What Saladin Did to Christian Female Prisoners After Hattin Was Worse Than You Imagine

What Saladin Did to Christian Female Prisoners After Hattin Was Worse Than You Imagine

On July 4, 1187, under the scorching Galilean sun, the most powerful Crusader army the Kingdom of Jerusalem had ever assembled was dying of thirst.  Enclosed within the horns of Ratim, two rocky hills that rose above the valley like bull horns, 20,000 men watched their own shadows shrink as they awaited the final assault.

They could see the Sea of ​​Galilee a few kilometers away, the water glistening in the sun like a promise of salvation they would never reach.  And all around them, in every direction, Saladin’s army waited, not in a hurry, not impatiently, just waiting, knowing that time and dehydration would do half the work [music] before a single sword needed to be raised.

Before this story [song] ends, you will understand why that day was not just the greatest military defeat in the history of the Crusades.  It was the day that thousands of Christian women discovered that their lives [music] were about to change in ways that no knight could prevent.  You will discover [music] what accounts from the time, particularly the writings of Imad Addin Al Isfahani, Saladin’s personal secretary, reveal about the fate of the female prisoners.

  And you will understand why this [song] story was deliberately erased from simplified summaries that turn Hatin into just another medieval battle, [song] when in fact it was the moment when an entire kingdom began to disappear, city by city, castle by castle, and life by life.  Welcome to Crimson Stories.

  But to understand what happened after Ratim, you need to understand what happened 88 years earlier. You need to understand why every Christian woman in Jerusalem, in every city of the Holy Land, carried the inherited memory of July 1099. Because in that month, when the First Crusade finally took Jerusalem, after 3 years of bloody campaigning, the Christian knights did something that would echo through almost a century.

They entered the city and massacred everything that breathed, not just soldiers, everything.  Women, children, the elderly, it didn’t matter.  Christian chroniclers from the First Crusade itself recorded that they walked through the streets of Jerusalem covered in blood up to their ankles [music]. One account describes horses wading through human blood inside the Al-Shara mosque.

Another chronicler, Rimond da Guilier, who was there, wrote that the number of dead was so great that no one could count them.  Modern estimates suggest that between 30,000 and 70,000 people were killed in two days, with men beheaded in the streets and women and children thrown from walls.

  And this was not the uncontrolled fury of crazed soldiers, it was deliberate politics, because those crusaders genuinely believed they were carrying out God’s will, that every Muslim killed, every Jew burned alive in locked synagogues was sacred service.  That was the memory that shaped everything.  Every woman in Jerusalem in 1187 knew what had happened to women in 1099.

Every mother had told her daughters, every grandmother had whispered it to her grandchildren.  When Crusader armies won, there was no mercy, only extermination.  And now, 88 years later, the positions had been reversed and Saladin was winning. Saladin was not a random figure who appeared out of nowhere.

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  He was a military commander who had spent two decades consolidating power across Egypt, Syria, and parts of Mesopotamia.  In 1187, he controlled resources, armies, and alliances that no Muslim leader had gathered since the First Crusade, and he had a singular objective: to retake Jerusalem, not out of personal ambition, but out of religious duty.

  Jerusalem was sacred to Islam.  The Dome of the Rock, the site from which the Prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven, was in the hands of Christians who had transformed it into a church. For Saladin, retaking the city was not conquest, it was restoration. But there was a problem.  Between it and Jerusalem lay the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, a Crusader state that controlled the Levantine coast and mountainous interior.

  And this kingdom, though small, had something Saladin needed to break before advancing: an army. In June 1187, Saladin crossed the Jordan River with an estimated force of between 20,000 and 30,000 men.  His strategy was simple and brutal.  to attack targets that would force crusaders to respond.  He went to Tiberias, a strategic city on the Sea of ​​Galilee.

  The governor’s wife was imprisoned inside, and Saladin knew this would create political pressure that was impossible to ignore.  It worked.  King Gui of Luzinh, pressured by nobles demanding immediate action, gathered virtually every man capable of fighting in the kingdom.  20,000 1000 soldiers, 100 fully armed cavalrymen.

  It was literally all the military power available.  Allowing the army to be destroyed meant leaving every city, every castle, every village defenseless.  King Gai knew this.  His most experienced advisors knew this and marched anyway.  The march began on July 3rd. It was a disaster from the start.

  Summer in Galilee, scorching heat of 40 degrees, full armor, not enough water.  Saladin had chosen the battlefield with surgical precision.   It forced crusaders to march through barren terrain, [music] keeping them away from sources of water.  And when the Crusader army camped on the night of July 3rd, it was trapped.  On the morning of July 4th, they woke up surrounded by music.

