Asad al-Din Shirkuh

Asad al-Din Shirkuh ibn Shadhi was the military architect of the Ayyubid rise, a Kurdish general whose three expeditions to Egypt delivered the Fatimid caliphate into his family's hands. The younger brother of Najm al-Din Ayyub, he shared the family's early wanderings from Dvin through Iraq, where his killing of a man at Tikrit forced the brothers into the service of Imad al-Din Zangi. Short, stocky, blind in one eye, and famously hot-tempered, Shirkuh became one of the most capable field commanders of his generation under Zangi's son Nur al-Din, fighting at the capture of Damascus in 1154 and in the long border war with the crusader states.

Egypt drew him south. The Fatimid caliphate had decayed into a contest between rival viziers, and in 1164 the ousted vizier Shawar appealed to Nur al-Din for restoration. Shirkuh led the intervention, taking his reluctant nephew Saladin with him, only for Shawar to turn on his rescuers and summon Amalric, the crusader king of Jerusalem. There followed five years of triangular war for the Nile, in which Shirkuh marched, besieged, and countermarched against both Franks and Fatimid factions. His conduct of the 1167 campaign, including the battle of al-Babayn in Middle Egypt and Saladin's defense of Alexandria, displayed a strategic boldness his contemporaries acknowledged even in failure.

The third expedition, launched in late 1168 after Amalric attacked Egypt directly, ended the contest. The Franks withdrew, Shirkuh entered Cairo in January 1169, and the caliph al-Adid had the treacherous Shawar executed. Shirkuh succeeded him as vizier of Egypt, a Sunni Kurdish soldier presiding over a Shia caliphate, with the title al-Malik al-Mansur.

He held the office barely two months. A man of soldierly appetites, he died suddenly on 23 March 1169, reportedly after an immoderate meal, and the emirs settled on his nephew Saladin as successor. Shirkuh never ruled in his own name beyond that brief vizierate, but the conquest was his: the dynasty that abolished the Fatimids, won Hattin, and faced the Crusades stood on the foundation his campaigns had laid. His own descendants held Homs as an Ayyubid appanage until 1263, outlasting the dynasty's main lines.