The snow he sent for Richard's fever

During the Third Crusade, King Richard the Lionheart fell ill outside Jaffa. His army feared he would die. When Salahuddin heard of it, he sent his personal physician, a basket of Mount Hermon snow, and a gift of Persian pears.

In 1192, in the fifth year of the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart lay in his tent outside Jaffa with a burning fever. He had been marching and fighting for months against Salahuddin's forces in a war that had failed to retake Jerusalem for the crusaders. He was near death. His army was despondent. His officers whispered that if the king died, the crusade would collapse.

News reached Salahuddin, who was encamped some distance away with his own army. His officers heard the news with satisfaction: the enemy king was ill, they said; if he died, the war would end. Salahuddin, in the reports of the chroniclers, was quiet for a moment. Then he ordered his personal Christian physician to travel to Richard's camp and to treat him. He ordered a basket of snow cut from Mount Hermon, kept in ice on the ride, to be sent to Richard so the king could cool his fever. He ordered a gift of ripe Persian pears, precious in that season, packed in ice and sent to the king along with the snow.

The classical Muslim commentators on this episode noticed what Salahuddin had chosen not to do. The war was pointless if Richard died in bed. Every strategic and cultural incentive urged Salahuddin to let the enemy die of a natural fever and end the war on his own terms. He did not. He sent his own physician. He sent snow from a mountain he still held. He sent pears out of his own supply. Richard lived to fight him again. The war continued for months. Muslims and Christians continued to die.

Salahuddin's officers questioned him. He gave them the answer that has been preserved in the sources: "A king does not let another king die of fever in his own tent." He meant something specific by it. He meant that the war was to be fought on the battlefield, sword to sword, banner to banner. He would kill Richard if Richard rode against him in the morning. He would not let Richard die of a fever brought on by heat and marching, because that would not be a death worthy of Richard. It would be an accident of the weather. It would be beneath the rank of a king to permit.

Richard, on his eventual recovery, was told the source of the physician and the snow and the pears. What he said in that moment is not recorded. But when the Third Crusade ended, and Richard sailed home to Europe, he sent a letter to Salahuddin. He said, in the version the Muslim chroniclers preserved: "You are the only Muslim king I have ever fought whom I would trust to keep the word of a truce."

The peace of Jaffa (September 1192) closed the Third Crusade. Muslims kept Jerusalem. Christian pilgrims retained the right to enter the city unarmed for prayer. Richard sailed for Europe. Salahuddin returned to Damascus, exhausted, and within six months of the peace he too died, in March 1193. He was fifty-five years old.

What the story teaches

The snow and the pears are remembered in the Islamic tradition because they capture something the tradition believes about how a Muslim leader is supposed to treat an enemy: not with the cruelty of a merchant answering price with price, but with the courtesy of a king who fights his enemy face to face and refuses cheap ways to be rid of him. The adab al-harb, the etiquette of war, was one of the oldest genres of Islamic ethical writing, and it is precisely stories like this one that were used to teach it. Salahuddin did not fight the war less hard for having sent the snow. He fought it just as hard. But he refused, in the moment of an accidental advantage, to accept a victory the desert weather had handed him without his having earned it.