Nur ad-Din Zangi
Turkic sultan of Aleppo and Damascus. Unified the Sunni Muslim world of Syria for the first time in a generation, laid the foundation of the counter-Crusade, and prepared the political geography that Salahuddin would inherit and complete. Known for personal ascetic piety and merciless justice.
- Lived
- 1118 - 1174 CE
- Read next
- Meaning of the name Nur
Who was Nur ad-Din Zangi? Turkic sultan of Aleppo and Damascus. Unified the Sunni Muslim world of Syria for the first time in a generation, laid the foundation of the counter-Crusade, and prepared the political geography that Salahuddin would inherit and complete. Known for personal ascetic piety and merciless justice.
Life
Nur ad-Din Mahmud ibn Zangi was born in 1118 in Aleppo, second son of the Turkoman warrior Zangi. He inherited Aleppo on his father's assassination in 1146. Over the following 28 years he built the Zangid state that unified the Sunni Muslim world of Syria, Aleppo, Damascus, Homs, Hama, under a single banner for the first time since the arrival of the Crusaders in 1099.
He conducted a lifetime campaign of counter-Crusader warfare. He retook Edessa in 1146 (the reason Pope Eugenius III called the Second Crusade). He defeated Raymond of Antioch at Inab in 1149. He captured Damascus in 1154 without a fight, uniting the two great Muslim cities of the Levant. In 1164 he took his most consequential decision: sent an army under his general Shirkuh (accompanied by Shirkuh's young nephew Salahuddin) to Egypt to end the Shia Fatimid caliphate.
Salahuddin succeeded Shirkuh as vizier of Egypt. When Nur ad-Din died in 1174 of a throat infection at the age of 56, Salahuddin was already the effective master of Egypt and had unified the political geography Nur ad-Din had prepared.
Nur ad-Din is remembered in the classical Islamic tradition as the ideal ruler: personally ascetic, ferocious in the ordinary application of justice, indifferent to luxury, deeply pious. He revived the office of the Sunni qadi across Syria, reintroduced the study of hadith in Aleppo, and endowed mosques and madrasas that shape the Old City of Damascus to this day.
Stories
Each story below is drawn from the classical Islamic historical sources.
The just sultan who prepared Salahuddin
For 28 years, from Aleppo, Nur ad-Din Zangi unified the fractured Sunni Muslim world of Syria, defeated the Crusaders repeatedly, and sent to Egypt the small army in which a young man named Salahuddin was serving. He died before he could take Jerusalem. Salahuddin would do it in his name thirteen years later.