History can be hard, right? Lots of timelines and
players to keep track of, and discussions of the interplay between political, economic, cultural,
and military factors can easily become mystifying to the point of incoherence. Imagine the surprise
of European farmers who learned that a disruption to tourism in the Holy Land means they have to
pay higher taxes to fund a transcontinental war. It’s a little tricky sometimes! This is why
historians aiming to both lighten the vibe and slim down the amount of narrative knives to
juggle may gravitate towards singular narratives about famous figures: rulers, generals, and
other such go-getters. This is often known as Great Man History — But it is stupid, and I
hate it, because not only is it insultingly reductive and so slavishly rote that it still
somehow manages to be boring, but it tends to blindly-glorify characters that, more often than
not, are assholes. So let’s try something else: we’ll ditch the arbitrary concept of “Greatness”
and give praise where it’s actually due by discussing two Good rulers in history: King
Cyrus of Persia and Sultan Saladin of Egypt. Two noble, genuinely virtuous people who, in a
statistical anomaly, are not profoundly awful after three minutes of cursory research. Of
course, this is not to say they are blameless, they’re monarchs who conquered stuff, their
literal job description involves killing thousands of people to acquire land, and the simple act
of ruling necessitates countless choices big and small that negatively affect someone or other.
My point here is to look at how someone in an innately-perilous moral position can nonetheless
demonstrate a commitment to virtue. So, to have a little fun with pure-biography in such a way
that won’t make me furious, Let’s do some History. Now let’s rewind to the 500s BC and meet our first
protagonist in Persia. Well, politically, this whole stretch was under the Median Empire, just
east of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in Mesopotamia. According to legend, the Median king Astyages was
feeling antsy about a dream that prophesied his overthrow at the small, adorably stubby hands of
his as-of-yet-unborn grandson. But despite orders for his daughter to kill the child, the itty bitty
Cyrus survived in secret for 10 years before being discovered by Astyages. Although the King had
been pretty set on his course a decade earlier, this time he was content to let Cyrus just
kinda go home to Persia and exist. In 559, Cyrus inherited Kingship of Persia from his
father, but they were still subordinate to Media, so in 553 he revolted against his grandfather
Astyages and, improbably, won, conquering Media in 550 and creating the Achaemenid Persian
empire, named after a distant ancestor. From there, Cyrus zoomed, swooping west into
Anatolia to conquer the Kingdom of Lydia, pushing east toward the Hindu Kush mountains,
and then finally into Mesopotamia to topple the empire of Babylon in 539. 14 years after telling
his grandfather to scram, Cyrus had an objectively insane amount of territory, with somewhere on the
order of 50 million people spread over dozens of cultures. Cyrus was managing Greeks, Phoenicians,
Semites, Mesopotamians, Medians, Persians, Bactrians, Parthians, and Indians. And those are
all pretty wide descriptors! Listing off all the ethnicities and subcultures of the Achaemenid
Persian Empire would leave me here all day, so you might expect someone in Cyrus’ position to
tell all of those people “gross, too complicated, no, no rights for you. Act more Persian, speak
my language, and also pay more taxes”, because that’s precisely what the Babylonian empire had
done. The capital city was rich beyond belief because it was drenched in tax revenue and loaded
with treasures from all over the empire, like statues of local gods, which, according to many of
these cultures, were the actual gods themselves. And Cyrus was aware that this was not the nicest
way to treat one’s subjects. When the Persian armies marched on Babylon, Cyrus claimed that
the great god Bel had deserted Babylon because of their greed and cruelty, switching his divine
favor onto the Persians. Now let’s just take a second to appreciate that Cyrus fundamentally
works on the same moral framework as China’s Mandate of Heaven. It’s obviously not the same
thing, but it’s clearly a similar thought process, and it definitely informs our reading of his
benevolence. So now that Cyrus was in charge of, well, functionally everything, he made some
changes, like sending divine statues back to what he called “The places that make them happy”
which is just so adorably sweet. He also allowed people to go back to their happy places, which
is corroborated by a little source known as The Bible. Because after Israel was conquered by
Babylon, the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and most Jews were deported to Mesopotamia. Cyrus
undid all that, allowing Jews to return home, and even sponsoring the construction of a
new temple to replace the first one. Many Jews were content to stay in big city Babylon,
but the migration back to the Levant had a huge cultural and theological impact on Judaism as a
whole. The books of Isaiah and Ezra describe how nice it is to be treated like people despite
their difference in religion and ethnicity, but if we had more sources from around the empire,
I’m sure we’d have lots of stories like this, as official records indicate multiple
repatriation and reconstruction programs. But all this pan-imperial benevolence
wasn’t just for warm fuzzy feelings, because Cyrus was extremely pragmatic. He
recognized where Media and Babylon failed, and knew that the disparate parts of the
empire would be happy if they could practice their customs in peace, and if the economic
infrastructure of the empire brought wealth into the provinces rather than just yanking
it out as taxes. So Cyrus and his successors worked to connect the empire and facilitate
trade by building roads, issuing coins, and standardizing weights & measures. After
completing his conquests, Cyrus led with kindness, and backed it up with actions that would
directly ensure the long-term stability and well-being of the Persian state. Man, it’s
amazing what happens when you actually Try. Our next subject won’t move us very far, but
we will timeskip about 1600 years ahead, which lands us in the Holy Land during the Crusades,
so I’m already not having fun. Politically, this corner of the world was, whoooof, crowded,
with Crusader states hugging the Levantine coast, and a smattering of small Muslim vassal
states sandwiched between the Egyptian Fatimid Caliphate and the Seljuk Sultanate.
