Anne-Marie Eddé is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, and was Professor of Medieval History at the University of Reims.
Originally published in France in 2008, this splendid [book] will
now have a wider international readership thanks to this fluent
translation by Jane Marie Todd… [Saladin is] so filled with lively
anecdote and a thoughtful, balanced analysis of the points at
issue, as to be eminently readable for a wide audience… The book is
a powerful reminder…of the full range of Saladin’s concerns across
the Middle East. At times we are so drawn towards his epic struggle
with the Christians that we lose sight of the Sultan’s need to
engage in near-constant negotiation, bluff, warfare and propaganda
with his co-religionists, processes that absorbed the majority of
his time and energy. These matters are superbly well drawn out, but
Eddé offers much more. There exists a wealth of evidence in the
form of poetry, in medical, financial and military treatises, in
religious and judicial material, and in architectural studies, that
she has utilized to illuminate the more day-to-day aspects of his
rule and the environment in which he operated… Anne-Marie Eddé has
drawn a charismatic figure in a richly colored environment, to
produce a refreshing, enjoyable and valuable book.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Profound and impressive… As an analysis of the ‘discourse’
surrounding Saladin, Eddé’s account can hardly be bettered… Eddé
convincingly shows the heterogeneous nature of 12th-century Near
Eastern society, in which a multifaith indigenous population was
controlled by competing forces from outside: Turks, Kurds, Greeks,
Armenians and western Europeans. Any notion of a Manichaean clash
of civilizations is unsustainable here. This is as important for
Near Eastern sensibilities as it is for Western perceptions. Eddé’s
richly textured account not only offers the prospect of
non-polemical research but suggests perhaps the beginnings of an
Arab Spring in historical scholarship, a fresh intellectual
openness that, if sustained, cannot but color the burgeoning
political diversity in the region it studies.
*Wall Street Journal*
Eddé’s book portrays Saladin amid a medieval world in motion: He
dispatches sons and nephews to what is now Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and
Egypt; crusaders from France, England, Scandinavia, and Germany
arrive in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious Holy Land… Less a
conventional biography than an exploration of how Saladin came to
be cited, by Dante and Sir Walter Scott, as a sort of ideal prince,
and why his name is still a rallying cry.
*New Yorker*
How, asks medieval historian Anne-Marie Eddé, did a ‘relentless
jihad fighter’ ultimately come to be identified as a ‘valiant,
generous, and magnanimous’ figure among his former foes? Her
comprehensive biography, Saladin, examines the birth and
elaboration of a legend that casts a shadow even into the present
day. In it, she highlights the conflict that can arise when our
quest for historical truth runs up against the carefully
constructed image that people of the past wanted us to see… The
Saladin of legend is a palimpsest on which the agendas and concerns
of whoever invoked him were inscribed. Eddé untangles the concrete
facts from the endless revisions and reinterpretations that turned
Saladin into a larger-than-life icon over the ages.
*Boston Globe*
An impressive biography of Saladin…supported by a multiplicity of
sources, known or previously unknown: chronicles, travel
narratives, letters, poems, administrative treatises… Although
[Eddé] is intent on placing that extraordinary figure within his
context, on understanding his conception of power and how he
founded his dynasty, she endeavors above all to analyze the
discourses of which he has been the object from the Middle Ages to
the present, discourses serving to fashion his myth. The result of
that exacting and rigorous undertaking is at once accessible to the
non-specialist and compelling, allowing us to rediscover a Saladin
richer and more complex than his Western or Eastern legend.
*Le Jour*
This fastidious and superbly well researched book is, in some ways,
the biography of an idea. We don’t know all that much about the
historical Saladin, and next to nothing about him personally—not
even what he looked like… Eddé’s account of Saladin’s life…is
always lucid and sensible, and instills complete confidence in the
reader… Above all, this book is valuable for giving us a sense of
what the Crusades looked like from the other side.
*Spectator*
Eddé mines below the official rhetoric of Saladin’s secretaries and
administrators to develop a historical account independent of the
many mythologies surrounding his biography… Extensive research
creates a picture readily distinguishable from the many Saladin
myths.
*Kirkus Reviews*
Eddé does an admirable job of showing all [Saladin’s] complexity,
from human, religious, and cultural standpoints, wading through the
mythology and hagiography surrounding him to present a more
balanced view of this historical figure who was so well suited to
his times.
*Library Journal*
In this insightful biography, the Muslim hero who impressed even
his Christian adversaries personifies the complex religious and
cultural dynamics of the crusading era… Eddé…picks carefully
through tendentious, often hagiographic medieval sources to
assemble an objective portrait of Saladin, and sifts the legends
surrounding him—many of them self-generated—for clues to the
ideologies of his day; presented by himself and others as the
defender of a sacred community against a cruel, impious,
animalistic Christian Other, he was even to Europeans the mirror
image of the Crusader. Eddé’s shrewd and informative, if stolid,
biography shows us how much two clashing civilizations had in
common.
*Publishers Weekly*
A central figure in the history of the Crusades, an enlightened
sovereign, a reunifier of the Muslim world, Saladin…is more than an
icon in the East, he is the greatest figure of its glorious past
and the model of the ruler par excellence. Profoundly attached to
Arab values, he is awash with unparalleled glory and respect from
the time of his reign until the present, and from his own
territories to Europe. That cannot fail to raise problems when it
comes to writing his biography. In fact, between hagiographical
accounts emerging directly from his close circle and hostile
criticism from his fiercest detractors, there was no objective
middle course. This book constitutes the first step on that path:
rigorous without being academic, resituating the man within his
context and noting the influences exerted on him, it proposes to
discover, beyond the usual panegyrics, the hidden face of Saladin,
a portrait in light and shadow.
*Chrysostome Gourio, Libraire Le Comptoir des Mots*
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