The Kurdish-born founder of the Ayyubid dynasty who ended the Shia Fatimid caliphate in Egypt, united Egypt and Syria, crushed the Crusader army at Hattin in 1187, and recaptured Jerusalem for Islam eighty-eight years after the First Crusade had taken it — and whose comparatively restrained conduct toward the conquered turned him, in later Western and Muslim memory alike, into the archetype of the chivalrous, magnanimous foe.
In October 1187, the Christian defenders of Jerusalem braced for slaughter. Eighty-eight years earlier, the First Crusade had stormed the same walls and massacred its inhabitants, Muslim and Jewish, in streets that ran with blood. Now a Kurdish sultan named Saladin stood outside with an army that had just destroyed the Crusader kingdom at a hill called Hattin. The city fell. But this time there was no massacre. Saladin let most of the inhabitants ransom themselves and walk free, and freed some who could not pay through acts of clemency, though not everyone unable to pay escaped captivity. That choice, as much as the victory itself, made his name echo for centuries among his enemies.