169 he became vizier, and by 1171 he was Egypt's ruler in fact.
On 4 July 1187 he defeated the Crusader army at Hattin. On 2 October 1187 Jerusalem surrendered.
In 1099 the Crusaders had drowned Jerusalem in blood. In 1187 Saladin took the city without a massacre; Western chronicles record it too.
Western literature gave him an exceptional place: Dante set him among the virtuous souls; Christian writers called him "the Prince of Chivalry."
In 1898 the German Emperor Wilhelm II had his ruined tomb in Damascus restored. So strong was the "noble enemy" image in Europe.
He died in Damascus in March 1193. By his biographer's account, his treasury held almost no money.
Later centuries pulled at him: Arab nationalism and some Turkish tellings both claimed him. The documents' summary is short: the origin is on record, the legacy belongs to many peoples.
His name lives on in four parts today: a province in Iraq, a university in Erbil, countless mosques, countless children.

The year is 1898. The German Emperor, Wilhelm II, stands before a tomb in Damascus. The tomb is neglected: the wood tired, the dome cracked. The man who lies inside died seven hundred years before. The emperor gives an order: this will be restored. A silver lamp is hung over the sarcophagus, and on the lamp are two coats of arms, the German emperor's and the Ottoman sultan's.

Why would a Christian emperor restore the grave of a Muslim ruler who beat the Crusaders? Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, telling this scene, takes one sentence from the English writer P. H. Newby: Saladin was "the nearest thing to a noble enemy that could be found." The date is on record: the visit came 711 years after the taking of Jerusalem.

The man in that sarcophagus was born in Tikrit, and his family was Kurdish, of one of the largest stateless peoples in the Middle East, between 30 and 45 million people today across the mountains where Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria meet. This article tells him not with fanfare but with the document: his birth, his rise, Jerusalem, his image in the West, and the place of his Kurdishness in the sources.

From Dvin to Tikrit: A Family's Road

Saladin was born in 1137 or 1138. To place the year: less than four decades earlier, in 1099, the First Crusade had stormed Jerusalem. His birthplace is Tikrit, a fortress town on the Tigris in today's Iraq.

The family was not local. Where had it come from? By the records, his grandfather Shadhi left Dvin with his two sons. Dvin was a medieval city south of present-day Yerevan, in today's Armenia. Dr. Izady writes that in the mid-tenth century the country around Dvin was set down as heavily Kurdish in population. Most sources point the same way: the family came from the Rewadi branch of the Hedbani tribal tree. The Russia-born orientalist Vladimir Minorsky went through these records one by one in his study "The Prehistory of Saladin" and reached the same conclusion.

Shadhi's sons were soldiers and administrators. Najm al-Din Ayyub governed the citadel of Tikrit; the dynasty takes its name, Ayyubid, from this father. His brother Shirkuh was a hard-tempered commander. The period sources tell it thus: when Shirkuh killed a man in a quarrel, the family was expelled from Tikrit, and they took the road on the very night Yusuf was born. The ornament of the story may be a later addition. What the document says for certain is a pair of facts: the place, Tikrit; the time, 1137 to 1138.

The Young Man Raised in Damascus: In Whose Service?

The family entered first the service of Zengi at Mosul, then came Baalbek and Damascus. Saladin spent his childhood and youth along this line: the country around Mosul, the citadel of Baalbek, the court of Damascus. His father and uncle were among the most trusted men of Nur al-Din, Zengi's son.

This picture was not one family's luck. In The Cambridge History of the Kurds, Boris James shows that from the 1130s onward, Kurdish military groups around Mosul, Saladin's family among them, were recruited to strengthen the Turkish-origin Zengid rule. David McDowall draws the same ground: the caliphal armies had known Kurdish officers and units for centuries; a Kurdish commander had defended Acre against the Crusaders.

The young Yusuf grew up in this world: horse, weapon, chancery correspondence, and religious learning. What did he count himself? Keep that question for the end of the article. First, the years that carried him into history.

The Gate of Egypt: Uncle and Nephew

In the 1160s Egypt was rich but without an owner. Who would take it? The Fatimid caliphate in Cairo, Shia in creed, had rotted from within; the Crusaders and Nur al-Din alike were watching that gap. Nur al-Din put Shirkuh at the head of the Egyptian campaigns. Shirkuh took his nephew with him.

It is related that Saladin went unwillingly; his biographer Ibn Shaddad records that he said, "I went as though to my execution." Three campaigns were made. In 1169 Shirkuh became vizier of the Fatimid caliph in Cairo and died two months later. The vizierate fell to the thirty-two-year-old nephew.

