Ayyubid Dynasty

Succession of rulers

1. 1.Saladin (Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub)r. 1174 – 1193
2. 2.Al-Adil I (Sayf al-Din Abu Bakr)r. 1200 – 1218
3. 3.Al-Kamil (Nasir al-Din Muhammad)r. 1218 – 1238
4. 4.An-Nasir Yusufr. 1236 – 1260
5. 5.As-Salih Ayyub (Najm al-Din)r. 1240 – 1249
6. 6.Turanshah (al-Muazzam Turanshah)r. 1249 – 1250
7. 7.Shajar al-Durrr. 1250 – 1250

Rulers of the Ayyubid Dynasty in order of accession.

All figures

• Saladin (Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub)1137 – 1193
• Al-Adil I (Sayf al-Din Abu Bakr)1145 – 1218
• Al-Kamil (Nasir al-Din Muhammad)1177 – 1238
• As-Salih Ayyub (Najm al-Din)1205 – 1249
• An-Nasir Yusuf1228 – 1261
• Asad al-Din Shirkuhd. 1169
• Najm al-Din Ayyubd. 1173
• Shajar al-Durrd. 1257
• Turanshah (al-Muazzam Turanshah)d. 1250

See who ruled alongside the Ayyubid Dynasty →

Related events

• Conflict

  Battle of Hattin

  1187· this dynasty: Victorious power; the battle broke the Latin kingdom's army

  On 4 July 1187 Saladin destroyed the field army of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin, a double hill above the Sea of Galilee. The campaign began when Saladin, having spent a decade uniting Egypt and Muslim Syria under Ayyubid rule, crossed the Jordan with a large army and besieged Tiberias, whose citadel held out under the countess Eschiva of Galilee. The kingdom mustered nearly its full strength, around 1,200 knights and many thousands of foot soldiers and turcopoles, at the springs of Saffuriya. King Guy of Lusignan faced conflicting counsel: Raymond III of Tripoli, whose own wife was besieged in Tiberias, argued against marching across the waterless plateau in high summer, while others pressed for relief. Guy ordered the advance on 3 July. Harassed by mounted archers and cut off from water, the army halted short of the lake and spent the night surrounded; the Muslims fired the dry scrub upwind of the camp. On the following day the thirst-weakened infantry broke from the knights, repeated cavalry charges failed to open a path to the springs, and the army was destroyed where it stood. The relic of the True Cross, carried with the army, was captured. Guy was taken prisoner and treated honorably. Raynald of Châtillon, lord of Kerak, whose attacks on Muslim caravans in violation of truce had been a stated cause of the war, was executed by Saladin personally or on his order; some two hundred captured Templars and Hospitallers were also put to death, while the bulk of prisoners were sold or ransomed. With the kingdom's army gone, its cities and castles fell in rapid succession through the summer and autumn, leaving Jerusalem itself exposed and culminating in its surrender in October.

• Conflict

  Siege of Jerusalem

  1187· this dynasty: Recovered the city after 88 years of Latin rule

  After Hattin destroyed the field army of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in July 1187, its fortresses and ports fell to Saladin through the summer with little resistance: Acre, Ascalon, and most of the coast were in Ayyubid hands by September. Jerusalem itself filled with refugees and was defended by almost no knights. Balian of Ibelin, one of the few senior barons not killed or captured at Hattin, had been allowed by Saladin to enter the city to evacuate his family; once inside he was pressed by the inhabitants to take charge of the defense, and Saladin released him from his oath to stay only one day. The siege began on 20 September 1187. After initial assaults against the western walls made no progress, Saladin shifted his camp to the north and his engineers brought down a section of wall near the point where the army of the First Crusade had broken in eighty-eight years earlier. With a storming of the city imminent, Balian came to terms. He is reported to have warned that, if denied terms, the defenders would destroy the Muslim holy places and kill their own families before dying in a final sortie. The capitulation, concluded on 2 October, set ransoms of ten dinars for a man, five for a woman, and one for a child; Balian and the city's treasuries bought out thousands of the poor, and Saladin and his brother al-Adil freed many more, though a substantial number who could not pay went into slavery. There was no massacre, a restraint contemporaries on both sides contrasted with the bloodshed of 1099. The Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa were restored to Muslim worship, while native Christians were permitted to remain. The loss of the city set off the call for the Third Crusade in the West.

