The Kurdish dynasty founded by Saladin that reunited Egypt and Syria and retook Jerusalem from the Crusaders.
The family were Kurds from Armenia who rose in the service of the Zengid rulers of Syria. Saladin’s uncle Shirkuh led Zengid armies into Fatimid Egypt, and when he died in 1169 the young Saladin succeeded him as vizier.
In 1171 Saladin abolished the Shia Fatimid caliphate, returned Egypt to Sunni allegiance, and after his master Nur ad-Din’s death made himself the independent ruler of Egypt and much of Syria, founding the Ayyubid dynasty.
Saladin united the Muslim Near East and turned against the Crusader states. In 1187 he destroyed the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin and recaptured Jerusalem itself, ending eighty-eight years of Crusader rule over the holy city.
His victories provoked the Third Crusade, in which he faced Richard the Lionheart; the two fought to a stalemate and a truce that left Saladin in control of Jerusalem while allowing Christian pilgrimage. Even Western writers remembered him as a model of chivalry and generosity.
Saladin divided his lands among his relatives, and after his death in 1193 his brother al-Adil I outmanoeuvred his sons to reunite the Ayyubid domains. Al-Adil’s son al-Kamil, ruling Egypt, took the pragmatic step in 1229 of ceding Jerusalem to the Emperor Frederick II by treaty rather than fighting the Sixth Crusade.
The Ayyubid realm was really a family confederation of princes in Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, and beyond, held together — or divided — by kinship.
The reliance on slave-soldiers proved the dynasty’s undoing. In 1250 the Mamluks, the elite military slaves of the Egyptian Ayyubids, seized power in Cairo, and by 1260 the last Ayyubid rulers had been swept away, though minor branches lingered in Syria.
The Mamluks who replaced them would go on to destroy the remaining Crusader states and halt the Mongols.
The Ayyubids reunited Egypt and Muslim Syria, restored Sunni Islam in Egypt, and made Saladin an enduring symbol of Muslim resistance to the Crusades. They fortified Cairo’s Citadel and patronised religious colleges (madrasas) across their lands.
Their fall to their own Mamluk soldiers set the pattern for the next three centuries of Egyptian history.