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Title: A breakthrough work, though somewhat biased.
Review: A more descriptive title of Ehrenkreutz's work might have been "Saladin in the Worst Possible Light." In his zeal to dispel the hero myth of Saladin, Ehrenkreutz has taken as his position the opposite of Stanley Lane-Poole's laudatory biography of 1898. He has decided to blast the sultan's motives and character based on sources which appear to be no more impartial than those he eschews. However, despite his evident bias, he succeeds in breaking through the shrouds of hero-worship draped over Saladin by his early biographers and by Lane-Poole and his successors. While it may well be overkill, it presents, really for the first time in a European biography, a dissenting view toward the character of the first Ayyubid sultan. A very important work, but one which needs to be balanced with a less critical biography to put the Sultan in a clearer light.
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