ABSTRACT
In the effort to penetrate behind the external history of a person whose reputation rests upon some military achievement, the modern tendency is to analyse the complex of circumstances within which he acted, with the sometimes explicit suggestion that the individual is rather the creature than the creator of his circumstances, or, more justly, that his achievement is to be explained by a harmonious adjustment of his genius to the conditions within which it operated. That this is generally true calls for no argument. But history, especially the history of the Near East, is full of conquering kings, who seem to owe nothing to their circumstances except the possession of a powerful army and the weakness of their antagonists. The question posed by the career of Saladin is whether he was just another such conqueror, or whether his career involved distinctive moral elements which gave his initial victory and subsequent struggle with the Third Crusade a quality of its own. That he fought in the cause of Islam against the crusaders is not enough to justify an affirmative answer to the second question, and might even be irrelevant. To put the matter precisely: was Saladin one of those unscrupulous, but fortunate, generals whose motive was personal ambition and lust of conquest, and who merely exploited religious catchwords and sentiments to achieve their own ends?
