A fortress town on the Tigris between Mosul and Baghdad, long a centre of Syriac Christianity, and the birthplace of Saladin in about 1137.
Tikrit stands on a bluff on the west bank of the Tigris, roughly midway between Baghdad and Mosul. The site is old and its logic simple: a fortified height commanding a river crossing on the main road of Upper Mesopotamia, valuable to whoever was trying to hold either city.
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries that made it a frontier post rather than a capital. It changed hands between the Uqaylids, the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad and the Seljuks, and was usually governed by a warden holding the citadel for whichever power was momentarily stronger.
Long before it was a Muslim frontier town, Tikrit was one of the most important Christian centres in Mesopotamia. Ahudemmeh was consecrated bishop there in 559, and the town became the seat of the maphrian, the head of the Syriac Orthodox church east of the Euphrates and second only to the patriarch of Antioch.
Its cathedral, known as the Green Church, was destroyed in 1089. Pressure on the community continued, and in 1156 the maphrian moved his seat to Mosul, ending six centuries in which Tikrit had been a capital of Syriac learning. The Christian population persisted in reduced numbers until the devastation at the end of the fourteenth century.
By the 1130s the citadel was held for the Seljuk authorities by Najm ad-Din Ayyub, a Kurd whose family traced itself to Dvin in Armenia. His brother Shirkuh served with him, and both would later make their careers with the Zengids of Mosul and Aleppo.
The family fell out of favour abruptly. Ayyub had given refuge to Zengi after a defeat, which the regional governor Bihruz resented, and when Shirkuh killed one of Bihruz's associates in a quarrel the brothers were expelled from the town. Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, Saladin's biographer and friend, records that Saladin was born on the very night the family left Tikrit, about 1137.
Saladin therefore had no meaningful connection with the town beyond the accident of being born in it; he grew up in Baalbek and Damascus, and made his career in Egypt. The article belongs in a European archive because of what he did later — the recovery of Jerusalem in 1187 and the war with Richard I of England during the Third Crusade shaped Latin Christendom as directly as anything that happened inside it.
Tikrit's real significance in his story is what it shows about how such men rose. The Ayyubids were provincial Kurdish soldiers holding a fortress for a Turkish overlord in an Arab caliphate, and within two generations they ruled Egypt and Syria. That trajectory, from a citadel wardenship on the Tigris to a sultanate, is the ordinary shape of twelfth-century Near Eastern politics rather than an exception.
Timur stormed and devastated Tikrit in 1393 and 1394, and the town never recovered its former standing. The Christian community departed, the citadel lost its strategic role as the routes shifted, and under Ottoman rule the settlement remained small.
Little medieval fabric survives on the site today, which is why the article is illustrated with a coin struck in the town rather than with a monument. A silver dirham minted at Tikrit for an Uqaylid ruler about 1009 to 1010 is honest contemporary evidence of the place in the century before Saladin was born there.