Eagle

Historical Note

Eagle is based in fact. Yusuf ibn Ayub — or Saladin as he is known to history — was one of the greatest military and political leaders of his age, and his exploits have been celebrated by Muslims and Christians alike. We are lucky enough to have contemporary accounts of his life from people who knew him, including Imad ad-Din, who appears briefly in Eagle. However, we know relatively little about Yusuf’s early life — the period covered in this book. We know that he grew up mainly in Baalbek and Damascus. He played polo, was interested in religious studies and knew many poems from the Hamasah by heart. There are stories of him drinking and consorting with prostitutes as a young man, and in Eagle I attempt to show why this deeply religious young man might have engaged in such behaviour. At the age of fourteen, he joined his uncle Shirkuh in the service of Nur ad-Din and was given a fief — Tell Bashir in this novel. Aside from a few brief stints in Damascus, he spent the next twelve years in Nur ad-Din’s service. From these scraps of history I have woven together the story of Yusuf’s early life.

The major events in the story happened much as I described them. I drew heavily on William of Tyre’s account for my description of the Second Crusade. Nur ad-Din did conquer Damascus without bloodshed, and he did surround and rout the Christians at the battle of Jacob’s Ford in 1157. However, there were too many battles for me to include every one. The final battle in the book is actually a composite of two events. In 1158 Baldwin marched on Damascus and subsequently defeated Nur ad-Din’s army on the plain of Buthaia. I combined this with Nur ad-Din’s defeat at Krak des Chevaliers in September 1163, the point at which Eagle ends.

Most of the people who appear in the story are real. Turan and Selim were Yusuf’s brothers and later his lieutenants. Ayub and Shirkuh were Kurds who entered the service of Nur ad-Din’s father after being banished from Tikrit. Qaraqush and Al-Mashtub became generals under Saladin. Usama and the eunuch Gumushtagin were members of Nur ad-Din’s court. Ibn Jumay, the Jewish doctor who John meets upon first arriving in Yusuf’s home, really did serve as Saladin’s physician. Less is known about the women in Yusuf’s life, although it is recorded that he had a sister who was very important to him — Zimat in my story. Faridah is my invention, although women like her certainly existed. Asimat was Nur ad-Din’s wife.

On the Frankish side, King Baldwin, the young prince Amalric, William of Tyre and Reynald de Chatillon were all — as far as we know — more or less how I have portrayed them. I have not exaggerated Reynald’s cruelty. The story of him tying the patriarch to the roof of the citadel of Antioch is true. Reynald used the money that he extorted from the patriarch to invade Cyprus, where he and his men went on a rampage, looting churches, burning crops, raping women and cutting the throats of those who were too young or too old to be sold into slavery. Reynald is also known to have regularly raided in Muslim lands. In fact, although I moved his capture to the battle of Jacob’s Ford in 1157, he was actually captured three years later while raiding cattle. He was confined in Aleppo for sixteen years before being ransomed by the Byzantine emperor Manuel for the mind-boggling sum of one hundred and twenty thousand dinars — this at a time when a mamluk’s monthly wage was only three dinars.

The only major character who was not real is John. However, while John is fictional, much of his story is based on fact. Saxons like John did suffer greatly during and after the Norman invasion of England. As many as one hundred thousand men and women — nearly ten per cent of the population of England at the time — were killed in the Harrowing of the North, during which the Normans developed many of the scorched-earth techniques that they later used in conquering the Holy Land. Many Saxon warriors fled to seek their fortune elsewhere. Some made their way to Constantinople, where they eventually formed the Emperor’s Varangian guard. Others headed for the Holy Land. And some, like John, no doubt ended up in slavery. After the failed siege of Damascus during the Second Crusade, there were so many captured crusaders in the city’s markets that some were indeed sold for the price of a pair of sandals.

I have done my best to portray accurately the details of the world in which John finds himself — the food, the markets, the slaves, the mamluks, the desert. The poems that Yusuf recites from the Hamasah were quoted from C. J. Lyall’s translations in John Cunliffe and Ashley Thorndike (eds), The Warner Library, Vol. 2: The World’s Best Literature. I drew on contemporary accounts, ancient maps and modern archaeological research to describe the walls, gates, buildings and general layout of Baalbek, Acre, Damascus, Tripoli and Aleppo. These cities have of course changed since crusader days, but many of their greatest treasures remain. The Roman temple in Baalbek — the largest in the world — is still every bit as spectacular as I describe it. Aleppo’s citadel, perched on a hill above the city, is a marvel. And the Umayyad mosque in Damascus is one of the great achievements of early Islam.

The Islamic world was in many ways more advanced than Europe at the time. While earlier practices like trial by fire persisted, this was also a society that had modern courts of law, psychiatric hospitals, brilliant philosophers and which, most spectacularly, invented modern medicine. Their doctors developed the germ theory of disease, techniques for removing cataracts and even medication for heart disease. Islamic medical books from the eleventh century were still being used in European medical schools into the early 1900s. Unsurprisingly, many Muslims, Jews and native Christians looked upon the Crusaders as dirty barbarians. One example of this attitude is the story that Ibn Jumay tells of the mad Frankish doctor whose only idea of medicine is cutting off body parts. I took the story from the autobiography of Emir Usama ibn Munqidh.

Of course not all Europeans were savages like this doctor or brutes like Reynald de Chatillon. Thousands were inspired by their faith to make the arduous journey to the Holy Land. And many of the Europeans who settled there adopted eastern ways, wearing caftans and turbans, bathing regularly, eating local foods and employing Jewish or Muslim doctors. They were part of a vibrant culture — Christian, Muslim and Jewish; eastern and western — which existed in the Middle East during the Crusades. While Eagle is a work of fiction, I hope that it does justice to the complexity of this culture and to the life of the man who represented the best it had to offer: Saladin.