Muslim light cavalry in every direction, archers in high positions, and no escape route that didn’t pass through thousands of enemies. The battle, if it can even be called that, was a massacre.  The riders dismounted because the horses were dying of thirst.  Infantry attempted to form defensive lines, but Muslim archers riddled the formations from afar, never needing to get close enough for hand-to-hand combat.

  The heat, the thirst, the exhaustion, everything conspired against it. It was finished around noon. King Gaide Luzinan was captured. Reinalde de Chatillon, the infamous lord who had broken truces and attacked Muslim caravans, was personally executed by Saladin. Templars and Hospitallers, the religious military orders, were beheaded en masse.

  Around 230 monk knights were executed in a single day.  Not out of random cruelty, but out of strategic calculation.  Saladin knew that these orders would never accept ransom, never change sides, and never stop fighting. Removing them from the field was a military necessity.

  But what about the rest?  And what about the thousands of common soldiers, squires, camp servants, and the women?  Because there were women in Ratim, but they weren’t warriors. Women who followed medieval armies as laundresses, cooks, nurses, soldiers’ wives, women who woke up that morning expecting to see their husbands return victorious and who, instead, watched the entire army be annihilated in a matter of hours.

  What did Saladin do to these people?  It’s a matter of deciding whether he goes down in history as a merciful conqueror or as an equal to the crusaders who massacred Jerusalem in 1099. And the answer is more complex than any simple narrative allows. According to accounts that have come down to us through chroniclers of the time, particularly Imaddin Al Isfa, who was in Saladin’s camp and witnessed events directly, prisoners were divided into categories.

  Knights and nobles who could pay the ransom were kept alive.  Their families [musicians] would pay fortunes for their return, and that gold would fund future campaigns. Ordinary soldiers, servants, and laborers were sold into slavery.  Men were sent to markets in Damascus, Cairo, and Aleppo.  And what about the women?  Women were the prize that nobody wants to discuss openly.

Imad Addin describes the slave market that [music] formed in the days after Atim.  Christian women were sold at prices that, according to him, have fallen dramatically due to the quantity of supply.  A woman who before the battle might have been worth 30 dinars, was now worth three.

  Wealthy Muslim families bought Christian maids.  Soldiers bought women as spoils of war.  Merchants bought entire plots of land for resale in other cities. This was no hidden secret.  It was an open, documented economy, recorded by witnesses who saw nothing wrong with it, because it was standard practice in medieval warfare.

  You won, you looted.  Looting included people, it always has.  But there is a crucial detail that separates Hatin from 1099. The Crusaders killed them all.  There was no choice, no rescue, no chance.  You were in Jerusalem when the gates were opened.  You died. Simple.  In Ratim there was choice, there was a system.

  If you had gold, you could buy freedom; if you had a rich family, you could be rescued; if you had nothing, you became property—cruel, absolutely, but different from indiscriminate genocide as well.  Yes. And that matters because what came after was even more revealing.  After Ratim, Saladin marched systematically through the kingdom of Jerusalem.

City after city fell: Acre, Jaffa, Ascalon.  Some resisted briefly, others opened their gates immediately.  And in each case, Saladin applied the same rule: ransom or enslavement.  Don’t massacre.  Never massacre.  discriminated against. Finally, in September 1187, he arrived in Jerusalem, the city that had been his goal from the beginning, the city where, 88 years earlier, his ancestors in the faith had been killed by the thousands.

  The city was now on defense, because every army capable of defending it had died in retaliation.  Jerusalem no longer had soldiers, it had walls, it had desperate citizens, and it had the memory of 1999. [music] Every person within those walls knew what Christians had done when positions were reversed.

  And now they were expecting the same thing.  They expected extermination.  They expected men to be killed, women raped, and children enslaved. Because that’s what victorious armies did.  It was standard, it was expected, it was history.  Saladin besieged the city for two weeks.  When it became clear that resistance was futile, Christian leaders asked for terms of surrender.

  And Saladin offered something that shocked chroniclers on both sides.  He offered universal rescue.  Any man who paid 10 dinars could go free.  Any woman who paid five dinars could go out free.  Any child who paid one dinar could go free.  There would be no massacre, no mass rape, no revenge; there would be system, there would be order, there would be mercy within the limits that a war economy allowed, and the majority paid the price.

