The Ayyubid Sultanate was the dynasty founded by Saladin, ruling Egypt and Syria while confronting the crusader states and the armies of the Third Crusade.
The Ayyubid Sultanate was Saladin's creation: the Kurdish soldier who ended the Fatimid caliphate (1171), united Egypt and Syria over Nur ad-Din's inheritance, destroyed the crusader army at Hattin and retook Jerusalem (1187), and fought the Third Crusade to the standing truce of 1192.
After him it ran as a family confederation — al-Adil's and al-Kamil's pragmatic decades trading truces and even Jerusalem itself (1229) with Frederick II — prosperous, learned, and militarily cautious, until the Khwarazmian sack (1244), Louis IX's crusade, and the Mamluk coup (1250) that replaced the dynasty with its own slave-soldiers.
The house of Ayyub were Kurdish officers in Zengid service: Shirkuh, Nur ad-Din's general, won the three-cornered Egyptian wars against Amalric I of Jerusalem and the Fatimid viziers (1164–1169); his nephew Saladin, inheriting the vizierate at thirty-one, abolished the Fatimid caliphate for Baghdad's (1171), survived Nur ad-Din's displeasure by that lord's death (1174), and spent a decade gathering Damascus, Aleppo (1183), and Mosul's homage — jihad's credentials assembled alongside the family appanages.
The reckoning with the Franks made the legend: Hattin's annihilation (4 July 1187), Jerusalem's negotiated surrender (October) pointedly unlike 1099's sack, and the coast swept — then held against the Third Crusade's siege of Acre and Richard the Lionheart's battles (Arsuf, Jaffa) to the Treaty of Jaffa (1192): the coast Frankish, the interior and the holy city Muslim, pilgrimage open. He died months later at Damascus, famously poor, his reputation — chivalric in the West's telling, saintly-jurist in the East's — the dynasty's greatest asset.
Saladin's empire was parcelled among kin as policy: sons at Damascus, Aleppo, and Cairo balanced by his brother al-Adil, who by 1200 had gathered the sultanate himself and set the pattern — a senior sultan in Cairo refereeing princely Syria. The system's genius was peace-management: truces with the rump-crusaders, trade privileges to Venice and Pisa, and the Fifth Crusade's defeat (Damietta regained 1221) followed by al-Kamil's masterpiece of realism — the 1229 treaty ceding demilitarised Jerusalem to Frederick II for a decade's peace, both rulers' clerics scandalised.
The unravelling came fast at mid-century: the Khwarazmian mercenaries' sack of Jerusalem (1244) and the allied Frankish-Syrian defeat at La Forbie; as-Salih Ayyub's concentration of Turkish slave-soldiers (the Bahri mamluks) as his instrument; Louis IX's crusade taking Damietta (1249) and dying into captivity at Mansurah (1250) — where the sultan's death mid-campaign exposed the succession: the mamluks murdered his heir Turanshah, raised Shajar al-Durr and then their own emirs, and the Ayyubid sultanate passed to its army. Syrian branches lingered (Aleppo to the Mongols, 1260; hill-appanages like Hama for centuries) but Ain Jalut's victors owned the future.
The Ayyubids governed as a kin-confederation under Cairo's seniority: appanaged princes (Damascus, Aleppo, Hama, Homs, the Jazira, Yemen) bound by oaths renegotiated at every death, iqta grants sustaining Kurdish and Turkish regiments, and the chancery-and-divan machinery inherited from Fatimids and Zengids running commerce-rich Egypt as the treasury of the whole.
Its signature institutions were Sunni-restorationist: madrasas planted in Cairo (ending Fatimid Ismaili instruction), citadels crowning the capitals — Cairo's begun by Saladin with Frankish prisoners, Aleppo's glacis among the age's engineering feats — and the hospital-and-college complexes (as-Salih's, later the model for Mamluk grandeur) that made Ayyubid cities the era's Sunni intellectual capitals.
Saladin, 1171–1193 — founder: Hattin, Jerusalem, and the truce of 1192.
Al-Adil I, 1200–1218 — the consolidator; "Saphadin" to the Franks he outbargained.
Al-Kamil, 1218–1238 — Damietta's defender, Frederick II's treaty-partner, St Francis's host.
As-Salih Ayyub, 1240–1249 — the Bahri mamluks' creator; died facing Louis IX.
Turanshah, 1249–1250 — Mansurah's victor for weeks; the dynasty's murdered last.
Ayyubid religion was the Sunni revival made policy: Shafii and other law-colleges endowed against two centuries of Ismaili rule, Sufi khanqahs patronised, jihad preached and pragmatically scheduled — with the dhimma's protections generally restored after Fatimid oscillations, Coptic administrators and Jewish physicians (Maimonides, Saladin's court doctor) serving the state.
Its culture was late-classical Islam's high plateau: Baha al-Din's and Imad al-Din's Saladin-biographies, Ibn Khallikan's biographical dictionary begun in its schools, Abd al-Latif's Cairo lectures, and an architecture of purposeful mass — citadels, city walls (Cairo's extended), madrasas — that Mamluk splendour would elaborate; commerce meanwhile bound Alexandria to Venice and the Red Sea to India: the sultanate as the spice route's Sunni toll-keeper.