• Conflict

  Third Crusade

  1189 – 1192· this dynasty: Held Jerusalem and contested the coast

  The destruction of the Latin army at Hattin and the surrender of Jerusalem in 1187 prompted the largest Western military response since the First Crusade. The papal call was answered by the three leading monarchs of Latin Europe: the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who drowned crossing a river in Anatolia in June 1190, leaving his great army to disintegrate; Philip II of France; and Richard I of England, who had taken the cross as count of Poitou and inherited the Plantagenet dominions in 1189. Richard's journey east included the conquest of Cyprus from its Byzantine ruler in 1191, an acquisition that anchored Latin power in the eastern Mediterranean for centuries. The two kings joined the long siege of Acre, which had been invested by Guy of Lusignan since 1189 while Saladin's army in turn surrounded the besiegers. The city fell in July 1191. Philip, ill and at odds with Richard, returned to France soon afterward, where his maneuvering against Plantagenet lands shaped the rest of the war. Richard marched south along the coast, defeating Saladin's attack at Arsuf in September 1191 and refortifying Jaffa and Ascalon, but twice advanced toward Jerusalem and twice withdrew, judging that the city could not be held even if taken while Saladin's field army survived. Negotiations ran alongside the fighting, conducted largely through Saladin's brother al-Adil, and included proposals, never realized, for a marriage settlement involving Richard's sister. After Richard's relief of Jaffa in August 1192, both exhausted sides concluded the Treaty of Jaffa in September: a three-year truce confirming Latin control of the coast from Tyre to Jaffa, with Ascalon demolished, and guaranteeing Christian pilgrims access to Jerusalem, which remained under Ayyubid rule. Richard sailed for home and was captured in Austria; Saladin died in Damascus in March 1193.

  Also involved: Plantagenet (Led the crusade's land campaign under Richard I), Capetian (Joint leadership until Philip II's early departure)

• Alliance

  Treaty of Jaffa

  1229· this dynasty: Ceded Jerusalem by negotiated truce

  In February 1229 the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt, al-Kamil, and the emperor Frederick II concluded an agreement at Jaffa that returned Jerusalem to Christian hands without a battle. Frederick had arrived in the East in 1228 under excommunication, having repeatedly delayed his promised crusade, and commanded a force far too small for serious conquest. Al-Kamil, for his part, was preoccupied with a power struggle among the Ayyubid family confederation, above all with his nephew an-Nasir Dawud, who held Damascus. The sultan had earlier dangled Jerusalem before Frederick as the price of an alliance, and although the political situation had shifted by the time the emperor landed, months of negotiation produced a settlement. The treaty established a truce of ten years and restored Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth to the Latin kingdom, together with a corridor connecting Jerusalem to the coast. The terms were carefully hedged: the Haram al-Sharif, with the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, remained under Muslim custody with free access for Muslim worship, the city's walls had already been dismantled and its defensibility remained limited, and outlying Muslim villages were excluded from Latin jurisdiction. Both principals were denounced by their own sides. Preachers in Damascus mourned the surrender of the holy city, which an-Nasir Dawud used against his uncle, while the Latin patriarch placed Jerusalem itself under interdict because the excommunicate emperor had recovered it; Frederick wore the crown in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in March 1229 in a ceremony without clergy, then left the East within weeks as war against his Italian lands loomed. The arrangement nevertheless held roughly to its term. Latin Jerusalem survived precariously until 1244, when Khwarazmian horsemen in Ayyubid service sacked the city, ending Christian rule there permanently.

