Jerusalem surrendered to Saladin on 2 October 1187, after a siege of less than two weeks. Rather than storm the city, he granted terms that let most of its people buy their freedom, and the massacre that had followed the Christian conquest of 1099 was not repeated.
On 2 October 1187 the holy city of Jerusalem opened its gates to Saladin, ending eighty-eight years of crusader rule1. It became one of the most famous surrenders in history, remembered as much for the clemency of the victor as for the scale of the event. This is how it happened.
After Hattin: a kingdom without an army
On 4 July 1187 Saladin destroyed the field army1 of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin, capturing its king and the relic of the True Cross. With almost no fighting men left to defend them, the cities of the crusader kingdom fell one after another through that summer, from Acre to Ascalon.
Saladin, sultan of Egypt and Syria, had united the Muslim Near East and made the recovery of Jerusalem the heart of his war. Once he had taken the coast he turned inland to the prize itself: the holy city that the First Crusade had stormed from Islam almost ninety years before.
Balian and the defence of a crowded city
Jerusalem was packed with refugees who had fled the countryside, swollen far beyond its normal size, yet it had almost no knights left to hold its walls. The man who took charge was Balian of Ibelin, one of the few leading barons to survive Hattin. He had come to the city only to bring his family to safety, under a safe conduct from Saladin2, but its people begged him to stay and lead them, and he agreed.
Finding only a handful of knights among the crowds, Balian is said to have knighted townsmen and boys to create a fighting nobility where almost none remained. Food, money and weapons were gathered, the walls were manned as best they could be, and the city braced for an assault it had little hope of surviving.
The twelve-day siege
Saladin's army arrived before Jerusalem on about 20 September 1187.3 His first assaults struck the western wall, near the Tower of David3, but the defenders held and the attacks were thrown back. After several days Saladin shifted his effort to the north-eastern wall4, close to where the First Crusade had broken in long before.
There his miners went to work, screened by archers and siege engines, and undermined a long stretch of the wall4. When a section collapsed, the defenders could no longer hope to hold the breach. The city lay open, and everyone inside knew what the storming of a city by assault would mean.
The surrender and the ransom
With the wall breached, Balian rode out to negotiate. Saladin at first refused terms, having vowed to take the city by the sword as the crusaders had in 1099. According to the Arabic chroniclers, Balian then warned5 that if no quarter were given the defenders would destroy the Muslim holy places, the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque, kill their own prisoners and burn all they had before dying in a last stand. Faced with the ruin of the holiest sites, Saladin agreed to terms.
On 2 October 1187 Jerusalem surrendered. Its people could buy their freedom: ten dinars for a man, five for a woman3, one for a child. A lump sum ransomed many of the poor, and Saladin and his brother al-Adil freed thousands more4 who could not pay, yet others who could not raise the price were led away into slavery. After eighty-eight years, the city passed back into Muslim hands.
Clemency, legend and the Third Crusade
Saladin's conduct became famous. Where the First Crusade had taken Jerusalem in 1099 amid a notorious massacre, Saladin let the Christian population depart, protected the churches and in time allowed Christian pilgrims to return. His restraint was praised even by his enemies and has been romanticised ever since, though it should not be overstated: the terms still meant ransom or slavery for many, and his first instinct had been to storm the city.
The fall of Jerusalem stunned Christian Europe and set off the Third Crusade, which brought Richard the Lionheart east to face Saladin, a rivalry told in Saladin vs Richard the Lionheart. Richard won victories and came close to the city, but Jerusalem itself was never retaken. Saladin's capture of the holy city in 1187 remains one of the great turning points of the crusading age.