Sultan Salahuddin Ayubi (Saladin in Western Text), the hero of hundreds of battles, was the person who for twenty years braved the storm of the Crusaders and ultimately pushed back the combined forces of Europe which had come to swarm the Holy Land. The world has hardly witnessed a more chivalrous and humane conqueror.
The Crusades represent the maddest and the longest war in the history of mankind, in which the storm of savage fanaticism of the Christian West burst in all its fury over western Asia. `The Crusades form', says a Western writer, `one of the maddest episodes in history. Christianity hurled itself against Muhammadanism in expedition after expedition for nearly three centuries, until failure brought lassitude, and superstition itself was undermined by its own labour.
Europe was drained off men and money, and threatened with social bankruptcy, if not with annihilation. Millions perished in battle, hunger or disease and every atrocity imagination can conceive disgraced the warrior of the Cross'. The Christian West was excited to a mad religious frenzy by Peter the Hermit, and his followers to liberate the Holy Land from the hands of the Muslims. `Every means', says Hallam, `was used to excite an epidemical frenzy'. During the time that a Crusader bore the Cross, he was under the protection of the Church and exempted from all taxes as well as free to commit all sins.
Peter the Hermit himself led the second host of the Crusaders comprising forty thousand people. `Arriving at Mallevile, they avenged their precursors by assaulting the town, slaying seven thousand of the inhabitants, and abandoning themselves to every species of grossness and liberalism'. The savage hordes called Crusaders converted Hungary and Bulgaria into desolate regions. When they reached Asia Minor, they, according to Michaud, `committed crimes which made nature shudder'.
The third wave of the Crusaders commanded by a German monk, according to Gibbon, `were comprised of the most stupid and savage refuse of people. They mingled with their devotion a brutal license of rapine, prostitution and drunkenness'. `They forgot Constantinople and Jerusalem', says Michaud `in tumultuous scenes of debauchery, and pillage, violation and murder was everywhere left on the traces of their passage'.
The fourth horde of the Crusaders which had risen from western Europe was, according to Mill, `another herd of wild and desperate savages... The internal multitude hurried on the south in their usual career of carnage and rapine'. But, at last, they were annihilated by the infuriated Hungarian Army which had a foretaste of the madness of the earlier Crusaders.
Later the Crusaders met with initial success and conquered a major part of Syria and Palestine, including the Holy city of Jerusalem. But their victories were followed by such brutalities and massacres of innocent Muslims which eclipsed the massacres of Changiz and Hulaku. Mill, a Christian historian, testifies to this massacre of the Muslim population on the fall of the Muslim town of Autioch. He writes: `The dignity of age, the helplessness of youth and the beauty of the weaker sex were disregarded by the Latin savages. Houses were no sanctuaries, and the sign of a mosque added new virulence to cruelty'.
According to Michaud: `if contemporary account can be credited, all the vices of the infamous Babylon prevailed among the liberators of Scion'. The Crusaders laid waste to flourishing towns of Syria, butchered their population in cold blood and burnt to ashes the invaluable treasures of art and learning including the world famous library of Tripolis (Syria) containing more than three million volumes. `The streets ran with blood until ferocity was tired out', says Mill. `Those who were vigorous or beautiful were reserved for the slave market at Antioch, but the aged and the infirm were immolated at the altar of cruelty'.
But in the second half of the 12th century, when the Crusaders were in their greatest fury and the emperors of Germany and France and Richard, the lion-hearted king of England, had taken the field in person for the conquest of the Holy Land, the Crusaders were met by Sultan Salahuddin Ayubi, a great warrior who pushed back the surging wave of Christianity out to engulf the Holy Land. He was not able to clear the gathering storm but in him the Crusaders met a man of indomitable will and dauntless courage who could accept the challenge of the Christian West.
Salahuddin was born in 1137. He got his early training under his illustrious father Najmuddin Ayub and his chivalrous uncle Asaduddin Sherkoh, who were the trusted lieutenants of Nooruddin Mahmud, the monarch of Syria. Asaduddin Sherkoh, a great warrior general was the commander of the Syrian force, which had defeated the Crusaders both in Syria and Egypt. Sherkoh entered Egypt in 1167 to meet the challenge of the Fatamide Minister Shawer who had allied himself with the French. The marches and counter-marches of the gallant Sherkoh and his ultimate victory at Babain over the allied force, according to Michaud, `show military capacity of the highest order'. Ibni Atheer writes about it: `Never has history recorded a more extraordinary event than the rout of the Egyptian force and the French at the littoral by only a thousand cavaliers'.
