Patrick C. DeBrosse, PhD Candidate, published his article entitled “The First Draft of a Saladin Legend: Saladin’s Reputation in the Latin West prior to 1187” in Viator 54, no. 1 (2023): 141-73.
Below is the abstract:
In 1187 the sultan Saladin (1138–93) famously won a victory at the Battle of Hattin that enabled him to conquer most of the territory of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In response, the rulers of the Latin West launched the Third Crusade (1187–92), one of the largest and most elaborate expeditions in the history of the crusades. Scholars of the period have explained the intensity of crusader sentiments in the Latin West through reference to the sense of trauma that gripped Europe after the news of Hattin, and they have shown how Saladin himself became the focal point of polemical crusade propaganda. But Saladin’s reputation in the Latin West prior to 1187 remains a relatively unexplored topic of scholarly inquiry. This essay offers an analysis of three Latin chronicle accounts composed between circa 1170 and 1186, in order to ascertain the sorts of claims Latin Europeans made about Saladin and his family before Hattin. These three chronicles (by Lambert of Wattrelos, Geoffrey of Vigeois, and Robert of Torigni) offered salacious accounts of events in the East, which made use of the same exotic storytelling devices that we can find in contemporary epic and romance. The independence of these accounts suggests that gossip about Saladin had, after crossing the Mediterranean, coalesced into an international set of recognizable tropes. Many of the chroniclers’ details about Saladin and his family anticipate the polemical claims that promoters of the Third Crusade advanced about the sultan after Hattin. Such echoes are significant because they suggest that preexisting perceptions about Saladin helped shape the reaction to Hattin, encouraging disdain and contempt for the sultan among the inhabitants of the Latin West. Scholars should therefore regard the culture of exotic storytelling about “Saracens” in the East as being among the long-term causes of the crusade. At the same time as these early rumors about Saladin encouraged outrage in the West and violence in the East, they also established literary themes about the sultan’s life that would persist in the literature of later centuries, by which time Latin European authors had reimagined Saladin as a chivalric hero.