After repulsing a Crusader army that had reached the gates of Fatimid Cairo, Salah al-Din declared the Fatimid caliphate to be at its end, and established the Ayyubid sultanate (1171). Egypt again became Sunnite.
In 1173, Salah al-Din mobilized Muslim enthusiasm to create a united front against the Crusades, and made Egypt the most powerful Muslim state in the world at that time.
The central administration was in the hand of the Sultan. When Salahuddin became the full-fledged ruler of Egypt, he restored the name of the Abbasid Caliph in the sermon of Friday prayer and the coinage in that country from which it had been absent for over two and a half centuries.
Salahuddin saw himself as simply the adjutant and commander of the armies of the Abbasids, as he had become for a brief time the wazir and commander of the armies of the Fatimid Caliphs. That he was called Sultan was simply the title he had inherited as wazir of the Fatimids.
The Ayyubids are remembered for both fighting and negotiating with the Christian Crusaders. Saladin and al-Kamil signed treaties with the Crusaders, the latter returning Jerusalem to Christian rule for ten years. Its reconquest in 1244 by foreign Turkic troops in alliance with the ambitious dynast al-Salih Ayyub resulted in massacres and considerable destruction.
Ayyubids fell to descendants of slaves to whom Salah al-Din had allowed a greater measure of freedom, the Mamluks.
Ayyubids dynasty (1171–1260)
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| An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub |
