ABSTRACT
The question of the alliance between the Byzantine Empire and Saladin (1174-93), sultan of Egypt and Syria, has been the subject of a heated and ongoing debate among modern scholars. In his 1962 article “The Byzantines and Saladin, 11851192: Opponents of the Third Crusade,”1 Brand was the first to deal extensively with this question, arguing in favour of the existence of complicity between the Byzantines and Saladin against the crusader states and particularly, as indicated by the title, against the Third Crusade. Brand’s paper has exerted a strong influence on several commentators and is still cited as authoritative by scholars who support the view that the Byzantine Emperor Isaak and Saladin operated in collusion against the Third Crusade. The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the question of the so-called Byzantine-Muslim alliance through a fresh examination of the primary material available.
