The Sultan and the Saint

Eight hundred years ago, Francis of Assisi and the Sultan of Egypt met on the bloody battlefields of the Crusades. The Crusades resulted in four generations of escalating conflict that was directed at Muslims, Jews, Orthodox Christians in the East, and eventually other Western Europeans. The conflict seemed to have no end until Francis of Assisi took one of the bravest risks in the history of peacemaking by crossing enemy lines to meet with the Sultan. The Sultan responded with one of the greatest humanitarian acts in the history of warfare by saving the Crusaders from starvation after the flooding of the Nile trapped their army of 50,000. Based on new research and scholarship about that fateful meeting, The Sultan and The Saint tells one of the great, lost stories from history as two men of faith fought against a century of war and distrust in a search for mutual respect and common ground.