The day Jerusalem was not a massacre

In 1099, when the First Crusade took Jerusalem, its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were massacred in the streets. The rivers of the killing were reported to reach the horses' bridles. When Salahuddin took Jerusalem back in 1187, he had every warrant of custom to answer that in kind. He did not.

On 15 July 1099, after a five-week siege, the armies of the First Crusade broke into Jerusalem. The city's Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were massacred systematically for three days. Eyewitness accounts written by the crusaders themselves speak of streets ankle-deep in blood, of Jews burned alive in their synagogue on the al-Hakari street, of Muslim men, women and children cut down inside the Aqsa mosque, of the Dome of the Rock stripped and desecrated. One crusader chronicler, Raymond of Aguilers, wrote with pride: "in the temple of Solomon our men rode in blood up to the knees and bridles of their horses."

That was July 1099. Eighty-eight years passed. In every one of them, the memory of that massacre lived among the Muslim and Jewish communities of the Levant. It was a foundational fact of how they understood the world.

Salahuddin Yusuf ibn Ayyub, a Kurdish general in the service of the Zangid sultan of Damascus, rose to power, unified Egypt and Syria under a single Ayyubid banner, and in July 1187 defeated the crusader army at the Battle of Hattin. The Crusader kingdom's field army was destroyed. Its king Guy of Lusignan was captured. Its True Cross relic, the sacred talisman under which the Crusader armies always fought, was taken. The road to Jerusalem was open.

Salahuddin arrived outside Jerusalem in September 1187. The Christian defense was led by Balian of Ibelin, a Frankish noble left in the city with a small garrison. Balian threatened Salahuddin that if the city fell by assault, the defenders would first destroy the Islamic holy places, kill the Muslim prisoners inside the city, and destroy their own women and children so that nothing would be left for the Muslim army to take. It was a suicide-threat.

Salahuddin faced a choice. His own commanders wanted a blood-for-blood answer to 1099. The classical customs of war permitted it. The Frankish garrison had no legitimate authority in his eyes; Jerusalem was Islamic soil taken by conquest less than a century before. He could have refused terms and taken the city by storm. He would have been within every legal and cultural warrant of his time.

He offered terms instead. Every Christian inhabitant of Jerusalem could ransom themselves. Ten dinars for a man. Five for a woman. One for a child. Those who could pay would go free with their property. Those who could not pay would remain prisoners, though he arranged for many to be freed by charity or by his own personal ransom. The Islamic holy places would be restored. Christians could worship at the Holy Sepulchre and pilgrims could come to Jerusalem freely. There would be no massacre.

Salahuddin's own brother, al-Adil, asked to free a thousand Christian slaves in Salahuddin's name as a gift. Salahuddin agreed. The Patriarch Heraclius left the city with his personal treasure intact, having paid only the standard ten-dinar ransom. Salahuddin let him go with everything. His own commanders asked, in astonishment, why he did not seize the Patriarch's wealth. Salahuddin answered: I will not violate a promise I gave.

Muslim families who had been in exile for eighty-eight years began, in the following months, to return to Jerusalem. Jewish communities, who had been forbidden entry under the crusaders, were invited back by Salahuddin's own decree. Rabbi Judah al-Harizi, who visited Jerusalem in 1216 and lived there afterward, wrote in praise of Salahuddin: "God stirred the spirit of the prince of the Ishmaelites in the year 4950 [1190 CE], and he gave orders that all corners of the city were to be searched, and if any of the seed of Ephraim were found, they were to be brought to their portion in peace."

The memory of what Salahuddin did on 2 October 1187 has been preserved, ever since, in Christian, Jewish and Muslim historical writing. Even Dante, writing more than a century later from within a Christian polemical tradition, placed Salahuddin in the honourable pagan section of his Inferno rather than in Hell proper. Even Sir Walter Scott, writing in 1825 for a Victorian British audience, made Salahuddin the moral hero of his novel The Talisman. The memory holds.

What the story teaches

The story of Jerusalem in 1187 is remembered by Muslims for a specific reason: it is the historical proof-case that Islamic conquest does not require Islamic massacre. The Islamic tradition on the treatment of the People of the Book, the rules of quarter for surrendered cities, and the protection of houses of worship are not merely doctrinal. They were tested at scale, in the emotionally-hottest possible circumstance, against the men who had personally massacred Muslim families a century before, and the Islamic tradition held. Salahuddin is remembered because of what he chose not to do that day. He gave the world the working proof of a principle it has needed ever since: that mercy in the moment of victory is a form of strength that outlasts the strength of the sword.