What follows is fast. In 1171 Saladin quietly ended the Fatimid caliphate; the Friday sermon was read in the name of Baghdad. When Nur al-Din died in 1174, he took Damascus. Within ten years Egypt and Syria were joined in one hand. In Dr. Izady's summary the state grew into an empire reaching from Egypt to Yemen, from the Hijaz to Kurdistan. The later branches of this state, and the story that runs to Hasankeyf, are the subject of a separate article; here we stay with the portrait.

1187: A Noon at Hattin

July 1187. West of the Sea of Galilee, at the foot of the twin hill called Hattin, two armies stand. The Crusader army has been marched a whole day without water; Saladin has cut off the wells and the lake. On 4 July the ring closed. The King of Jerusalem was taken captive; the True Cross, the Crusaders' holy relic, fell into Saladin's hands.

Why does Hattin matter so much? Because the army of the Crusader kingdom melted in a single noon, and the gates stood wide open. By early October Saladin was before Jerusalem. Terms were negotiated with Balian, who defended the city. On 2 October 1187 Jerusalem surrendered. The Crusaders had held the city for eighty-eight years.

The Blood Not Shed: 1099 Against 1187

Now let us set two dates side by side.

1099: the First Crusade took Jerusalem. The Muslims and Jews living in the city were put to the sword. This is told not by enemy propaganda but by the Crusaders' own chronicles; Raymond, a priest on the campaign, wrote of blood in the streets rising to the knees. The image may be overdrawn; the massacre itself is on record.

1187: Saladin took the same city, and no one was put to the sword. The surrender ran in order. The period sources give even the ransom figures: ten dinars for a man, five for a woman, two for a child. Of the thousands who could not pay, it is related that most were released, and that ransoms were paid from the purses of the commanders and of Saladin himself. The Eastern Christians stayed in the city; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was not shut.

Why this gentleness? One side of it was political reason: a ruined city cannot be governed. The other side was a recorded character: even the Crusader writers of the age noted that he kept his word. No adjective is needed. Two dates stand side by side: 1099 and 1187. The document speaks.

In the Eyes of the West: An Honoured Corner in Hell

Europe did not forget the man who beat it; the opposite happened. Saladin became one of the strangest exceptions in Western literature: the beloved enemy.

Dante, laying out hell layer by layer in the Divine Comedy, placed him in the lightest layer, among the virtuous unbaptized; he sits "alone, apart." For a medieval Christian poet no greater compliment was easy. Boccaccio, in the Decameron, drew him as a wise and generous ruler. In Lessing's play Nathan the Wise (1779) he is one of the three faces of tolerance. Walter Scott's novel The Talisman (1825) made him the gentleman rival of Richard the Lionheart. The Crusader chronicles tell this: when Richard's horse was killed under him before Jaffa, Saladin sent him a horse in the middle of the battle. The scene may be dressed up; the image stuck.

Dr. Izady gives the image its name too: Christians fitted him with the title "the Prince of Chivalry." The tomb restoration of 1898, that scene at the head of this article, is the seal on seven centuries of it. But did that same West know his origin? Mostly not; it took him for the "noble Saracen," the noble Easterner, and passed on. The record of his origin sat on other shelves.

A Kurd? What Do the Sources Say, and Who Claimed What Later?

First the documents of his own age. Ibn Shaddad, the biographer who was at his side for years, and the other Arabic sources of the time, know and write the family's Kurdish origin. The great biographical dictionary of the thirteenth century, Ibn Khallikan's Wafayat, binds the line, in telling of the Ayyubid rulers, to the Rewadi Kurds of Dvin. When Sharaf Khan wrote the Sharafnama in 1597, the first comprehensive Kurdish history, he gave the Ayyubids a chapter of their own and drew on Ibn Khallikan. Modern scholarship stands in the same place: Minorsky's study, Dr. Izady's handbook, McDowall's modern history give the origin the same way. The documents are clear: the origin is on record.

Then the twentieth century came, and nationalisms could not share the dead ruler. In Egypt, the Nasser-era film "El Nasser Salah El Din," made in 1963 under President Nasser, made him the hero of Arab unity; the word Kurd is not spoken in it. Saddam Hussein, born in Tikrit, carried his townsman Saladin onto posters as an Arab symbol. In Turkey some popular tellings counted him a Turk, offering as their reason the Turkish soldiers in his army. These tugs did not change the document. Nor did they need to; the honest sentence has two parts: the origin is on record, the legacy belongs to many peoples.

That the legacy belongs to many peoples is also what the document says. McDowall reminds us: Saladin never lived in Kurdistan; he counted himself not a Kurdish leader but a soldier of Islam; he gave the fertile Shahrizor plain, in the middle of Kurdistan, to a Turkish mamluk. His state's language was Arabic, its army a mixture of Kurd, Turk, and Arab. In the twelfth century there was no nationalism; to expect a modern identity from him is to do history an injustice.

