Saladin Seizes Jerusalem: Crusader Rule Ends

Eighty-eight years of Crusader rule ended not with a massacre but with a negotiation. On October 2, 1187, Saladin's army entered Jerusalem after a twelve-day siege, and the sultan — in deliberate contrast to the bloodbath the First Crusaders had inflicted in 1099 — allowed the city's Christian inhabitants to ransom their freedom and leave with their possessions. The fall of Jerusalem was the culmination of a military campaign that had begun four months earlier at the Horns of Hattin, where Saladin annihilated the main Crusader field army on July 4, 1187. King Guy of Lusignan was captured. The True Cross — Christendom's most sacred relic, carried into battle as a talisman — was seized. With the Kingdom of Jerusalem's fighting force destroyed in a single afternoon, dozens of Crusader castles and cities surrendered in rapid succession. Acre, Jaffa, Sidon, and Beirut all fell before autumn. Jerusalem's garrison, commanded by Balian of Ibelin, had almost no professional soldiers. Balian knighted every boy over sixteen and armed civilians, but the defense was hopeless against Saladin's siege engines. After breaching the northern wall near the Gate of the Column, Saladin agreed to terms: each person could purchase their freedom for a fixed ransom — ten dinars for a man, five for a woman, one for a child. Those who could not pay would be enslaved. Balian negotiated a lump sum to free seven thousand of the poorest residents, though thousands more were still taken into captivity. Saladin's restraint was both strategic and principled. He wanted Jerusalem intact, not razed, and understood that magnanimity would weaken Christian resolve less than atrocity would inflame it. Churches were largely left standing, though the cross atop the Dome of the Rock was torn down. The Al-Aqsa Mosque, which the Crusaders had converted into a palace, was restored to Muslim worship. The loss of Jerusalem shocked Europe into launching the Third Crusade, bringing Richard the Lionheart to the Levant. But the city would remain in Muslim hands for most of the next seven centuries.