• Conflict

  Seventh Crusade

  1248 – 1250· this dynasty: Defending dynasty; its Egyptian line collapsed in the aftermath

  Louis IX of France took the cross after a grave illness in 1244, the year Jerusalem was lost to Khwarazmian raiders and the Ayyubid sultan as-Salih Ayyub crushed the Latin-Syrian coalition at La Forbie. The crusade he assembled was the best-financed and best-organized of the century, directed not at Palestine but at Egypt, the center of Ayyubid power. The army landed in June 1249 and took Damietta, at the mouth of the Nile, almost without resistance after its garrison fled. As-Salih Ayyub, already mortally ill, died in November 1249 as the crusaders advanced up the Delta. His widow, Shajar al-Durr, concealed the sultan's death with the cooperation of senior commanders, issuing orders under his name while the heir, Turanshah, traveled from the Jazira. In February 1250 the crusader vanguard under the king's brother Robert of Artois forced the channel at Mansurah and charged into the town, where it was annihilated in street fighting by the Bahriyya mamluk regiment; Robert was killed. The main army held its ground but could go no farther, and with its river supply line cut by Egyptian galleys, disease and hunger forced a retreat. In April 1250 the army was overwhelmed near Fariskur and Louis was taken prisoner. The king was ransomed for a vast sum and the return of Damietta, and sailed to Acre, where he spent four years fortifying the Latin coastal towns before returning to France in 1254. The crusade's deeper consequence unfolded in Cairo: in May 1250 the Bahriyya murdered Turanshah, weeks after his accession, and Shajar al-Durr was proclaimed sultana, soon yielding power to the mamluk commander Aybak whom she married. The coup ended Ayyubid rule in Egypt and founded the Mamluk sultanate that would dominate the region for over 250 years.

  Also involved: Capetian (Launched and led the invasion of Egypt)

• Conflict

  Battle of Ain Jalut

  1260· this dynasty: Syrian branch destroyed in the preceding Mongol invasion

  The campaign that ended at Ain Jalut began with the westward offensive of Hulagu Khan, brother of the great khan Möngke, who had been charged with subduing the Islamic lands. In 1258 his army sacked Baghdad and put the last reigning Abbasid caliph, al-Musta'sim, to death, extinguishing a caliphate that had stood for five centuries. In early 1260 the Mongols took Aleppo by storm and received the surrender of Damascus. The Ayyubid ruler of Syria, an-Nasir Yusuf, abandoned his capital without a battle, fled south, and was captured; he was later killed in Mongol custody. Ayyubid Syria had ceased to exist as a power. Hulagu then withdrew the bulk of his army eastward, a movement usually connected to the death of Möngke in 1259 and the succession struggle that followed, though logistical limits on pasturing a large cavalry army in Syria may have weighed as heavily. He left a force of perhaps ten to twenty thousand under the Naiman commander Kitbuqa and sent envoys to Cairo demanding submission. The Mamluk sultan Qutuz executed the envoys and marched into Palestine, joined by the émigré commander Baybars. The armies met on 3 September 1260 at Ain Jalut, the "Spring of Goliath," in the Jezreel Valley of Galilee. The Mamluks, fielding numbers at least equal to the Mongol force, drew Kitbuqa's troops forward with a feigned retreat and enveloped them; Kitbuqa was captured and executed. The defeat was modest in scale but large in consequence: it was the first major battlefield reverse of the Mongol westward expansion not soon avenged, it fixed the Euphrates as the rough frontier between the Mamluk sultanate and Hulagu's Ilkhanate, and it delivered Muslim Syria to the Mamluks. Qutuz was assassinated on the homeward march, and Baybars took the throne.

  Also involved: Mongol Empire (Defeated; its westward expansion was checked), Abbasid Caliphate (Extinguished at Baghdad in 1258, during the same Mongol offensive)

See also