Nur al-Din Zengi

Nur al-Din Mahmud, a prince of the Turkic Zengid dynasty, ruled Aleppo from 1146 and Damascus from 1154 until his death in 1174. By uniting Muslim Syria and bringing Egypt under his authority, he built the power base that his former officer Saladin would later turn against the crusader states, and he is remembered in the Muslim world as a model of piety and just rule. His name means "light of the faith".

He was born in February 1118, the second son of Imad al-Din Zengi, the atabeg of Aleppo and Mosul, who in 1144 had taken the crusader County of Edessa. When Zengi was murdered in 1146, his sons divided his lands: the elder, Sayf al-Din Ghazi, took Mosul, and Nur al-Din took Aleppo. That same year he crushed a Frankish attempt to recover Edessa. In reprisal for their help to the Franks, he massacred the city's Armenian Christians, enslaved the women and children and pulled down its walls.

The Second Crusade, which reached Syria in 1148, failed after a siege of Damascus that lasted only four days, and Nur al-Din exploited its collapse. In 1149 he destroyed the army of the Principality of Antioch at Inab, where Prince Raymond of Poitiers was killed, then rode to the coast and bathed in the Mediterranean as a sign of his mastery. He took all of Antioch's lands east of the Orontes but left the city itself, which soon accepted Byzantine overlordship. Joscelin II, the last count of Edessa, was captured in 1150 and died blinded in an Aleppo prison.

When his brother at Mosul died in 1149, the new ruler there recognised Nur al-Din as overlord. Damascus, whose governors preferred alliance with the Kingdom of Jerusalem, held out longer, but in 1154 he took the city with the help of its inhabitants and treated its deposed ruler generously. Syria was now united under one ruler from Edessa to the Hauran. In 1157 he took the Hospitaller fortress of Banias and defeated King Baldwin III of Jerusalem; in 1159 he made peace with the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos, who was asserting his authority in Antioch, and in 1164, at Harim, he routed the armies of Antioch and Tripoli and captured their leaders.

Egypt, ruled in the name of the weak Fatimid Caliphate, became the prize between Nur al-Din and King Amalric I of Jerusalem. Nur al-Din sent his Kurdish general Shirkuh there in 1164, again in 1166–1167, and finally in 1168–1169, when Shirkuh finally took control and became vizier. Shirkuh died within months and was succeeded by his nephew Saladin. Under pressure from Nur al-Din, Saladin ended the Shi'ite Fatimid caliphate in 1171, but he grew increasingly independent and reluctant to join his master's campaigns.

Nur al-Din promoted Sunni Islam vigorously. Forty-two madrasas were built in Syria during his reign, about half at his own expense, and he founded hospitals, mosques and caravanserais for travellers and pilgrims. In 1148 he banned the Shi'ite call to prayer in Aleppo. He held regular hearings at which subjects could bring complaints against his officials. Even the crusader chronicler William of Tyre, who called him a great persecutor of Christians, praised him as just, brave and wise.

In 1174 Nur al-Din was preparing to invade Egypt and remove Saladin when he fell ill with a fever, caused by an abscess in his throat. He died in the citadel of Damascus on 15 May 1174, aged 56, and was buried in the madrasa that bears his name. His young son as-Salih Ismail succeeded him, but Saladin soon took over Syria, joining it with Egypt in practice as well as in name.

Our 1100 map shows the region shortly before his time, divided between Muslim states, the Byzantine Empire and the new crusader states of the Crusades; our 1200 map shows the empire Saladin built on Nur al-Din's foundations.