Rich families [in the music] paid for poor families.  Religious orders paid for nuns and monks.  Churches opened their treasures to rescue parishioners. Christian chroniclers, including those who hated Saladin, acknowledged that he kept his word.  People paid, people left, alive, unharmed, allowed to march to the remaining Christian towns on the coast.

  But not everyone had money, not everyone had a wealthy family, and not everyone could afford it.  And Saladin, despite the mercy he showed, was not handing out freedom for free.  According to chroniclers, approximately 15,000 to 20,000 people were unable to pay the ransom, and of those, the majority were women [music] and children.

  Poor men had a better chance of working, saving money, and being included in collective payments from guilds or lords.  Poor women, particularly those without family, were alone.  And what happened to them is recorded with disturbing precision.  They were enslaved, sold in markets, distributed among soldiers as part of spoils of war, taken to Damascus, [music] to Cairo, to Leppo, to serve Muslim households as [music] servants, concubines, laborers.

Imad Adin records that he saw Christian women being sold in groups, their lives reduced to commercial transactions recorded in ledgers that treated human beings as inventory. And here’s the part that makes the story impossible to fit into a simple hero-versus-villain narrative. Was Saladin merciful compared to the standards of his time? Yes, it undoubtedly allowed tens of thousands to leave peacefully when it could have massacred them all.  That was extraordinary.

But he also enslaved thousands of women who didn’t have the money to buy their own freedom. That’s also true.  And trying to erase any of those facts [from music] to create a cleaner, more comfortable story, more suitable for school summaries, is dishonest. The historical truth is that people are complex, that systems are complex, and that even acts of relative mercy occur within contexts that are fundamentally cruel.

Saladin was neither a monster nor a saint; he was an 11th-century military commander operating within the norms of the 11th century.  And these norms included slavery as a standard consequence of military defeat.  But let’s be clear about something that [music] accounts from the time also make absolutely transparent.

  Enslaved women did not disappear in silence, they did not passively accept their fate. Resistance is documented, albeit fragmented.  Women trying to escape during marches, women refusing to eat, preferring death to slavery. Women who, once sold, sought ways to send messages to family members and religious orders, pleading for belated ransom.

  Some were recovered [music] months or years later, others never were.  And their names, their individual stories, their voices were lost because medieval chroniclers rarely considered the experiences of poor women worthy of detailed recording.  What we have are numbers, generalities, categories. Women were enslaved, prisoners were sold.

Passive phrases that [music] hide thousands of individual tragedies.  And then, in the following years, something began to happen that would permanently change Saladino’s perception of music. He began to free slaves, not all of them, not immediately, but gradually, as the political situation stabilized.

  [music] As Jerusalem was firmly under control, as he consolidated governance, he began to allow families to rescue loved ones who had previously been enslaved. It allowed Christian groups to negotiate collective releases.  In some cases, he freed people without payment, particularly the elderly and sick, who had no value [music] as slaves.

Why?  The reasons are debated.  Some historians argue that it was a political strategy to build a reputation as a just ruler that would help in future negotiations with Christian states.  Others suggest it was a genuine expression of Islamic religious principles that encouraged the liberation of captives as a pious act.

It was probably a combination.  Saladin was a sophisticated politician who  understood the value of reputation, but he was also a devout Muslim who took religious teachings seriously.  And Islam, while permitting slavery, also emphasized mercy and the liberation of captives as virtues.  Regardless of motivation, the impact was real.

Christian chroniclers who had initially described Saladin [music] as a tyrant began to recognize that he was different.  Richard the Lionheart, who would fight against Saladin in the Third Crusade, developed a respect for his adversary that is reflected in accounts from the time.  When Richard fell ill during the campaign, Saladin sent him his personal physicians.

  When Richard was without a horse in battle, Saladin sent him two horses as a gift.  These are not the actions of a monster, they are the actions of a man who understood that war had rules, that enemies could be respected, that unnecessary cruelty was not strength, but weakness.  And that reputation has survived eight centuries.

  Saladin is remembered, even in the West, as a rare example of a medieval leader who combined military prowess with moral principles.  But, and this is crucial, this reputation must not erase what happened [music] to women in 1187. It must not create a sanitized narrative where Ratim and Jerusalem were painless liberations.

  Thousands of women were enslaved, thousands lost their freedom, family, and future.  And the fact that it could have been worse, that it could have been a massacre like in 1099, does not remove the suffering from what actually happened.  History is not a competition to see who was the least terrible, it is a record of what happened.

