Ayyubids dynasty (1171–1260)

Ayyūbid dynasty, Sunni Muslim dynasty, founded by An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (Salah al-Din).

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)

An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub 

Early history of Mamluks

The word Mamluk means ‘owned’ and the Mamluks were not native to Egypt but were always slave soldiers, mainly Qipchak Turks from Central Asia. The Mamluks had first appeared in the Abbasid caliphate in the ninth century.

The use of Mamluks as a major component of Muslim armies became a distinct feature of Islamic civilization as early as the 9th century CE. The practice was begun in Baghdad by the ʿAbbasid caliph al-Muʿtaṣim (833–842), and it soon spread throughout the Muslim world. Mamluk regiments constituted the backbone of the late Ayyubids military. Each sultan and high-ranking Amir had his private corps, and the sultan as-Salih Ayyub (1240-1249) had especially relied on this means to maintaining power. In 1249, the Bahri mamluks defeated the crusaders at the battle of al-Mansurah and captured Louis IX, effectively ending the crusade.

As the Mongols and Crusaders tried to work out an alliance against their common enemy, the Ayyubids, they were overthrown by their own Turkish slave soldiers called Mamluks. The Mamluk dynasty was established in Egypt in mid-thirteenth century after abolishing the Ayyubid dynasty in 1250. The regime they set up came to be known as the Mamluk sultanate.

The Mamluk sultans established their rules both in Egypt and Syria, Cairo being their capital. Then they achieved the re-conquest of the last of the Crusader kingdoms in the Levant, and defeated the Mongols at the critical battle of Ayn Jalut in 1260.

The Mamluk sultan Zahir Baybars (1260-77) installed an Abbasid amir as caliph at Cairo, who survived the Mongol massacre in Baghdad in 1258. For more than two centuries, right up to the1480s, the external threat to the Mamluks varied in intensity but not in quality.

Early history of Mamluks

Mamluk dynasty in Egypt

The victory of Al- Din Baybars over the Mongols at Ayn Jlaut in 1260 saved the Muslim world from catastrophe.

His dynasty is known in Egyptian history as Mamluk. Mamluk is an Arabic term meaning “possessed” or “owned” and generally refers to military slavery.

Mamluk dynasty began in 1249 and lasted until 1517, Most of the Mamluks were men born and captured in the Black Sea, region, Turks not yet coverts to Islam or Circassians, a Caucasian tribal people.

Throughout their period damnation the Mamluks were deeply feared and respected by their neighbors because of their martial valour. During the early Mamluk dynasty the majority of the Mamluks came from Kipcak tribes; after reign of Sultan Barquq (1382-1399), recruitment focused on Circassians.

The Mamluks were decisively defeated in wars with the rising Ottomans (1485-1491, 1516-1517), who conquered Egypt in 1517, overthrowing the Mamluk sultanate.
Mamluk dynasty in Egypt

Ancient history of Aleppo

Aleppo is an ancient town in northern Syria, on the old Silk Road. Aleppo been settled for more than three thousand years.

Aleppo was the capital of the powerful Amorite state of Yamhad in the second millennium BC. The Amorites were originally nomads from the desert of Arabia; toward the end of the third millennium BC they had moved north and settled in many of the cities of Mesopotamia and the Levant.

In the seventeenth century BC, it was the territory of the Hittites. The rise of the Hittites proper to power in the second millennium BC began with immigration of groups of Indo-Europeans from the north into central Anatolia sometime simply identified themselves with the city of Nesha and called their language nasili.

King Hattsili I extended Hittite power well into Syria and under his grandson Mursili, the Hittite took Aleppo and even sacked Babylon in 1595 BC thus bringing the dynasty of Hammurabi to an end.

In the mid-ninth century the Assyrian king Shalmanese III extended his empire into Syria. Damascus was captured, as were the Phoenician ports of Tyre and Sidon and Aleppo became a provincial capital.

Then it became the land of the Persian empires, when Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great of Persia, for almost a thousand years until the Greek Empire of Alexander the Great captured it.

The Romans were the next owners of this part of the Middle East and after them, Arab and Ottoman masters until the fall of the latter in 1923. After the Turkish conquest of Anatolia in the 11th century Aleppo became increasingly important as a regional capital and under the Zangib and Ayyubid dynasties, the city played a fundamental role as a center for the reconquest of Crusader territories in the Levant.

Around the year 1100, the city came under siege from the Crusaders on two occasions by they failed to capture it.

Under the Mamluks and Ottoman the city became an important center of textile manufacture and trade and Aleppo became one of the cheap textile cotton fabrics as well as luxury silk cloths woven with gold and silver.
Ancient history of Aleppo