Shirkuh

The crusaders are driven from Jerusalem and most of Palestine by the great Kurdish general Salah ad Din ibn Ayyub, known in the West as Saladin.

Saladin had come to Egypt in 1168 in the entourage of his uncle, the Kurdish general Shirkuh, who had become the wazir, or senior minister, of the last Fatimid caliph.

Saladin becomes the master of Egypt after the death of his uncle.

The dynasty he founds in Egypt, called the Ayyubid, will rule until 1260.

Saladin abolishes the Fatimid caliphate, which by this time is dead as a religious force, and returns Egypt to Sunni orthodoxy.

He restores and tightens the bonds that tie Egypt to eastern Islam and reincorporates Egypt into the Sunni fold represented by the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad.

At the same time, Egypt is opened to the new social changes and intellectual movements that have been emerging in the East.

Saladin introduces into Egypt the madrasah, a mosque-college, which is the intellectual heart of the Sunni religious revival.

Even Al Azhar, founded by the Fatimids, becomes in time the center of Islamic orthodoxy.

Saladin dies peacefully in Damascus in 1193.

His dominions split up after his death into a loose dynastic empire controlled by members of his family, the Ayyubids.

The Ayyubid sultans of Egypt are paramount within this empire because their control of a rich, well-defined territory gives them a secure basis of power.

Economically, the Ayyubid period is one of growth and prosperity.

Italian, French, and Catalan merchants operate in ports under Ayyubid control.

Egyptian products, including alum, for which there is a great demand, are exported to Europe.

Egypt also profits from the transit trade from the East.

Like the Fatimids before him, Saladin had brought Yemen under his control, thus securing both ends of the Red Sea and an important commercial and strategic advantage.

Culturally, too, the Ayyubid period is one of great activity.

Egypt becomes a center of Arab scholarship and literature and, along with Syria, acquires a cultural primacy that it will retain through the modern period.

The prosperity of the cities, the patronage of the Ayyubid princes, and the Sunni revival make the Ayyubid period a cultural high point in Egyptian and Arab history.

Ascalon’s conquest in 1153 by the Crusaders is offset in the next year by the occupation of Damascus under Nur ad-Din: one more stage in the encirclement of the crusader states by a single Muslim power.

Najm ad-Din Ayyub ibn Shadhi, for whom the Ayyubid dynasty will later be named, is a member of a family of Kurdish soldiers of fortune who had early in the twelfth century taken service under the Seljuq Turkish rulers in Iraq and Syria.

In 1137/38, on the night of the birth of his son Saladin—in full Salah Ad-din Yusuf Ibn Ayyub (“Righteousness of the Faith, Joseph, Son of Job”)—Ayyub had gathered his family and moved from Tikrit in Mesopotamia to Aleppo, there entering the service of Zengi.

Upon Ayyub’s appointment as governor of Damascus, he and his brother Asad ad-Din Shirkuh unite Syria in preparation for war against the crusaders.

Saladin had apparently spent an undistinguished youth growing up in Baalbek and Damascus, with a greater taste for religious studies than military training; his formal career begins when he joins Shirkuh’s staff.

Nur ad-Din proves to be one of the most dangerous enemies the Frankish kingdom has ever faced.

Starting out as Emir of Aleppo, he had steadily increased his territory at the expense of his Muslim and Latin neighbors, until he gained the great city of Damascus in 1154.

He had seriously defeated the Crusaders at the Battle of Lake Huleh in 1157, but fell very ill immediately afterward, allowing the Franks to a chance to recover and, with the help of Thierry of Alsace and an army of pilgrims, to capture Harim castle later in the year.

However, an attack on Shaizar failed when Reynald of Châtillon, the Prince of Antioch, quarreled with the other Franks.

Consequently, Shaizar soon became the property of Nur ad-Din.

In 1158, Thierry and King Baldwin III had defeated Nur ad-Din at Butaiha, northeast of Tiberias.

The year 1160 had seen the capture of Reynald, who will spend the next sixteen years in Nur ad-Din's dungeons.

In December 1161, the Emperor Manuel I Comnenus had married Maria of Antioch and this event has given Antioch a strong protector in the emperor.

Amalric, count of Jaffa and Ascalon, succeeds his elder brother Baudouin III to the throne of Jerusalem in 1163.

Both Amalric and Nur ad-Din had soon become aware of the weakness of Fatimid Egypt, whose government has fallen into a state of decay.

After the assassination of Caliph al-Zafir and a series of palace coups, Shawar had seized power in 1162, was soon deposed, and appealed to Nur ad-Din for help.

Neither the Latin king nor the Muslim emir can afford to let the other capture the rich prize of Egypt.

Accordingly, Nur ad-Din had sent his lieutenant Shirkuh with an army to support the Egyptian vizier.

While Shirkuh campaigns in Egypt, Nur ad-Din mounts an offensive in Lebanon.

Following Latin policy, King Amalric takes an army to support his northern vassals, Bohemund III of Antioch and Raymond III of Tripoli.

Fortuitously, a large group of French pilgrims led by Hugh VIII of Lusignan and Geoffrey Martel, the brother of William IV of Angoulême, have joined the king of Jerusalem.

In addition, Constantine Kalamanos, the governor of Cilicia, has brought his Greek warriors to assist the Crusaders.

Nur ad-Din is no match for such a formidable combination of enemies and his army suffers a defeat.

