Saladin and his Successors
The empty treasury
When Saladin died at Damascus on 4 March 1193, his secretary and biographer Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad set down what the sultan left behind. His generosity, Baha ad-Din wrote, was too public to need recording, and the proof sat in the treasure chest:
"when he died, in his treasure chest were found only forty-seven Nasiri dirhams of silver and a single Tyrian gold coin, the weight of which was unknown to me"
- Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, al-Nawadir al-Sultaniyya, trans. D. S. Richards 2002The ruler who had retaken Jerusalem and faced down the Third Crusade died with forty-eight coins to his name.
The man and his biographer
Yusuf ibn Ayyub ibn Shadhi, known by his honorific Salah al-Din ("righteousness of the faith"), was born around 1137 at Tikrit on the Tigris to a Kurdish military family in the service of the Turkish rulers of Syria. He rose under Nur al-Din of Aleppo, became vizier of Fatimid Egypt in 1169, abolished the Fatimid caliphate in 1171, and over the following decade joined Egypt and Muslim Syria under his own rule.
On 4 July 1187 he destroyed the Frankish field army at Hattin, and that October he received the surrender of Jerusalem. He fought Richard I's Third Crusade to a negotiated settlement at Jaffa in September 1192 and died at Damascus six months later, on 27 Safar 589 in the Muslim calendar.
The closest portrait we have comes from Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad (1145-1234), who entered Saladin's service in 1188 as judge of the army and remained at his side until the end. His al-Nawadir al-Sultaniyya, translated by Richards as The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, praises the sultan's piety, generosity, calm, and courage, and preserves his ambitions in his own voice:
"I have in mind that, when God Almighty has enabled me to conquer the rest of the coast, I shall divide up the lands, make my testament, take my leave and set sail on this sea to their islands to pursue them there until there no longer remain on the face of the earth any who deny God, or die in the attempt."
- Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, trans. Richards 2002Baha ad-Din wrote as a confidant and admirer, and his book is the foundation on which every later account of Saladin's character rests.
The legend in the West
A set of lead-glazed earthenware floor tiles made around 1250-60, excavated in the 1850s at Chertsey Abbey in Surrey shows Richard I on horseback driving his lance into a reeling Saladin. The tiles depict a duel that was never fought. Richard and Saladin negotiated through envoys, chiefly through Saladin's brother al-Adil, and the two rulers never met in person (Gillingham 1999). The tile makers, working within two generations of the events, painted the war as its participants wished it had gone.
The same imagined combat was still selling six centuries later. A mezzotint of 1831 in the British Museum shows Richard on a white charger, wielding an axe and grasping the shield of Saladin, who rides a dark horse; the traditional subject is the so-called battle of Ascalon of 1192. No pitched battle was fought at Ascalon that year. Richard's engagements against Saladin's army were Arsuf in September 1191 and Jaffa in August 1192, and the Ascalon of 1192 was a refortification project.
Walter Scott gave the legend its most durable literary form. The Talisman , published in 1825 and set during the Third Crusade, turns on the mutual admiration of Richard and Saladin, who appears in disguise as the physician El Hakim. Scott's Richard, believing himself poisoned, refuses to doubt him:
"His blood beats calm as an infant's... De Vaux, whether we live or die, dismiss this Hakim with honour and safety. Commend us, friend, to the noble Saladin."
- Scott, The Talisman, 1825Stanley Lane-Poole, writing Saladin's first full English biography, measured the novel against the record:
"The Talisman has given us a noble portrait of the Sultan whose chivalry and generosity excited the admiration of the Crusaders, but the reader is left in uncertainty as to the history and achievements of the hero, and what he is told in those fascinating pages is not always strictly authentic."
- Lane-Poole 1906The legend was never only a Western invention. Hillenbrand (1999) traces how Saladin's image as the model of just kingship was built in Arabic sources, Baha ad-Din first among them, before Europe borrowed it.
