Blind History S2E3: Saladin

in the West of Jordan as a desert plain of rock and stone upon this great plane nearly 1,000 years ago the great Muslim soldier Vizier and King and Nassif Saladin Yusuf eben ayob emerged from his silk tent to launch a great attack on the castle of guarantee within a few years he would defeat all his enemies recaptured Jerusalem and achieved the expulsion of the Christian Crusaders from the Holy Land but before he could do that there would be honor and chivalry and violence he would be responsible for all three in excess and would become one of the most celebrated characters in medieval history William of Tyre in a history of deeds done beyond the sea in 1170 wrote this of the man he was a man wise in consul valiant in war and generous beyond measure but the holy land is still stained with blood from his lifetime he is of course Saladin or an Nasir Saladin Yusef even Ayub that's his full name is born in 1137 and died in 1193 this is an episode of blind history with Anthony Madera CEO of Taylor blinds and shutters I'm a Gareth cliff just to history nerds welcome to another episode so do you like Saladin I enjoy Saladin great warrior and he was very very successful wasn't canceled valiant in war that's exactly what William tar said but it was he was also he didn't text yet no he was he was a dangerous guy and he met his match in a number of Crusaders who attempted to overthrow him and take back Jerusalem or take Jerusalem will keep Jerusalem and one of them was Richard the first the Lionheart who had this to say about him he was genuinely struck by Saladin skill tolerance and magnanimity as a ruler and a battlefield commander so he was born as a Kurd and as a Sunni Muslim in Damascus in Syria and what's interesting about him is that he became eventually the first Sultan of Egypt and Syria and this is in the eleven hundreds which was really an extraordinary time to have been in that position he ruled at one point over all of Egypt Mesopotamia Yemen and parts of North Africa as well as obviously Syria Damascus and parts of the Holy Land one thing that he did say during his time and that's why he was I would believe quite excited to fight the Crusades was he he didn't lock fighting Muslim against Muslim no so when he finally had the chance and it settled everything he became sultan of northern syria and all the regions you've just mentioned he turned his attention on Jerusalem and farting the Crusades he was one of the most famous Muslim heroes correct I suppose we felt pressure to include people from all different parts of the world and people of all different faiths and Saladin would have made this on merit alone but it's interesting that he is still revered in the Muslim world his tomb in Damascus is still a place of pilgrimage and we'll get to how he eventually lived out his life in a second but I got something wrong I said he was born in Damascus he was actually born in Tikrit in Iraq and he was educated in some of the Greek classics Euclid he could quote he was a very good administrator he was also good with arithmetic he had many languages under the belt he was also fluent in law and he saw the First Crusade when he was a young man taking the Holy Land and of course that kind of made him decide early on that what he wanted to do with his life was free Jerusalem from the Christians and he became Vizier of Egypt in between where he went and offered his counsel and his military strategy to the the rulers of Egypt at the time and there were many uprisings or even assassination attempts against him during that time in Egypt he became the protégé of nur ad-din so Saladin and nur add-in and nur add-in was sort of his teacher in some ways and he was the ward for this man who and they were related that's right yeah his ankle was the Sultan and that was his son they walked a long path together but you could see that path was gonna end up where they would have to fight each other and it just so happened that Nura didn't passed away prior to him having to do that because you see they were on the warpath at some stage in their life but just getting back to Tikrit in Iraq Saddam Hussein was born in Tikrit and he said once that he saw himself as the Saladin of his age of course he died more ignominiously than than Saladin and Saladin and when Saladin died by the way since we've got to the end of his story but we'll go back when he died he actually distributed all of his goods to the people he was not interested in material goods he wore mostly black in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad he was a devotee believed he also needed to keep himself pure in order to take Jerusalem it wasn't just a military conquest he was after he was after a spiritual conquest as well so he was a very devout man in that respect and quite conscientious about how he behaved he gave up wine when he was in Egypt and was vizier so that he could begin a life of success purity dignity conquest and all of those things and that's actually when he started battling against the Crusaders and the Crusades were actually political failure ultimately if we look at what's talked about in Muslim books and history they talked very little about the Crusades and they actually left very little after all those years that they were in battling there the Mongols left more we always hear espouses Westerners about the Crusades but they political animal a true failure yeah it was it was a disaster I think if first Pope Urban was the