Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, known to Europeans as Saladin, became the most famous Muslim ruler of the medieval Mediterranean. He took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders in 1187, fought Richard the Lionheart to a standstill in the Third Crusade, and died in Damascus in 1193 with forty-seven dirhams in the treasury. But before all of that he was a Kurdish boy born in flight from a citadel called Tikrit, raised in Mosul and Baalbek and Damascus, schooled in Sunni jurisprudence by the most patient ruler of his generation, and dragged south against his will into a complicated foreign campaign in Egypt that he wanted no part of.

This first episode covers the years from his birth in 1137 to his recognition as Sultan of Egypt and Syria in 1175. We follow the family flight from Tikrit, the decade he spent watching his teacher Nur al-Din rule from a wooden house in the citadel of Damascus, his three reluctant Egyptian campaigns with his uncle Shirkuh, the seventy-five-day siege of Alexandria when he first met the Crusader king Amalric face-to-face, his surprise appointment as vizier of a dying Fatimid khilafa, the slave-army revolt of 1169, and the quiet Friday morning in September 1171 when two hundred and two years of Shia Ismaili rule in Egypt ended in silence. The chroniclers said that on that Friday in Cairo "not two goats butted heads." We pause on what that silence cost. The dispersal of the great Fatimid royal library, one of the largest book collections in human history, scattered into a thousand private hands. The hills of book ash that al-Maqrizi could still see in Cairo two centuries later.

This is the story of formation. Before Hattin. Before Jerusalem. Before the name everyone in the world would learn. The boy who was born in flight, and the man who would one day return Muslims to their own home.

Sources: Baha al-Din ibn Shaddad's al-Nawadir al-Sultaniyya, Imad al-Din al-Isfahani's al-Barq al-Shami, Ibn al-Athir's al-Kamil fi'l-Tarikh, al-Maqrizi's Itti'az al-Hunafa, Ibn Khallikan's Wafayat al-A'yan, with modern scholarship from Lyons and Jackson, Anne-Marie Edde, Yaacov Lev, Fozia Bora, Heinz Halm, Lost Islamic History, and the Yaqeen Institute.

Content Warning: This episode contains a description of the 1099 Crusader sack of Jerusalem (blood, corpses), the execution of the Sudanese slave army at Giza, and the cultural loss of the Fatimid library.

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