Najm al-Din Ayyub

Najm al-Din Ayyub ibn Shadhi, the eponym of the Ayyubid dynasty, was a Kurdish soldier and administrator whose career traced the upheavals of twelfth-century Syria and Iraq. Born into a military family from Dvin in Armenia, he and his brother Shirkuh entered the service of the Seljuk authorities in Iraq, where Ayyub held the fortress town of Tikrit on the Tigris. It was there, according to tradition, that his son Yusuf — the future Saladin — was born in 1137, on the very night the family was forced to leave the town after Shirkuh killed a man in a quarrel.

The brothers found refuge with Imad al-Din Zangi, the atabeg of Mosul and the most formidable Muslim commander of the era. Ayyub's loyalty was rewarded with the governorship of Baalbek in the Beqaa valley, which he held from 1139 and defended after Zangi's assassination in 1146. He subsequently negotiated his way into the service of Damascus, and his standing in that city proved decisive in 1154, when he helped engineer its peaceful surrender to Zangi's son Nur al-Din, sparing Damascus a siege and earning the new ruler's lasting confidence.

Under Nur al-Din, Ayyub governed Damascus while Shirkuh commanded armies, and the brothers became the twin pillars of the regime. When Shirkuh and then Saladin established themselves in Egypt, Ayyub travelled to Cairo in 1170 to join his son. Saladin, by then vizier of the Fatimid caliphate, is said to have offered his father the office; Ayyub refused, content with the treasury and the port of Alexandria, and counselled his son to act with patience toward both the dying Fatimid regime and the suspicious Nur al-Din.

Ayyub died in August 1173 after a fall from his horse while riding outside Cairo, a few months before the death of Nur al-Din opened the way to his son's independent sultanate. He never reigned, yet the dynasty took his name: his descendants and those of his brothers ruled Egypt, Syria, the Jazira, and Yemen for nearly a century, and the patronymic 'Ayyubid' fixed his place at the head of the house.