  And what was happening in 1187 [music] was a system where women without money became property. This system was universal in medieval warfare.  The Crusaders did the same when they won.  Byzantine armies did this.   The Mongols would do it on an even larger scale decades later.  But universality is not a justification, it’s context.

  Context allows us to understand without excusing, to acknowledge without romanticizing.  The accounts we have, particularly from Imad Addin, are unsettling because they are so transactional. He describes the prices, quantities, and logistics of slave markets with the same neutrality with which he would describe the grain market.

  Because for him, for his time, for his world, this was normal.  It wasn’t a scandal, it was a consequence.  If we want to understand history, we need to confront this normality.  We need to sit with discomfort knowing that people who built magnificent cathedrals also massacred entire cities [musically]. that military commanders celebrated for their chivalry also presided over mass enslavement, that the same man could send doctors to sick enemies and sell thousands of women in the same year.

  This is not a contradiction, it is a  complex, contradictory humanity, capable of both kindness and cruelty simultaneously. And 835 years later, when we read these accounts, when we confront what Saladin did and what he didn’t do, we are forced to ask uncomfortable questions. Is partial mercy enough to deserve praise?  To be less cruel: what alternative is it a virtue, or simply less monstrous? And how do we weigh the legacy of someone who was simultaneously [music] better than his time?  and still a product of its time.  There are no easy answers, but

the [music] truth is documented.  The truth is that in 1187, after the greatest military victory of his career, Saladin chose not to repeat 1999. He chose system over massacre, rescue [music] over extermination, and that choice saved tens of thousands of lives.  But it is also true that thousands of women have lost their freedom, have been torn from their families, have been reduced to commodities.

  And these women deserve to be remembered as much as knights who died in battle, as much as kings who were captured, as much as cities that changed hands. The letter of 1187, the accounts of Imad Addin, the surviving Christian chronicles—they all tell the same story when you read them together. They tell stories of moments when history could have repeated itself, but it didn’t repeat itself completely, and it wasn’t transformed either.

  The pattern of medieval warfare, where victory meant plunder and plunder meant people, continued with more mercy than before.  Yes, with an end to cruelty?  No. And this distinction matters because it teaches us something about historical change.  Change doesn’t happen instantly.   It doesn’t happen because a person decides to be better.

  It happens gradually, through accumulated choices, through established precedents, through each generation, pushing little beyond what the previous generation allowed. Saladin pushed.  It did not transform medieval warfare into a humanitarian endeavor, but it did establish a precedent that a Muslim ruler taking over a Christian city did not necessarily end in genocide.

And that precedent mattered.  In the following centuries, when crusaders and Muslims continued fighting, when cities continued changing hands, when prisoners continued being taken, the precedent of Jerusalem 1187 existed as a counterpoint to Jerusalem 1099. It proved that the alternative was possible, not perfect, not just, but possible.

  And possibility is the first step towards change.  The women who were enslaved in 1187 did not live to see this change, did not benefit from it, and bore the cost of being on the wrong side of the battle at the wrong time.  And their stories, their names, their voices were buried beneath grander narratives about kings and battles and the destinies of nations.

  But they were there in the apricot markets, in the merchants’ ledgers, in Imadin’s records, who documented everything with such precision that he felt no need to censor [the music], because he saw nothing that needed to be hidden.  And when we read these records now, 835 years later, in a world that at least nominally [music] acknowledges that slavery is wrong, that people are not property, that women have inalienable rights, we are forced to confront how recent these principles are.

  How much of our current morality would have been incomprehensible to Saladin, to Imad Addin, to Richard the Lionheart, to anyone in 1187? What if our descendants, 800 years in the future, look back on our current practices with the same horror we felt when reading about medieval slave markets? History is not judging the dead by the standards of the living.

  It is an acknowledgment that patterns change, that humanity learns slowly, that progress is real, but never complete.  Saladin was a product of his time, transcending some of its limitations while remaining bound by others.  As we all are, so we will all be judged.  This is the story from the letter of 1187, which accounts from that time were preserved by Muslim and Christian chronicles.

  Not a clean legend of a perfect hero, not a simple narrative of a one-dimensional villain, but a complex, contradictory, profoundly human record of a moment when choices mattered, where partial mercy saved thousands and still failed thousands, where the best possible version of medieval warfare was still fundamentally terrifying.

  And the women who lived through this, who survived or did not survive, who were rescued [music] or died in slavery, deserve to have their stories told honestly, without romanticizing, [music] without simplifying, just the truth, as complete as records allow, as honest as discomfort allows.  If you believe these stories [music] deserve to be told, subscribe to Carmezinho Stories.