Both Muslims and Franks are impressed by the fighting qualities of the imperial soldiers.

The negative result of al-Buqaia only makes Nur ad-Din more keen for revenge.

Nur ad-Din had sent his lieutenant Shirkuh to Egypt accompanied by his own nephew, Saladin, to settle a dispute between Shawar and Dirgham over the Fatimid vizierate.

Shawar is restored and Dirgham killed, but after quarreling with Shirkuh, Shawar allies with Almaic of Jerusalem, who, believing his northern front secure, had taken his army to Egypt, where had found himself in a three-way contest between his Franks, Shirkuh, and Shawar, with the latter trying maintain Egyptian independence.

Because Egypt had never paid the yearly tribute that it had promised Baldwin in 1160, Amalric hopes to gain control of Egypt and break Muslim unity.

He ousts Shirkuh from Egypt in 1164, but the king has had to rapidly abandon Egypt upon the news of a great disaster in the north.

The war between Amalric and Nur ad-Din has gradually become a contest for control of Egypt.

During three military expeditions led by Shirkuh into Egypt to prevent its falling to the Franks, a complex, three-way struggle has developed between Amalric, Shawar, and Shirkuh.

Amalric appeals both to Emperor Manuel and to Louis VII of France for help.

Manuel agrees to lend his fleet for one of Amalric's campaigns, with the provision that Amalric divide Egypt with Constantinople.

Shawar now seeks help from Shirkuh.

The Battle of al-Babein takes place on March 18, 1167, between Amalric and a Zengid army under Shirkuh for control of Egypt.

Saladin, Nur ad-Din’s nephew, serves as Shirkuh’s highest-ranking officer in the battle.

The battle is a tactical draw between the Zengid forces and King Amalric's invasion army.

Shirkuh has avoided a pitched battle with the Crusaders, who in any case have insufficient resources to conquer Egypt and are forced to retreat, but the Latin-Greek alliance is maintained.

Amalric of Jerusalem, realizing the necessity of cooperation with Constantinople against Muslim Syria, had sent William of Tyre as envoy to the imperial capital.

Before the news of the agreement arranged by the envoy reaches Jerusalem, however, the King in 1168 sets out for Egypt.

The reasons are not clear, and there had been considerable division among the barons.

The Almohad caliph Abu Ya'qub Yusuf, ruler of Morocco, had declared in Fés, the capital, that all Jews must convert to Islam.

One Jew, Judah ha-Kohen ibn Shushan, had been arrested as a practicing Jew, found guilty, and burned alive for refusing to convert.

His pupil Moses Maimonides, whose family had left Córdoba six years earlier, had fled the country, moving to Palestine and, a few months later, Egypt, where Jews are free to practice their faith openly, though any Jew who had once submitted to Islam courts death if he relapses to Judaism.

Maimonides himself is at one point accused of being a renegade Muslim, but he is able to prove that he had never really adopted the faith of Islam and so is exonerated.

Though Egypt is a haven from harassment and persecution, Moses Maimonides had soon been assailed by personal problems.

His father dies shortly after the family's arrival in Egypt.

His younger brother, David, a prosperous jewelry merchant on whom Moses leans for support, had died in a shipwreck in 1167, taking the entire family fortune with him, leaving Moses as the sole support of his family.

He cannot turn to the rabbinate because the rabbinate is conceived of as a public service that offers its practitioners no remuneration.

Pressed by economic necessity, Maimonides had taken advantage of his medical studies and become a practicing physician.

The Fatimid kingdom of Egypt and Libya had begun to crumble internally in the mid-twelfth century; the caliphs have lost most of their power, and the viziers, at the head of a highly centralized government, have assumed much of the executive and military leadership.

Amalric in the winter of 1168 again attacks Egypt, and Shawar switches alliances again, this time going back to Shirkuh, who he had betrayed in 1164.

Shirkuh and Shawar attempt to force the Crusader garrison out of Egypt, but Amalric presses on, until his army is camped south of Fustat.

The Fatimid vizier, Shawar, fearing that the Egyptian capital (in today's Old Cairo) will be captured by the Crusaders, orders the city set afire.

The city will burn for fifty-four days.

There is some delay when the imperial fleet and the army finally arrive in Egypt in 1169.

Inadequate provisions and seasonal rains force both armies to retreat again, each side blaming the other.

In any case, the venture fails, and Shirkuh enters Cairo, subjugating Egypt and thus presenting a broad and competent Muslim front against the crusaders.

Shirkuh has Shawar executed and is named the new vizier, but his reign lasts only two months.

Already an obese man, he dies on May 23 of "indigestion".

His nephew, Saladin, now Nur ad-Din's deputy is left to overcome the remaining opposition and master Egypt.

He is at the age of thirty-one appointed both commander of the Syrian troops in Egypt and vizier of the Fatimid caliphate.

His relatively quick rise to power must be attributed not only to the clannish nepotism of his Kurdish family but also to his own emerging talents.

As vizier of Egypt, he receives the title malik, “king”, although he is generally known as the sultan.

Saladin, although himself an orthodox Muslim, initially does not proclaim the Sunni faith amid a people still devoted to the tenets and practice of the Shi'a sect, but he will soon find himself able to do so; and thus the spiritual supremacy of the Abbasids will again prevail, not only in Syria, but throughout Egypt and all its dependencies.