An Artuqid dirham of AH 590
The Artuqids were a Turkmen dynasty descended from Artuq Bey, an eleventh-century commander; their two branches ruled in the Diyarbakr region of upper Mesopotamia, the Mardin line from 1104 until 1408. By the 1180s the Mardin branch had submitted to Saladin, and its rulers struck a remarkable series of large copper dirhams (a dirham is normally a silver denomination; these Turkoman pieces are copper) carrying figural designs drawn from classical, Byzantine, and astrological models.
Saladin died on 27 Safar 589, and this type first appears in that year. Spengler and Sayles read the obverse as a scene of mourning for the dead sultan: the central seated figure slumped in grief, the attendants gesturing in lament. They connect the composition to astrology as well, reading the seated figure as Virgo surrounded by planets, a reference to the conjunction of September 1186, when the sun, moon, and the five visible planets gathered in one region of the sky.
A forged astrological circular known as the Toledo Letter had spread through Europe from 1184, predicting that the September 1186 gathering of the planets in the sign of the Scales would bring world-ending storms; the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered a three-day fast. The panic reached the Islamic world too. Saladin thought it nonsense, and on the appointed night of 16 September 1186 he held a candlelit open-air party while the fearful hid in caves; a companion remarked that they had never seen so calm a night (Asbridge 2010).
Astrologers could later claim their calamity had merely arrived late, in the sultan's death seven years on. The medieval sources place the conjunction in Libra rather than Virgo, so the Spengler and Sayles reading requires the engraver to have taken some liberty with the zodiac; their mourning interpretation and their astrological one are proposals, not certainties, and Turkoman figural types resist single readings.
The political information on the reverse is firmer.
The first strikes of this type, in AH 589, carry a shorter legend naming only the Abbasid caliph al-Nasir, with no Ayyubid overlord at all. Saladin was dead, his sons were at odds, and Yuluq Arslan evidently saw no need to acknowledge a master.
Within a year the calculation changed: the issue of AH 590 shown above names al-Adil, Saladin's brother, as overlord. The grieving figures on the obverse face a reverse that records, in five lines of Kufic, how quickly the mourners found a new sovereign.
The brother: al-Adil, called Saphadin
Al-Adil Abu Bakr ibn Ayyub (June 1145 to 31 August 1218) was Saladin's younger brother and his most capable lieutenant, governing Egypt in his absences and the Jazira, including Harran, from 1192.
The crusaders knew him as Saphadin, a rendering of his honorific Sayf al-Din, "sword of the faith," and he enters the Richard legend directly: during the negotiations of 1191 Richard proposed, apparently in earnest, a marriage between his sister Joan and al-Adil, with the couple to rule Jerusalem jointly. The scheme collapsed, but it measures how far the diplomacy ran through the brother rather than the sultan (Lyons and Jackson 1982).
After Saladin's death al-Adil outmaneuvered his nephews in a decade of succession wars, took Damascus in 1196, and proclaimed himself sultan at Cairo on 17 February 1200 (AH 596). He ruled Egypt and Syria until 1218, consolidating rather than expanding, and his line, not Saladin's, held the sultanate thereafter (Humphreys 1977). Balog (1980) catalogs the Ayyubid coinage.
The fals (a small copper coin) belongs to the regional governor; the silver dirhams belong to the sultan.
Loyalty under pressure: the leopard rider of AH 606
Mardin's acknowledgment of the Ayyubid overlord outlived Yuluq Arslan. His brother and successor Nasir al-Din Artuq Arslan (ruled 1201-1239) struck this dirham in AH 606 (CE 1209-1210):
AE dirham (11.09g), Mardin mint, AH 606 (CE 1209-1210). Obv: rider on a leopard. Rev: legend citing the Ayyubid sultan al-Adil Abu Bakr. Ref: cf. ANS 1917.216.1058.
