Saladin: Sword of Chivalry (6+ Hour Biography)

[instrumental music] Chapter one: Origins in the Shadow of Tikrit, 1137 to 1151.

The Tigris does not announce itself in the dark.

It simply moves, wide and patient, carrying the cold of the northern mountains down through the flatlands of Mesopotamia, and on this particular night in the year 1137, its passage beneath the walls of Tikrit is the only sound that does not belong to the fortress.

Inside those walls, the citadel is awake.

Torches gutter along the parapet where sentries pace the same worn stretch of stone they have paced every night for years, their breath fogging faintly in the spring chill, their eyes turned less toward the river than toward the keep behind them, where a light burns in an upper chamber that has not gone dark since sundown.

Word has already moved through the garrison the way word always moves through a fortress under siege of its own anticipation: quietly, quickly, from guard to guard, from kitchen to stable.

The wife of Najm ad-Din Ayyub, commander of this citadel, is in labor.

Ayyub himself is not in that chamber.

It is not the place of a Kurdish nobleman of his standing to hover at a birth.

That is the province of the midwives and the women of the household.

And so he waits instead in the hall below, where a fire has been built up against the night air, and where his brother sits across from him with the particular stillness of a man who has learned through long practice to make patience look like ease.

That brother is Asad ad-Din Shirkuh, and even seated, even doing nothing more than waiting for news of a nephew or niece not yet born, he carries himself like a blade left resting against a wall: present, plain, and entirely capable of being picked up and put to use without a moment's warning.

He is younger than Ayyub, broader through the shoulder, missing an eye from some encounter in his past that he does not speak of at length, and he has the restless energy of a man who has spent more of his life on horseback than off it.

The two brothers do not much resemble each other in temperament.

Ayyub is the elder, the more measured, the one who reads a room before he speaks in it.

Shirkuh is the one who has never much cared what the room thought.

They are Kurds, both of them, sons of a man named Shadhi ibn Marwan, and their family's road to this citadel on the Tigris has been long and switchbacked in the way that so many roads were long and switchbacked in that fractured century.

Their origins lie further north and east, in the hill country around Diyarbakir, in the borderlands where the Kurdish highlands meet the Armenian Plateau, a landscape of stone villages and grazing flocks entirely unlike the flat river plain on which Tikrit sits.

Shadhi had left that country to seek his fortune in the service of greater men, as ambitious men of modest birth so often did, in an age when the old order of the Great Seljuk Empire was crumbling into a scatter of rival principalities, atabegs, and garrison commanders, each carving out what authority he could from the wreckage of a unified caliphate that existed now more in name than in fact.

Shadhi had settled for a time near Baghdad, in Tikrit itself, and had died there, leaving his sons to make their own way in a world where a man's worth was measured almost entirely by whom he served and how well he served him.

Ayyub and Shirkuh had made their way well.

They had entered the service of Biruz, a eunuch of considerable power, who held the governorship of Tikrit and its surrounding territory on behalf of the Seljuk sultan in Baghdad.

And Biruz, recognizing competence when he saw it, had eventually placed the citadel of Tikrit itself under Ayyub's command.

It was no small trust.

Tikrit sat astride the river route between Baghdad and Mosul, and whoever held its citadel held a hinge upon which a great deal of regional traffic, military, commercial, and political, was obliged to turn.