Our protagonist Salah ad-Din was born Yusuf Ibn Ayyub in Northern Mesopotamia, where he was
educated in language, theology, Islamic political and military history, and science. But Medieval
Muslim scholarship was almost always fantastic, so this really shouldn’t be surprising. There
was, however, no substitute for experience, and as a young adult Saladin accompanied
his uncle on a campaign to Egypt, where some clever politics, a victory in battle, and
maybe assassinating the Fatimid vizier resulted in Saladin becoming Vizier of Egypt, and thanks
to the fortuitous deaths of a couple caliphs, Saladin ruled his new Ayyubid Sultanate by 1174.
And boy could he have done a heck of a lot worse than Egypt. Throughout history, the place
has been well-supplied, interconnected, and extremely rich. So it made a wonderful
base of operations from which to go pester the crusaders. While he was swooping
around the levant and up to Syria, Saladin’s main focus stayed on the Christian
kingdoms along the coast. He obviously had a religious motivation in taking Jerusalem, but this
typically theological rivalry had one especially irritating antagonist by the name of Raynald
of Châtillon. From the Sultan’s perspective, Raynald’s singular goal in life was to give
Saladin a heart attack from raw stress, by breaking every treaty he possibly could, and
killing innocent pilgrims basically for funsies. Raynald unambiguously sucked, and even Christian
sources at the time openly wished for Saladin to get him. In 1183 he did get close, when he
besieged Raynald’s castle at Kerak. But Saladin heard Raynald’s stepson and Princess Isabella of
Jerusalem had been married in the castle earlier that day, and were spending the evening in one
of the towers, so he ordered his army to continue the siege, but be mindful so as not to disturb
the tower. The castle was too well-defended so Saladin withdrew a few days later, but this
still shows Saladin’s chivalry and his good sense of humor. Just because he was at war
didn’t mean he’s going to be a jerk about it. But Saladin wouldn’t have to wait for long
to get that weaselly Raynald, or Jerusalem, for that matter. In 1187, Saladin besieged
the city of Tiberias and baited a crusader army to ride out from Acre; in the middle
of the summer, across a very long road with only one water spring. When Saladin subsequently
ambushed the army at the Horns of Hattin, it was already Game Over. Most of the army was killed
or captured, including the King of Jerusalem and Monsieur Raynald. The King was cool, so
Saladin treated him with the utmost courtesy, but Raynald was beyond negotiation, so Saladin scolded
him for his awful behavior before grabbing a sword and killing him himself. After that, the king was
ransomed and sent peacefully home. Although, home is a stretch, because Saladin took advantage of
the Crusaders’ sudden lack of an army to conquer Jerusalem and almost all of the Holy Land. And
in contrast to the Crusader’s massacre of 1099, Saladin took Jerusalem with far less violence and
vandalism, ransoming most Christians in the city and letting several thousand just go free. This of
course prompted a third Crusade, pitting Saladin against England’s King Richard the Lionheart, but
this contest was far more chivalrous. Although Richard executed thousands of Muslim captives in
Acre, he was still infinitely better than Raynald. When Richard lost a horse and fell ill at the
battle of Arsuf, Saladin, who lost that battle, gifted two horses from his royal stables and sent
his royal physician to treat the English King. The war soon ended in a treaty that restricted
Crusader kingdoms to the coast, and recognized the capture of Jerusalem, but Saladin offered to
allow Christian pilgrims to still visit the city. So it’s not hard to see why even sources from
his adversaries had a deep respect for the man. Both within and beyond their respective
empires, Cyrus and Saladin are well-deserving of their reputations. Their political and
military accomplishments were plenty already, but it takes a really special figure for even
their enemies praise their underlying character. Generals who fought against Saladin wrote him
letters of apology, and then even the Greek writer Xenophon cited Cyrus as the ideal king. To
a degree, both of these figures got caught on the other side of an arbitrary East vs West conflict,
which is why us “westerners” don’t know them as well as we arguably should, but despite the unkind
bias of various Greek and Crusader historians against Persians and Muslims respectively,
the reputations of these two have clearly transcended cultural boundaries, as models of what
it means to use power for good, mostly for good, about as good as a monarch can use their power
for, all things considered. And heck, maybe recent history is just getting to me, but I uh, I dunno,
feel like we can maybe learn a bit from that. Thank you so much for watching! As someone who
has very strong opinions about the way monarchs are discussed in history, this was a very fun way
to talk about cool characters that we can actually look up to in some key ways. Luckily, history
does have a handful of actually good rulers, so I’m looking forward to covering
some more in future videos. As always, thank you patrons for supporting the work that
we do, and I’ll see you in the next video.
