Nur al-Din
Nur al-Din was the son of Zengi, the Turkish atabeg whose capture of Edessa in 1144 provoked the Second Crusade, and in twenty-eight years as ruler of Aleppo he did what his father had not, uniting Muslim Syria from Aleppo to Damascus against the crusader states, beating Antioch's prince in the field and sending his head to Baghdad, taking Damascus in 1154 when its people opened the gates, and sending his Kurdish general Shirkuh and Shirkuh's nephew Saladin into Egypt, where they ended the Fatimid caliphate in 1171 and built the power that would take Jerusalem. Saladin, who had been his officer, made himself the heir of his policy and his reputation as the just and pious prince of the holy war. He inherited Aleppo in 1146 when Zengi was murdered by a slave, put down the revolt of Edessa at once and destroyed the city, and watched the crusade of Louis VII and Conrad III come and go. The crusaders' council at Acre chose to attack Damascus in 1148, the one Muslim state that had been allied with Jerusalem against the Zengids, and Nur al-Din marched to relieve it. The crusaders retreated after four days before he arrived, and Damascus, having seen where safety lay, became his ally and then his city. He beat and killed Raymond of Antioch at Inab in 1149, captured Joscelin of Edessa, and was checked by Baldwin III at Baniyas. The turn to Egypt came from the crusaders. Amalric of Jerusalem invaded it three times in the 1160s, and Nur al-Din sent Shirkuh to stop him. The third expedition made Shirkuh vizier of Egypt and, when he died in 1169, Saladin. Saladin abolished the Fatimid caliphate on his master's orders in 1171 and then avoided meeting him, and Nur al-Din was preparing to march on Egypt to bring his general to heel when he died of a quinsy at Damascus in May 1174, leaving a son of eleven whom Saladin displaced. He built madrasas in every city, a hospital in Damascus that stood for seven centuries, and the pulpit for the Aqsa mosque that Saladin carried to Jerusalem in 1187.
- Lived: 1118 CE – 1174 CE
- Nationality: Turkish
- Roles: emir, ruler, general
