Zengid emir of Aleppo (1174–1181), the boy-son of Nur ad-Din whose minority allowed Saladin to seize Damascus and most of Muslim Syria.
As-Salih Ismail was the Zengid emir of Aleppo from 1174 to 1181, the young son and heir of the great Nur ad-Din, who had united Muslim Syria against the Crusaders. He came to power as a boy of eleven on his father's sudden death, and his minority proved the undoing of his house.
With the strong hand of Nur ad-Din gone, his ablest lieutenant, Saladin, moved from Egypt into Syria and seized Damascus and much of the country, claiming to act as the guardian of Nur ad-Din's heir. As-Salih, holding out in Aleppo, became the rallying point of resistance to Saladin, but he died still a teenager in 1181, and within two years Aleppo too had fallen to Saladin, extinguishing Zengid power.
As-Salih Ismail was born in 1163, the son of Nur ad-Din, the atabeg who had welded Aleppo, Damascus, and much of Muslim Syria into a single power dedicated to the holy war against the Crusader states. When Nur ad-Din died suddenly in 1174, the eleven-year-old As-Salih was proclaimed his successor at Aleppo, with the great emirs of the realm contending to control him.
His inheritance was immediately imperilled by the ambitions of Saladin, whom Nur ad-Din had sent to govern Egypt and who now claimed to act in the boy's name.
As-Salih Ismail is remembered less as a personality than as a symbol — the legitimate boy-heir around whom loyalty to the house of Nur ad-Din gathered against the usurping ambition of Saladin. The sources, especially those hostile to Saladin, cast him in a sympathetic light, the rightful young prince dispossessed by an over-mighty servant.
What the record allows him is a certain dignity and resolve beyond his years. He appealed to the people of his cities against Saladin, held Aleppo through repeated sieges, and became a genuine focus of Zengid loyalism. Yet he was, inevitably, a pawn as much as a prince — his cause managed by the emirs around him, his fate bound to a power struggle he was too young to master. He is the poignant last hope of the Zengid house, whose early death sealed its fall.
The central drama of As-Salih's brief reign was the loss of his father's empire to Saladin. Within months of Nur ad-Din's death Saladin marched from Egypt into Syria and took Damascus, presenting himself as the loyal protector of the young emir even as he stripped away his lands. As-Salih, withdrawn to Aleppo, refused this fiction and led the resistance, appealing to the loyalty owed his father's memory.
For years Aleppo and its allies — including, at times, the Zengids of Mosul and even, opportunistically, the Crusaders and the Assassins — fought to check Saladin's expansion. But Saladin steadily prevailed, and As-Salih was confined to an ever-shrinking sphere around his capital.
As-Salih Ismail died at Aleppo on 4 December 1181, aged only eighteen, some said of poison. On his deathbed he is reported to have urged his followers to hand the city to his Zengid cousins of Mosul rather than to Saladin. Aleppo passed briefly to a cousin of the house, but in 1183 Saladin at last took the city, ending Zengid rule there.
As-Salih Ismail is remembered as the boy-emir whose death cleared Saladin's path to the mastery of Muslim Syria. So long as Nur ad-Din's legitimate heir lived, Saladin's expansion wore the guise of protection and met determined resistance; with As-Salih gone and Aleppo taken, Saladin could unite Egypt and Syria under his own house, the Ayyubids, and turn that united power against the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem — the road that led to Hattin in 1187.