Burid Dynasty

Also known as Burid emirate, atabegs of Damascus

Turkic atabeg dynasty of Damascus that held the city as an independent buffer between the Crusader states and the rising Zengid power, ending in surrender to Nur ad-Din in 1154.

The Burids were founded by Toghtekin, a former Seljuk slave-soldier and atabeg of Damascus who took the city in his own name on the death of his nominal master in 1104. Through the next half-century the dynasty's rulers — Toghtekin, his son Buri, and the increasingly weak Mu'in ad-Din Unur — kept Damascus precariously independent in the gap between two larger powers, the Frankish kingdom to the south and the Zengid principality to the north.

Under Unur in the 1140s the Burid emirate signed open alliances with the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem against the Zengids, and it was the breakdown of that delicate balance that produced one of the kingdom's strangest moments — the Frankish siege of Damascus during the Second Crusade in July 1148, undertaken against a Damascene regime that had been a working ally only months before. The siege failed in four days, and the Burid leadership immediately reopened communications with Nur ad-Din.

Within six years the dynasty was finished. Nur ad-Din entered Damascus in April 1154 — by negotiation rather than storm — and absorbed the city into the Zengid principality. Ibn al-Qalanisi, secretary in the Burid chancery and twice ra'is of Damascus, lived through and recorded the whole period from inside the regime's last administration.

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