Salahuddin Ayyubi
Righteousness of the Faith

Salahuddin Ayyubi

Salahuddin Ayyubi, known in Europe as Saladin, was the sultan of Kurdish descent who united Egypt and Syria, founded the Ayyubid dynasty, defeated the Crusaders at Hattin in 1187 and took Jerusalem the same year. “Salah ad-Din” means “righteousness of the faith”. It was a title of honour. His own name was Yusuf ibn Ayyub.

He was born in 1137 or 1138 and died in Damascus on 4 March 1193. We know him well because Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, the judge of his army who went with him on his later campaigns, wrote his life. Where it matters, this page sets that account beside the Frankish chronicle attributed to Ernoul, a squire of Balian of Ibelin, the man who negotiated Jerusalem’s surrender on the other side.

Meaning of Salahuddin Ayyubi

Salah

Ṣalāḥ (صلاح) is Arabic for “righteousness”.

Uddin

Al-Dīn (الدين) means “the faith” or “the religion”. “Uddin”, “ad-Din” and “al-Din” are different English spellings of the same words. Together, Salah ad-Din means “righteousness of the faith”.

Titles built this way, a word followed by al-Din, were a standard kind of honorific in classical Arabic names. Library cataloguers list them alongside examples such as Nur al-Din, the name of Saladin’s own overlord. So Salah ad-Din was a title, not a given name. His personal name was Yusuf, the Arabic form of Joseph.

Ayyubi

His father was Ayyub, the Arabic form of Job, so he was Yusuf ibn Ayyub, “Yusuf son of Ayyub”. Ayyubi is a nisba, the part of an Arabic name formed with the ending -i that shows where or whom someone comes from. The dynasty he founded is called the Ayyubids for the same reason.

So “Salahuddin Ayyubi” can be read as “Righteousness of the Faith, of the family of Ayyub”.

Early Life and Faith

Baha ad-Din says he was born in the year 532 of the Islamic calendar (AD 1137–1138) in the citadel of Tikrit, where his father was governor. The family was of Kurdish descent. His father and his uncle, Shirkuh, served the Zengid ruler of Mosul, and later moved to Syria, where the boy began his own service under his father.

Baha ad-Din’s portrait of his faith is detailed rather than general: he kept the daily prayers, travelling or not, and his charity was so constant that when he died he left, in Baha ad-Din’s words, “but forty-seven Nasri dirhems, and one Tyrian gold piece” in his treasury. That is a friend’s account, written after his death, and it reads like one. It is also the closest witness we have.

How he rose

His power was built long before Jerusalem.

• Egypt. He went to Egypt with his uncle Shirkuh, who became vizier to the Fatimid caliph. When Shirkuh died in March 1169, Saladin took his place at the head of the government.
• The end of the Fatimid caliphate. Shortly before the last Fatimid caliph, al-Adid, died in September 1171, Saladin had the Friday sermon read in the name of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, ending the Shiʿi Fatimid caliphate in Egypt.
• Syria. His overlord Nur ad-Din died in Damascus on 15 May 1174. Saladin moved into Syria and took Damascus, and over the following years he fought Muslim rivals as well as the Crusaders.

That unification of Egypt and Syria is what made 1187 possible: the Crusader states now faced one ruler on two fronts.

Hattin, 4 July 1187

The victory that opened Jerusalem was won near Hattin, west of Tiberias. The Crusader army under King Guy of Lusignan marched to relieve Tiberias, which Saladin was besieging, across ground with little water. Baha ad-Din describes the Crusaders on the hill of Hattin “tortured by thirst” as the Muslims set fires around them. Guy was captured, and the relic of the True Cross was lost.

What happened next is told in detail by Baha ad-Din. Saladin gave the thirsty king “a bowl of sherbet made with iced rose-water”. When Guy passed it to Reynald of Châtillon, the lord of Kerak who had attacked a caravan during a truce, Saladin said it was the king, not he, who was giving Reynald a drink: by custom, a captive who ate or drank with his captor was spared. Later that day Saladin struck Reynald himself, and his men finished him. He told the frightened king: “It is not the wont of kings to kill kings; but that man had transgressed all bounds.”

Baha ad-Din also records that Saladin resolved to execute the captured Hospitallers and Templars, “and he spared not a single one.”

Jerusalem, 1187

Saladin reached Jerusalem on 20 September 1187, and the city surrendered on 2 October 1187. There was no massacre. That is a real contrast with the Crusader capture of 1099, when, in the Crusaders’ own account, the killing at the Temple was so great that “our men waded in blood up to their ankles.”

But leaving the city was not free. Three early accounts, from both sides, give the same ransom, and a fourth differs on one figure:

• 10 dinars for a man, 5 for a woman and 1 for a child, according to Baha ad-Din; 10, 5 and 1 bezants in the chronicle attributed to Ernoul; and 10, 5 and 1 in the Latin De expugnatione Terrae Sanctae, which counts boys of seven and under as children.
• The historian Ibn al-Athir, in an English translation quoted by the Muslim Heritage site, gives two dinars for a child. With three accounts from both sides agreeing on one, the evidence leans to one.
• In Ernoul’s account Saladin first asked 20, 10 and 5, adding that anyone who could not pay would remain a slave, and brought the price down after negotiation with Balian. Baha ad-Din puts it the other way round: everyone who paid “was to receive his freedom”.