But the other face of the coin is documented as well. Boris James counts the Ayyubid period the peak of the Kurds' integration into Egypt and Syria; in the eyes of later generations the dynasty became "the Kurdish dynasty itself." Dr. Izady relays a striking detail: the Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, in 1440, two centuries after the dynasty's fall, gave the first page of his great work to a list of Kurdish tribes, because Kurdish names still ran thick among Egypt's elite. A historian even came out of the dynasty itself: Abu'l-Fida, ruler of Hama. Dr. Izady describes him as a Kurd of the Ayyubid line. A dynasty that had forgotten its origin would not have left these traces.

Today: One Name in Four Parts

Saladin died in Damascus in March 1193. He was fifty-five. The detail Ibn Shaddad relays is the firmest close for this portrait: from his treasury came barely enough to cover the funeral. He had left an empire; he left no fortune.

So what remains of him today? Look at the four parts. In Iraq the province centred on Tikrit bears the name Salah al-Din. The great university in Erbil, the main Kurdish city of northern Iraq, carries his name. Above Cairo stands the citadel he began; his tomb in Damascus still takes visitors. And across the four parts thousands of children are given the name Saladin. Kurdish memory keeps him like a cause not lost: the son, of a stateless people, who built a state.

The trap of this memory is fanfare; its cure is the method of this article: history, place, source. What makes Saladin large is not ornate adjectives but two dates standing side by side and a seven-century respect that restored a ruined tomb. The rest is written in the document; it is enough to read it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was Saladin a Kurd? The sources of his age record his family as Rewadi Kurds of Dvin origin; Ibn Khallikan's biographical dictionary, the Sharafnama, Minorsky, Izady, and McDowall point the same way. The origin is on record. He himself was not a national leader in the modern sense but the ruler of an Islamic state; his legacy belongs to many peoples.

When and how did Saladin take Jerusalem? On 4 July 1187 he defeated the Crusader army at Hattin; on 2 October 1187 Jerusalem surrendered by negotiation. There was no massacre in the city; a ransom system was run, and it is related that most who could not pay were released. The contrast with the Crusader massacre of 1099 is on record even in Western chronicles.

Why does Western literature love Saladin? His conduct in 1187 gave rise to the "noble enemy" image. Dante set him among the virtuous souls; Boccaccio, Lessing, and Walter Scott enlarged the image. In 1898 the German emperor had his tomb restored.

How long did the Ayyubid state last? Saladin ruled from 1169 to 1193. In Dr. Izady's summary the dynasty's branches lasted in Egypt and Syria to the mid-thirteenth century, and in Kurdistan to the end of the fifteenth. The story of those branches lies outside this portrait.

Where is Saladin buried? In Damascus, in his tomb beside the Umayyad Mosque. His death was in March 1193.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (4th edition); the medieval history chapter, the Ayyubids, and the 1898 tomb record.
David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds; the assessment of Saladin and the medieval Kurdish military tradition.
Hamit Bozarslan et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Kurds (2021); Boris James's chapter on the Kurdish emirates and the Ayyubid period.
Sharaf Khan, Sharafnama (1597; Dr. Izady's English edition); the Ayyubids chapter and the Ibn Khallikan connection.

Social Media Summaries

The following summaries are ready to share; copy and use them.

In 1898 the German emperor had a ruined tomb in Damascus restored and hung a silver lamp above it. Inside lay the Kurdish ruler who took Jerusalem 711 years before: Saladin. The document of the "noble enemy": bedelboseli.com/en/saladin-the-kurd-behind-the-legend
In 1099 the Crusaders took Jerusalem and drowned it in blood; their own chronicles say so. In 1187 Saladin took the same city, and no one was put to the sword. Two dates side by side, the document speaks: bedelboseli.com/en/saladin-the-kurd-behind-the-legend
Writing hell, Dante made room for the man who beat him in the lightest layer, among the virtuous: Saladin, "alone, apart." The story of the one enemy the West loved: bedelboseli.com/en/saladin-the-kurd-behind-the-legend
Saladin's line is on record in the sources of his age: Rewadi Kurds of Dvin. Later some made him an Arab, some a Turk. The document did not change. The honest summary: origin on record, legacy of many peoples: bedelboseli.com/en/saladin-the-kurd-behind-the-legend
He built an empire from Egypt to Yemen. When he died in Damascus in March 1193, his treasury barely covered the funeral. His biographer wrote it: he left an empire, not a fortune: bedelboseli.com/en/saladin-the-kurd-behind-the-legend