First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam Read Online Free PDF Page A

three campaigns against the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and was soon named second-in-command of the Syrian army under his uncle Shirkuh.Shirkuh became vizier of Egypt, but died just two months after his appointment, whereupon Saladin assumed his office.
He then spent the next two decades in a protracted political struggle as he consolidated his position as de facto ruler of Egypt, extended his power into Syria and northern Iraq, and skirmished with the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.By 1187 he felt strong enough to challenge the might of the Crusaders, and after a three-month campaign he defeated the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in a fierce battle at the Horns of Hattin, near Tiberias on the Jordan River.Among the spoils of the battle were the True Cross, the most sacred of the Crusaders’ relics, and Guy, the King of Jerusalem, whom Saladin held for ransom.The remaining strongholds of the kingdom quickly fell to Saladin, and by the end of 1187, the only major city in the Levant remaining in Crusader hands was Tyre.
Responding to the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Pope Gregory VIII proclaimed the Third Crusade in October, 1187, to be led by the English King, Richard Coeur-de-Lion (the Lion-Hearted); the French King, Philip Augustus; and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa.Misfortune plagued the Germans once again, as Frederick drowned while crossing a river in Anatolia on his way to the Holy Land, and most of the German army then returned to their homes, having reached only as far as Antioch and never coming to battle with Saladin’s Saracen armies.
Richard arrived in the Levant after Phillip, having first taken Cyprus to use as a secure base for his supplies.Together the two kings led their armies to the port city of Acre, on the Mediterranean coast, which was then under assault by the remnants of the army of Jerusalem, led by the now-ransomed King Guy.After a prolonged siege, with almost no food left in the city and the walls crumbling after repeated attacks by the Crusaders’ engineers and miners, Acre surrendered in 1191, the city’s inhabitants offering themselves up for ransom.
Saladin at first refused to pay the sum demanded by Richard and Phillip Augustus, hoping that exhaustion would set in on the Crusader forces and compel them to allow the hostages to go free, but eventually he relented.However, payment was delayed, and soon the Crusaders grew tired of waiting.Richard ordered more than 3,000 Moslem captives—men, women, and children-–to be executed on a hillside near the city of Ayyadieh.It was this one act more than any other that cemented the lasting enmity between Islam and Christendom, as Richard would be remembered as “The Butcher of Ayyadieh” among Moslems.(For centuries Arab parents would silence unruly children by hissing at them, “Hush!Or England will get you!”)
Eventually Richard’s and Saladin’s armies met in at Jaffa in 1192, and after a bitter, hard-fought battle, the Moslems withdrew in defeat.The casualties on both sides were so severe that Richard lacked the strength to recapture Jerusalem, while Saladin was unable to drive the Crusaders into the sea.The two warriors, who had come to admire and respect one another as kindred souls, concluded a treaty which established fixed borders between the Latin lands and Moslem territories, and which allowed unarmed Christian pilgrims to visit Jerusalem.A month later Richard departed the Levant forever.
Forty years would pass before another military expedition on the scale of the first three Crusades was attempted.Meanwhile, the Fourth Crusade, launched in 1204, was a fiasco, serving as little more than a pretext for a mercenary army in the pay of Venice to sack and burn Byzantium, the greatest Christian city in Asia Minor, crippling the city as a financial rival to the Venentian lending houses.Though condemned by the Church in the strongest possible terms, the sack of Byzantium left a Venetian puppet on the throne of the Eastern Empire