Many of the poor were freed anyway. Ernoul’s chronicle says Saladin’s brother, whom the Franks called Saphadin, asked for a thousand of them as slaves and freed them; the Patriarch and Balian were each given more to free; Saladin then had the poor let out through the postern of St Lazarus from sunrise to sunset, without counting, as his own alms. The same passage says that anyone found carrying the means to pay was to be imprisoned, and that the young men and women were put “between two walls” while the old were put outside the city. Balian and the Patriarch also bought the freedom of 7,000 poor people for 30,000 bezants, taken from the king of England’s treasure held by the Hospitallers. When the counting was done, the same chronicle says, about eleven thousand were still unransomed, and Saladin refused an offer from the Patriarch and Balian to stay as hostages in their place. Saladin’s own secretary, Imad ad-Din, counts differently: in a passage quoted by the historian Andrew Holt, he writes that the women and children alone “came to 8,000 and were quickly divided up among us”. Under the terms, those who could not pay remained slaves; the Latin account’s version of the terms says that those who did not have ten besants “were to become booty, to be slain by the army’s swords”.

Baha ad-Din adds that everyone who paid was escorted to Tyre, and that the Muslim prisoners freed in the city numbered more than three thousand. Both accounts, from opposite sides, describe the same thing: restraint far beyond a sack, together with a ransom that many people could not pay.

The Third Crusade and his death

The loss of Jerusalem brought a new crusade from Europe. Richard I of England defeated Saladin at Arsuf on 7 September 1191, a battle Baha ad-Din calls “a blow to all Moslem hearts”, but Richard never took Jerusalem. The war ended with a three-year peace dated 2 September 1192: Jaffa, Caesarea, Arsuf, Haifa and Acre went to the Crusaders, Ascalon was to be demolished, and Christian pilgrims went up to Jerusalem under Saladin’s escort.

Saladin died in Damascus on 4 March 1193, six months after the peace. Baha ad-Din was there. “We were obliged to borrow money to purchase everything necessary for the funeral,” he writes, “even down to things that cost but a halfpenny.”

Quick answers

• Who was Saladin? Yusuf ibn Ayyub (born 1137–1138, died 1193), founder of the Ayyubid dynasty and sultan of Egypt and Syria. “Salah ad-Din” is a title meaning “righteousness of the faith”.
• How did he take Jerusalem? By destroying the Crusader field army at Hattin on 4 July 1187. Jerusalem surrendered on 2 October 1187 after a siege and a negotiation with Balian of Ibelin.
• Did he spare everyone in Jerusalem? There was no massacre, but safe passage had to be bought. Thousands of the poor were freed without paying; the Frankish chronicle says about 11,000 were still unransomed at the end and, under the terms, remained slaves.
• Who defeated Saladin? Richard I beat him at Arsuf in 1191, but Jerusalem stayed in Saladin’s hands and the war ended in a negotiated peace in 1192.
• Why is he remembered as chivalrous? Partly for real restraint in 1187, and partly because European writers took him up: Dante places him among the virtuous non-Christians in the first circle of the Inferno, “alone, apart”, and Walter Scott made him a central figure of The Talisman.

Legacy of Salahuddin Ayyubi

Saladin was admired by writers on both sides of the war he fought. His biographer wrote as a devoted servant. In Europe, Dante’s line places him, alone, among the virtuous non-Christians of Limbo, and Scott’s The Talisman made him a romantic hero.

The sources give a fuller picture than either legend. The same biographer who records the empty treasury also records the execution of every captured Templar and Hospitaller after Hattin. The Frankish chronicle that praises his courtesy to the widows and daughters of knights also counts the thousands left unransomed. Both are part of the record.

Righteousness of The Faith

What can a reader take from his story?

1. Read both sides. On the ransom, Saladin’s biographer and the chronicle attributed to a Frankish squire agree almost exactly, and a Latin account agrees with them; Ibn al-Athir differs only on the child’s rate. When opposing witnesses agree, that is about as solid as medieval evidence gets.
2. Keep the numbers with the praise. “There was no massacre” and “about eleven thousand were still unransomed” are both in the sources. A story that keeps only one of them is a legend, not history.
3. Notice what his own side admired. Baha ad-Din opens his book not with victories but with chapters on Saladin’s religion, his love of justice and his generosity. Whatever you make of the man, it is a record of what his contemporaries thought righteousness looked like.

Checked September 2026.

Sources

• Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, The Life of Saladin (What Befell Sultan Yusuf), translated by C. W. Wilson (Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1897). Internet Archive.
• Chronique d’Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier, ed. L. de Mas Latrie (Paris, 1871). Internet Archive.
• Gesta Francorum, on the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, in the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, The Siege and Capture of Jerusalem: Collected Accounts (Fordham University).
• IFLA, Names of Persons: Arabic Names (2018).
• De expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum, tr. James Brundage, in the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, De expugnatione Terrae Sanctae, 1187 (Saladin takes Jerusalem) (Fordham University).
• Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil, as quoted in English in Muslim Heritage, Jerusalem: thriving trade, scholars and magnificent architectural works.
• Andrew Holt, Saladin’s legacy: some thoughts (25 July 2017), quoting Imad ad-Din.
• Behind the Name: Salah ad-Din, Yusuf, Ayyub.
• Dante, Inferno, canto IV, line 129, in La Divina Commedia (Project Gutenberg).
• Walter Scott, The Talisman (Project Gutenberg).