one who decided to send the the people of Europe into the early land to try and conquer Jerusalem it was meant to just be pilgrimage before then and they decided no no no we need to own this and there are a number of French families who went and Italians and even English but the First Crusade by some extent a successful 188 years of control over Jerusalem came to Swift and once Saladin came into the picture yeah so he came into the picture and then that really perked the targa there were three kings that came across that's right leader Lu senior who was essentially the king of Jerusalem because his wife's brother Baldwin had died he was known as the leper king and he was Baldwin the fourth he had only about 375 Knights who guarded him in Jerusalem so Saladin could at any time have pressed the button and gone in there and made mincemeat out of him but he was actually quite a respectful man and he wanted to do things right it didn't matter to him that he just won he wanted to win properly and honorably and and there were some dishonorable people in the Christian side of things a guy called Vinod the shotty or who was a vicious quite out of control Knight he didn't seem to submit to the authority of either giddy listen or anyone else he had a castle called Carrick and Saladin attacked and besieged this place twice Raynald I think abducted Saladin sister at some point and luckily for him I suppose in the end not so luckily but he didn't do her any damage and she was handed back to Saladin in the interceding time between that handing back of his sister and the end of Reynolds story Saladin decided that this guy needed to be taken out he was a problem and at the end of the siege of Jerusalem he captured her in Aldershot eyo and he had he and did listen you're sitting at his tent and he offered ghee iced water I mean this is a real treat in the heat of Palestine at that stage and he gave the drink to ghee and he just cut off Reynolds head with his sword right there and then and guess what he was going to kill him too and he said it is not the want of kings to kill kings but that man had transgressed all bounds and I treat him thus yeah exactly pretty hectic guy that's where you see a different side to him but you know Richard the Lionheart I think his horse was killed in battle hmm and Saladin sent a new horse to him yeah so just shows you as well you know chivalry that's that very interesting and he had a great reputation with the Westerners yeah I think they're also obviously there was a bit of propaganda because they built it up as the evil enemy that's right yeah because they wanted to be seen that they do the boogeyman yeah and they were doing some work of dignity and and there were Crusaders well look I mean it wasn't all dignity because effectively what happened and Saladin probably did treat the Christians better than they treated the Muslims and when he did take Jerusalem I think it was in the eleven eighty seven there were about 5,000 Muslim prisoners inside and there was a guy called Balian of Ibelin who threatened to destroy the Dome of the rock and the al-aqsa mosque and execute all 5,000 Muslims who were being held hostage if Saladin didn't come to terms and he did come to terms he said fine we'll have a little period where everybody can leave where you can get out and we can take the city peacefully but you're going to have to pay me a ransom and there was a ransom amount of a certain I think he was recce quiver lint to $50.00 per person now it had to be paid to him and they all exited Jerusalem and that was the end of 88 years of Christian control of that city that was incredible and they never took it back no they tried and and Richard the Lionheart won a few battles but never the war so Richard the Lionheart was impressive him badly was a good warrior but he was really up and down Saladin was already much much older so he was really late 40s early 50s who is Richard the Lionheart had only started to bankrupt England and he did he continued to I mean actually had what they called a Saladin tax in England where he had encouraged his barons to levy taxes on people so that he could keep fighting and Richard was actually a very poor King he spent a few months in England during the 11 or 12 years of his reign and the rest of the time he spent on the battlefields or in prison yeah so not the Lionheart that the English would like you to believe when you see that statue of him outside the Palace of Westminster but the feud passed into legend people have talked about it for ages and ages but only in the Western world I mean there's not a lot talked about it in the middle as such well there's two great men of the eleven hundreds in one podcast blind history thank you for listening to season two of blind history this is one of the many episodes that we have planned for you in there plenty more to come it's brought to you by Taylor blinds and shutters only on cliff central.com [Music]

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Views: 3,463

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Keywords: Taylor, Taylor Blinds, Taylor Shutters, Shutters, Security Shutters, Shutter styles, American shutters, Plantation shutters, Door shutters, Window shutters, How shutters open, Shutter options, podcast, south african podcast, history podcast, cliff central, gareth cliff, tailored, saladin, nat geo, nat geo soutb africa, history channel

Id: VMg-u1R4xiU

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 01 2019