time ruling a country that doesn’t belong to you. You’ re
getting strong and rich with Egypt’s gold, but I want you,
your new soldiers, and the money that you’ve won with me,
here, to fight the Franks in the Holy Land. Unless you come
back to Syria immediately, I’ll attack you!
Some young men in Saladin’s army said, ‘If the King of Syria
comes here, we’ll fight him and send him back to his country!’
But Ayyub, Saladin’s father, told him, ‘I’ll kill you myself if
you go against your commander!’ Saladin listened and waited.
In 1174, Nuradin died. His last words were, ‘Only one thing
makes me unhappy: what will happen to my family at the hands
of Yusuf, son of Ayyub?’
Because Nuradin’s son, Al-Saleh, was only eleven years old,
many people wanted to rule Syria in the boy’s name. Then
two months later, King Amalric of Jerusalem died too. His
son, Baldwin, was thirteen, and was ill with leprosy. Saladin,
now thirty-six, saw that it was a good time to move against the
Franks, but he needed a bigger army.
‘If I can teach Nuradin’s son how to be a good ruler while he’s
still young, and I can rule Syria in his name, then all Muslims
will help my soldiers fight for the Holy Land,’ he thought.
But many Syrians were afraid of Saladin. The emirs said, ‘You
go too far, Yusuf! You were just a soldier, and now you want
all of Syria! You came from nothing. You are nothing. And we
won’t listen to you!’
But Saladin wanted to make Nuradin’s dream of winning
back the Holy Land come true. He took Damascus with little
trouble. Then he moved on to Aleppo. This was where the young
Al-Saleh went with his emirs after they saw how quickly Saladin
was winning the country. But Aleppo was difficult to take, so
Saladin attacked the castle of Azaz first. It fell after thirty-eight
days of fighting, and then Aleppo surrendered.
The emirs didn’t trust Saladin and thought that he really
wanted to be King of Syria, so they asked the Assassins, a secret
group of killers, to kill him. They tried twice, while Saladin
was asleep, but he was lucky and lived. He decided to fight the
Assassins in their mountain home, but it wasn’t easy. Some of
his soldiers said, ‘We were near Sinan, the Assassins’ general,
but he has great powers that we can’t explain. He looked at us,
and we couldn’t lift our swords to fight him!’
One night Saladin made a trap to catch anyone trying to get
near him while he was sleeping. In the morning he found some
sweet bread near his head. A knife through it held a message
saying: You are under our power! No one could explain how the
things got there.
‘Perhaps Sinan does have special powers!’ thought Saladin,
‘We must stop fighting him and his people.’
No one knew what Saladin and Sinan agreed, but the Assassins
never tried to hurt Saladin again. By 1177, most of Syria wanted
to help Saladin, who was now thirty-nine. Then the news came
that the Franks and the people in Byzantium were no longer
friends. Saladin felt that perhaps now was the time to start a
holy war to take Jerusalem back from the Franks.
Chapter 5 – Defeat and victory