Ibn al-Athir

Also known as Izz ad-Din Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Muhammad al-Jazari

Mosul-born universal historian whose al-Kamil fi'l-Tarikh is the standard Sunni history of the central Middle Ages and the principal Muslim narrative of Hattin, the Third Crusade, and the early Ayyubid years.

Ibn al-Athir was born in 1160 at Cizre on the upper Tigris into a scholarly family closely tied to the Zengid atabegs of Mosul. He moved to Mosul as a young man, studied widely in Baghdad, Damascus, and Aleppo, and travelled with Saladin's army on at least one campaign — though his dynastic loyalty to the Zengids gives his account of Saladin a coolness rare in the Arabic sources of the period.

His al-Kamil fi'l-Tarikh — 'The Complete History' — runs from the Creation to the year 1231 in eleven volumes and is the most ambitious universal chronicle in Arabic before Ibn Khaldun. For the period 1097 to 1231 he is the indispensable Muslim narrative source, weighing alongside Ibn al-Qalanisi for the First Crusade, alongside Imad ad-Din and Baha ad-Din for the era of Saladin, and standing largely alone for the early Ayyubid succession crises that followed.

He died at Mosul in 1233, where his tomb survived as a local shrine until it was bulldozed by ISIS in 2014. D. S. Richards' three-volume English translation of the crusading sections of the Kamil (2006–08) is now the standard reference for Anglophone readers.

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