A banner in this world was an address before it was a symbol. Arabic distinguished between them carefully: the liwāʾ was the commander's or the army's standard, the rāya the battle flag, the ʿalam the general term for a flag or standard — and tradition remembers the Prophet's own, a white banner nicknamed the Young Eagle and a black one said to have been made from Aisha's head-cloth. What a horseman carried above him afterwards told you whose authority he served, because the great dynasties took colours and held to them. The Umayyads flew white. The Abbasids of Baghdad took black, on the strength of a prophecy about a people coming from the East with black banners. The Fatimids of Cairo flew white in deliberate opposition to Abbasid black — the flag was the argument. Saladin's Ayyubids flew yellow. Read those colours together and you have the political map of the twelfth-century Muslim world, which was not one power but several in competition, and you also have the measure of what Saladin actually did: he brought Egypt and Syria under a single colour before he ever turned that combined strength against the Kingdom of Jerusalem. A man carrying a flag was carrying the answer to the only question that mattered on a road — whose side are you on.

The figure rides in green robes over golden scale armour, with a shield and a curved sword at his side and a light-coloured horse in red and gold tack, and he carries a large green banner worked with Arabic calligraphy in a frame of ornament. Two things are worth saying about that banner. The lettering is well placed for the period: the earliest Islamic flags were plain colour, in keeping with the prescriptions on aniconism, and inscribed religious flags belong to the medieval centuries — the miniatures of the thirteenth-century illustrator Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti show them in use. The green is a later convention. Green as the general colour of Islam came afterwards, and the army this man is meant to serve flew yellow. He is best understood as a standard-bearer of the Muslim armies as later tradition pictures them rather than as a documented Ayyubid ʿalam. Ride him beside Saladin the Mighty and Saladin's Personal Standard Bearer for a command group with its flags up, add Attacking Saracen with Fallen Crusader for the fighting line the banner is meant to steady, and set him opposite Crusader Priest Standard Bearer — the two of them make the sharpest pairing in this range, because both armies at Hattin in 1187 marched behind something they considered holy, and only one of them carried it home.

Model: MK205 / King & Country / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set