Saladin takes Jerusalem

After Hattin the kingdom had almost no field army left. Balian of Ibelin, who had escaped the battle, obtained Saladin's leave to go to Jerusalem for a single day to fetch his wife, Queen Maria Komnene, on condition that he would not fight; but the patriarch Heraclius, Queen Sibylla and the citizens begged him to lead the defence, and the patriarch absolved him of his oath. Balian found the city crowded with refugees and held by fewer than fourteen knights; he knighted some sixty squires and burgesses and laid in food and money. Saladin, meanwhile, took the towns of the coast, failed before Tyre and on 20 September appeared before Jerusalem.

For six days his troops assaulted the walls near the Tower of David and the Damascus Gate without success; then he moved his camp to the Mount of Olives, and on 29 September his miners brought down a section of the wall. The defenders could not close the breach, the clergy led barefoot processions, and Balian went out to negotiate. Saladin at first insisted on taking the city by force, but Balian threatened that the defenders would kill their own families and the 5,000 Muslim prisoners in the city and destroy the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque. Terms were agreed: a ransom of ten dinars for a man, five for a woman and one or two for a child — the sources differ — and 30,000 dinars from the city treasury for 7,000 of the poor. On Friday 2 October 1187 — 27 Rajab 583, the anniversary of the Prophet's Night Journey to Jerusalem — Saladin's army entered the city.

The handover was carried out in comparative order. Saladin's brother al-Adil, the patriarch and Balian obtained the release of further captives, and Saladin freed many of the old; those who had paid left in three columns led by the Templars, the Hospitallers and Balian with the patriarch, for Tyre, Tripoli, Antioch and Alexandria. According to Saladin's secretary Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, some 15,000 who could not pay — 7,000 men and 8,000 women and children — were enslaved. The golden cross the crusaders had set on the Dome of the Rock was pulled down, and al-Aqsa was purified with rose water and given the minbar that Nur ad-Din had commissioned for it. Saladin closed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for three days but rejected advice to destroy it, let the Eastern Christians stay and invited the Jews to resettle in the city. The loss of Jerusalem after eighty-eight years of Latin rule gave the crusade proclaimed by Gregory VIII its goal.