Zengid Dynasty

Also known as Banu Zangi, atabegs of Mosul and Aleppo

Turkic Sunni dynasty of Mosul and Aleppo whose conquest of Edessa in 1144 triggered the Second Crusade and whose sponsorship of the rise of Saladin produced the unified Sunni state that would retake Jerusalem.

The dynasty was founded in 1127 when the Seljuk sultan appointed the Turkic commander Imad ad-Din Zengi as atabeg of Mosul. Zengi added Aleppo to his governorship in 1128 and from those twin capitals built the first effective Sunni reunification of the Jazira and northern Syria for almost a generation. His most famous act — the storming and reconquest of the Crusader county of Edessa in December 1144 — was the spark for the disastrous Second Crusade.

Zengi's son Nur ad-Din (r. 1146–74) refined the project. He absorbed Damascus from the Burids in 1154, ringed the Frankish kingdom with a continuous Sunni front for the first time, and from 1163 sent successive expeditions to Egypt under his Kurdish lieutenant Shirkuh to neutralise the Fatimids. Those expeditions ended in 1169 with Shirkuh's nephew Saladin installed as Fatimid vizier — nominally as Nur ad-Din's deputy.

Saladin's break from his Zengid overlords on Nur ad-Din's death in 1174 fractured the dynasty politically, but the Zengid name continued in attenuated form at Mosul, Sinjar, and other Jaziran towns until the last branch fell to the Mongols and the rising Ayyubid successors in the mid-thirteenth century.

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