Selections from The Life of Saladin

📖 Public Domain Classic — Islamic Golden Age

Description

When Saladin died in Damascus in 1193, the treasury of the man who had conquered an empire held forty-seven silver dirhems and a single gold piece — not enough to cover his own burial. He had given away whole provinces to men who simply asked. The man who recorded this, and hundreds of details like it, was not a court flatterer writing from a distance but Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, Saladin's own qadi, who rode beside him through the recapture of Jerusalem, the long siege of Acre, and the arrival of Richard the Lionheart, and who sat with him through his final illness.

Baha ad-Din's biography, composed within a few years of the Sultan's death, is one of the great works of medieval Arabic historiography precisely because of that closeness — an eyewitness account, unusually intimate for its genre, of the man behind history's most famous confrontation between Islam and the Crusader states. This edition presents four chapters from the 1897 Palestine Exploration Fund translation: Baha ad-Din's character study of Saladin, his account of the Battle of Hattin and the fall of Jerusalem, his description of King Richard's arrival before Acre, and his account of the Sultan's death. The complete work runs past four hundred pages of day-by-day campaign chronicle and diplomatic correspondence; this edition selects the passages of broadest interest to the general reader.

Author & Genre

Author: Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad (1145–1234)
Genre: History / Biography / Islamic Golden Age Non-Fiction
Translator: Palestine Exploration Fund (1897)

"He who had possessed such abundance of riches, left in his treasury, at his death, but forty-seven Nasri dirhems, and one Tyrian gold piece... Yet he had given away whole provinces."