Saladin (Salah ad-Din)

Also known as Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, An-Nasir Salah ad-Din

Kurdish-born sultan who unified Egypt and Syria under the Ayyubid dynasty and retook Jerusalem from the Franks in 1187.

Saladin was born around 1137 in Tikrit into a family of Kurdish soldiers in the service of the Zengid atabegs of Mosul and Aleppo. He came to prominence as the deputy of his uncle Shirkuh on the Zengid expeditions to Fatimid Egypt in the 1160s, succeeded him as Egyptian vizier in 1169, and on the death of the Fatimid caliph al-Adid in 1171 abolished the Shi'i caliphate and restored Sunni allegiance to Baghdad.

Through the 1170s and 1180s he assembled — by a combination of campaigning, marriage, and patient diplomacy — a single Sunni state stretching from Cairo to Aleppo, the first such unification since the Seljuk collapse. His invasion of the kingdom in 1187 destroyed the Frankish field army at Hattin, took Jerusalem in October of that year, and reduced the kingdom to its coastal strongholds.

His resistance to the Third Crusade, conducted in continuous campaign against Richard the Lionheart in 1191–92, ended in the Treaty of Jaffa: a stalemate that left Saladin with the interior and Jerusalem and the Franks with the coast. He died in Damascus in March 1193, and his Ayyubid dynasty held Egypt and most of Syria for another half-century until the Mamluk takeover of 1250.

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