Ayyubid dynasty

The Ayyubids were a Sunni Muslim family of Kurdish origin who ruled Egypt, most of Syria, Upper Mesopotamia, Yemen and the Hejaz from 1171 until the mid-thirteenth century, with minor branches lasting much longer. Their founder, Saladin, ended the Shia Fatimid caliphate, united Egypt and Syria and took Jerusalem from the crusaders in 1187. Shown on our maps as the Ayyubid Sultanate, the dynasty made Egypt the leading Sunni power of the eastern Mediterranean, a position it kept for centuries.

The family's ancestor Shadhi left the Armenian town of Dvin and became governor of Tikrit, a post his son Ayyub inherited. Ayyub and his brother Shirkuh later entered the service of the Zengid rulers of Mosul and Aleppo. From 1164 Nur al-Din sent Shirkuh, with his nephew Saladin, on campaigns to keep the crusaders out of a disordered Fatimid Egypt. Shirkuh became vizier in 1169 but died later that year, and the Fatimid caliph appointed Saladin in his place. When the last caliph died in 1171, Saladin transferred Egypt's allegiance to the Sunni Abbasid caliph in Baghdad.

After Nur al-Din's death in 1174, Saladin took Damascus, then Hama and Homs, and finally Aleppo in 1182. His relatives meanwhile carried Ayyubid power into Yemen, northern Nubia and Libya. Having united the Muslim lands around the crusader states, he destroyed the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at Hattin on 4 July 1187 and within months held almost all of it, including Jerusalem, with Tyre the main exception. The Third Crusade recovered Acre and a coastal strip, and a treaty with Richard I in 1192 confirmed it. Saladin died in 1193.

Saladin left not a centralised state but a group of principalities shared among his kin, each owing loyalty to the sultan but largely self-governing. His sons quarrelled, and by 1200 his brother al-Adil had made himself sultan; all later Ayyubid sultans of Egypt descended from him. Al-Adil's son al-Kamil defeated the Fifth Crusade in the Nile Delta in 1221, and in 1229 negotiated a truce that handed an unfortified Jerusalem to Emperor Frederick II for ten years, to the anger of many Muslims. In the 1230s the Syrian princes broke with Cairo, until as-Salih Ayyub reunited most of Syria apart from Aleppo by 1247.

The Ayyubids were great builders and patrons. They founded madrasas for all four Sunni legal schools, using them to restore Sunni teaching in formerly Fatimid Egypt; ten were built in Cairo under Saladin and about 25 more over the rest of the Ayyubid period. Saladin enclosed Cairo and Fustat within a single wall, and Ayyubid castles combined Fatimid, crusader and new techniques. Women of the ruling family endowed many religious buildings in Damascus, and physicians such as Maimonides served at court. The army relied on Kurdish and Turkic cavalry paid partly through land grants, alongside growing corps of mamluk slave soldiers.

In 1248–49 Louis IX of France led the Seventh Crusade against Egypt, landing at Damietta. As-Salih Ayyub died during the campaign, but his Bahri mamluk officers defeated the crusaders at Mansurah. Soon afterwards they murdered the new sultan, Turanshah, in 1250, ending Ayyubid rule in Egypt. An-Nasir Yusuf of Aleppo held Syria for a decade, but the Mongols under Hulagu took Aleppo in January 1260 and then Damascus. After the mamluks defeated the Mongols at Ain Jalut that September, Syria too passed to the Mamluk Sultanate.

A few Ayyubid lines survived as Mamluk clients. The princes of Hama, including the geographer Abu al-Fida, ruled until 1341, and the branch at Hisn Kayfa in south-eastern Anatolia lasted until the Ottomans displaced it in the early sixteenth century.

Our 1200 map shows the Ayyubid Sultanate centred on Egypt and Syria, facing the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem on the coast. It replaced the Fatimid Caliphate and gave way to the Mamluk Sultanate. For its founder see Saladin, and for its wars with the crusaders the Battle of Hattin and the Third Crusade.