The citation of al-Adil may have been pointed. In the first decade of the thirteenth century his supremacy was contested by shifting coalitions of dissident Ayyubid princes, Zengids, Begtiginids, and Rum Seljuqs, and a vassal's coin naming him can be read as a public declaration of which side Mardin stood on. That reading is plausible rather than proven; the date and the name are the attested facts.
The obverse is the puzzle. Sayles connects the leopard rider to the image of Dionysos riding a leopard known from the Hellenistic mosaics of Delos, and the type does stand in a long line of classical survivals on Turkoman coppers (Spengler and Sayles 1992; on the Hellenistic mosaic tradition in the Levant, Ovadiah 2012). How a composition of that kind reached a die engraver in thirteenth-century Mardin is unknown; an astrological reading has also been suggested. What the coin shows beyond dispute is a Muslim mint, fifty years before the Mongols, reaching for an image fifteen centuries old.
The son: al-Zahir Ghazi of Aleppo
The last coin returns to Saladin's own blood. Al-Malik al-Zahir Ghazi (1172-1216), the sultan's third son, was installed at Aleppo in 1186, at about fourteen, and held it for three decades.
AE fals (3.70g, 23mm), Halab (Aleppo) mint, AH 611 (CE 1214-1215). Obv: al-Malik al-Zahir in an eight-pointed star; mint and date in the marginal segments. Rev: the shahada, "There is no god but God; Muhammad is the Messenger of God," with al-Imam al-Nasir, the Abbasid caliph, within an eight-pointed star. Ref: Balog 678; cf. ANS example at 4.05g.
al-Zahir's navigated the rivalries of his father's successors, above all his powerful uncle al-Adil, kept working relations with the neighboring crusader states, strengthened Aleppo's fortifications, and patronized its religious and architectural institutions, helping make the city one of the principal centers of Ayyubid power (Humphreys 1977). The fals names no Ayyubid overlord: only al-Zahir himself and the caliph al-Nasir in Baghdad, the formula of a prince who answered, at least on his small change, to God and the caliph alone. He died in 1216, two years before his uncle, leaving Aleppo to his young son al-Aziz Muhammad.
The legend and the ledger
Set the coins out in a row and read the names. Al-Adil, three times, as governor and as sultan. Al-Zahir Ghazi. Yuluq Arslan and Artuq Arslan of Mardin. The caliph al-Nasir, twice. Saladin appears on none of them, and his own treasury, by his biographer's count, held forty-seven dirhams and one gold coin at the end.
The money tells the drier, truer story: a vassal mourning his overlord and shopping for a new one in the same year; a brother converting a decade of service into a sultanate; a son holding one city by diplomacy for thirty years. Baha ad-Din gave Saladin his character. The coins give him his context.
Bibliography
References:
Baha' al-Din Ibn Shaddad. The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin (al-Nawadir al-Sultaniyya wa'l-Mahasin al-Yusufiyya). Translated by D. S. Richards. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
Scott, Walter. The Talisman. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1825.
Album, Stephen. Checklist of Islamic Coins. 3rd ed. Santa Rosa, CA: Stephen Album Rare Coins, 2011.
Balog, Paul. The Coinage of the Ayyubids. Royal Numismatic Society Special Publication 12. London: Royal Numismatic Society, 1980.
Edde, Anne-Marie. Saladin. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Gillingham, John. Richard I. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Hillenbrand, Carole. The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Lane-Poole, Stanley. Saladin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1906.
Lyons, Malcolm Cameron, and D. E. P. Jackson. Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Ovadiah, Asher. "The Hellenistic Mosaic Head from Dor, Israel: Reconsidered." Gerion 30 (2012): 91-102.
Spengler, William F., and Wayne G. Sayles. Turkoman Figural Bronze Coins and Their Iconography. Vol. 1, The Artuqids. Lodi, WI: Clio's Cabinet, 1992.
Whelan, Estelle J. "A Contribution to Danishmendid History: The Figured Copper Coins." American Numismatic Society Museum Notes 25 (1980).
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