Saladin spared kings. He did not spare Templars. After the crusader army was destroyed at Hattin on 4 July 1187, the sultan ransomed ordinary prisoners, treated the captured King Guy of Lusignan with courtesy, and then had every captured Templar and Hospitaller put to death — buying them from their individual captors at fifty dinars a head to make sure none escaped the sentence. That single decision tells you more about the relationship between Saladin and the Knights Templar than any chronicle of battles. To him, the military orders were the one enemy that could never be negotiated with.
Who Was Saladin?
Short answer: Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (c.1137–1193) was a Kurdish commander who became sultan of Egypt and Syria and founded the Ayyubid dynasty. By uniting both territories under one authority he surrounded the crusader states with a single power, and in 1187 he destroyed their field army at Hattin.
Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub was born around 1137 into a Kurdish family in Tikrit, rose through service to the Zengid rulers of Syria, and made himself master of Egypt by 1171. By 1186 he had united Egypt and Syria under one authority — the achievement that mattered, because it meant the crusader states were surrounded by a single power rather than squabbling rivals. He founded the Ayyubid dynasty and died in Damascus in 1193, reportedly leaving too little money for his own funeral.
His reputation in Europe is unusual. Western writers who had every reason to vilify him instead made him a model of chivalry; Dante placed him in Limbo rather than Hell, and Walter Scott turned him into a gentleman in The Talisman. That reputation is not baseless, but it is selective — and the Templars are the main evidence for the other side of it.
Montgisard: The Defeat Everyone Forgets
The first serious meeting went badly for Saladin. On 25 November 1177 at Montgisard, near Ramla, a small crusader force under the sixteen-year-old leper king Baldwin IV — including roughly eighty Templar knights from Gaza — caught Saladin’s army strung out and foraging. The charge broke it. Saladin escaped on a camel and lost a large part of his force on the retreat to Egypt.
Montgisard is worth remembering because it shaped expectations on both sides for a decade. It demonstrated what a disciplined heavy cavalry charge could do to a larger army caught out of formation, and it taught Saladin a lesson he applied with devastating patience ten years later.
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Cresson and Hattin: The Year It Ended
On 1 May 1187 at the springs of Cresson, a force of about 130 knights — Templars and Hospitallers — charged a Muslim raiding party several thousand strong. Gerard de Ridefort, the Templar Grand Master, had overruled the advice to wait. Almost everyone died. Ridefort was one of three or four who rode out of it.
Two months later the full crusader army marched from Sepphoris across waterless country to relieve Tiberias, and Saladin let it. By the afternoon of 4 July the army was exhausted, parched and surrounded on the Horns of Hattin. The True Cross was captured. The kingdom’s field army ceased to exist. We cover that day in detail in the Battle of Hattin, the Templars’ darkest day.
Then came the executions. Saladin spared Guy of Lusignan, famously telling him that kings do not kill kings, and personally killed Reynald of Châtillon, whose raids on pilgrim caravans he had sworn to avenge. The Templars and Hospitallers he gathered separately and had beheaded. The chronicler Imad ad-Din, who was present, recorded that Saladin wanted the orders destroyed as institutions, not merely defeated.
Why Did Saladin Execute the Templars?
Short answer: Because they could not be bargained with. The Templar Rule forbade paying ransom for a captured brother, removing any financial reason to spare one, and the orders were permanently funded and replenished from Europe. Saladin paid fifty dinars a head to buy the prisoners and have them killed.
The logic was practical. A secular baron could be ransomed, and ransom bought both money and a quieter frontier. A Templar could not. The Order’s own Rule forbade paying ransom for a captured brother beyond his belt and knife, which removed any financial incentive to keep one alive. More importantly, the orders were permanent: they were funded by estates across Europe, replenished by a steady flow of recruits, and bound by vows that made accommodation impossible. Killing a baron removed a man. Killing a Templar removed a soldier the Order would simply replace — unless you killed enough of them at once.
That permanence is the whole point of the military orders, and it comes straight out of their founding discipline. A day in the life of a Templar knight shows the monastic routine that produced it.
After Hattin: Jerusalem and the Castles
With no field army left, the kingdom fell in pieces. Acre, Jaffa, Sidon, Beirut and Ascalon surrendered through the summer. Jerusalem capitulated on 2 October 1187 after Balian of Ibelin negotiated terms, and Saladin permitted the inhabitants to ransom themselves and leave — a deliberate and widely noted contrast with the slaughter the crusaders had carried out when they took the city in 1099.
The Templar castles held longest, because they were built to. Safed, Baghras and others endured sieges or were surrendered only by negotiation, and a few places never fell at all. Our guide to Templar castles and fortresses explains the engineering that made a handful of brothers worth an army behind walls.
The Third Crusade: Richard, Saladin and the Templars
Saladin did not finish the job, and the Templars were central to why. Acre fell back to the crusaders in July 1191 after a two-year siege, and Richard I of England took the field with the military orders as the backbone of his army. At Arsuf on 7 September 1191 the Templars held first the vanguard and then the rear of a column marching under constant harassment down the coast — the discipline that kept the army intact until the moment a counter-charge could land.
The two men never met. They negotiated constantly, mostly through Saladin’s brother al-Adil, and concluded the Treaty of Jaffa in September 1192: the coastal strip stayed crusader, Jerusalem stayed Muslim, and Christian pilgrims were guaranteed access to the city. Richard sailed home weeks later, reportedly travelling in a Templar galley and, by some accounts, in a Templar habit — the Order’s shipping network being the discreet way to cross a hostile Mediterranean.
Reading the Sources Carefully
Much of what we know about Saladin comes from writers with an interest in his reputation. Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad served in his household and wrote an admiring biography; Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani was his secretary and wrote in elaborate, partisan prose. On the Christian side, the Itinerarium Peregrinorum and the continuations of William of Tyre carry their own agendas.
Where these sources agree — the executions after Hattin, the terms granted at Jerusalem, the long negotiation with Richard — the record is reasonably firm. Where they diverge, particularly on numbers and on private conversations, scepticism is the right default. The famous line about kings not killing kings, for instance, survives in several incompatible versions.
What to Take From It
Saladin’s chivalry and his execution of the orders are not contradictory; they are the same policy seen from two angles. He was precise about who could be bargained with. The Templars could not, and they knew it — which is why they fought the way they did, and why a Templar surcoat on the field carried a weight that no baron’s arms did.
That is the quality worth carrying into a modern design: not ornament, but the plain red cross of men whose terms were already decided. Keep it simple, keep it dark, and let the symbol do the work.
The formation that broke at Hattin is explained in crusader heavy cavalry tactics.
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