Map – Ayyubids (1187 – 1260 CE)

TIME PERIOD: 1187 – 1260 CE

“In Egypt, the Fatimids continued to rule until 1171, but were then replaced by Salah al-Din (Saladin) a military leader of Kurdish origin. The change of rulers brought with it a change of religious alliance. The Fatimids had belonged to the Isma’ili branch of the Shi’is, but Salah al-Din was a Sunni, and he was able to mobilize the strength and religious fervor of Egyptian and Syrian Muslims in order to defeat the European Crusaders who had established Christian states in Palestine and on the Syrian coast at the end of the eleventh century. The dynasty founded by Salah al-Din, that of the Ayyubids, ruled Egypt from 1169 to 1252, Syria to 1260, and part of western Arabia to 1229.”

Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, p. 84 Warner Books Edition, 1991

“A Kurdish officer called Salah al-Din — better known in the West as Saladin — launched a jihad against the Crusaders in 1187. By his death in 1193, he had recaptured Jerusalem and expelled the Crusaders from all but a narrow coastal strip. It was only the break-up of Saladin’s Syro-Egyptian empire into a host of small states under his successors which permitted the Crusading states to drag out an attenuated existence for another century, until the reconstitution of a Syro-Egyptian state under the Mamluks in the thirteenth century brought about their final extinction.”

Bernard Lewis, The Middle East p. 91 Scribner paperback, 1995

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