Siege of Jerusalem (1187)

In the autumn of 1187 the Ayyubid sultan Saladin besieged Jerusalem, the capital of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, which had been in Latin Christian hands since its capture in 1099 during the First Crusade. The siege lasted from 20 September to 2 October, when the nobleman Balian of Ibelin negotiated the city's surrender. The handover involved far less bloodshed than the crusader capture almost ninety years earlier, but thousands of residents who could not pay a ransom were enslaved. The loss of the holy city prompted the Third Crusade.

The Kingdom of Jerusalem, divided by internal quarrels, lost most of its army at the Battle of Hattin on 4 July 1187. King Guy and most of the nobility were captured. Over the following weeks Saladin took Acre, Nablus, Jaffa, Sidon, Beirut, Ascalon and other towns. Survivors gathered at Tyre, which held out thanks to the timely arrival of Conrad of Montferrat.

Balian of Ibelin, then at Tyre, asked Saladin for safe conduct to Jerusalem to bring out his wife, Maria Komnene, and their children, promising to stay only one day and not to fight. Once he arrived, however, Patriarch Heraclius, Queen Sibylla and the townspeople begged him to lead the defence, and the patriarch released him from his oath. Saladin nonetheless had Balian's family escorted safely to Tripoli. Balian found the city crowded with refugees but almost without soldiers; with fewer than fourteen knights available, he knighted sixty squires and burgesses and gathered food and money for the siege.

Saladin arrived on 20 September and first attacked near the Tower of David and the Damascus Gate. For six days his assaults were thrown back with heavy losses. On 26 September he moved his camp to the Mount of Olives, where the defenders had no major gate from which to sally, and kept up a constant bombardment. On 29 September miners brought down a section of wall. The defenders could not drive the attackers from the breach, but the attackers could not break into the city either. Only a few dozen knights were left to hold the walls.

Balian went to negotiate. Saladin at first insisted on taking the city by force, but Balian threatened that the defenders would destroy the Muslim holy places, kill their own families and some 5,000 Muslim captives, and burn their wealth rather than surrender unconditionally. A bargain followed: inhabitants could leave on paying a ransom of ten dinars for a man, five for a woman and two for a child, and Balian paid 30,000 dinars from the city treasury to free 7,000 of the poor. The city was handed over on 2 October.

Saladin freed nearly 3,000 Muslim prisoners and allowed noblewomen, including the queens Sibylla and Maria, to leave freely. His brother al-Adil, the patriarch and Balian were each granted groups of captives, whom they freed, and elderly people unable to pay were released. Even so, those who could not pay were enslaved: according to Saladin's secretary Imad al-Din, about 15,000 people.

The cross placed by the crusaders on the Dome of the Rock was taken down, and the al-Aqsa shrine was purified and restored to Muslim worship. Saladin closed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for three days but, rejecting advice to destroy it, reopened it, charging Frankish pilgrims a fee. Native Eastern Christians could stay and worship freely, Jews were allowed to resettle, and Copts, previously barred by the crusaders, were admitted.

News of Hattin had already reached Europe, and on 29 October Pope Gregory VIII issued a call for a new crusade. England and France raised the Saladin tithe to pay for it. The crusade set out in 1189 under Richard I of England, Philip II of France and the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. The Kingdom of Jerusalem survived, with its capital first at Tyre and later at Acre, but the crusade did not recover the city itself.

The nearest of our maps is 1200, a few years after Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade.