Saladin

Saladin by John Man. In 2019 I visited the Saladin Citadel in Cairo, Egypt and thought the book could be a good complement to that experience. Saladin was born in present day Iraq and was a Sunni muslim of Kurdish ethnicity. He ended the Fatmid caliphate (Shia islamic) in Egypt and reconquered multiple cities from the crusaders, including Jerusalem. He estabilished the Ayyubi dynasty (named after his father Ayyub) which encompassed both Egypt and Syria. Saladin is depicted as a patient leader and a strategist by Man. The book doesn’t devote much space to his time in Egypt, but it does mention the construction of the citadel in Cairo.

One interesting bit described by the book is the pigeon communication protocol. Pigeons can only carry messages one way (they only know how to return home), so the receiver has to send (by land/sea) a lot of trained pigeons to its senders upfront. Piegons can die or get lost during the way, so when sending messages there must be redundancy.

This entry was parsed from an older retrospective post.