Nur al-Din Zengi and the Reconquest of Muslim Syria

Nur al-Din Zengi and the Reconquest of Muslim Syria In 1099, Jerusalem fell to a starving, divided army of European knights, and for nearly fifty years, the Muslim Near East seemed unable to muster the unity to take it back. Nur al-Din Mahmud, born in Aleppo in 1118 to the brutal warlord Zengi, inherited a fractured frontier at twenty-eight and spent twenty-eight years transforming it: annihilating a Crusader army at Inab, unifying Aleppo and Damascus without a single major siege, and bathing in the Mediterranean to mark the reach of his power. But Nur al-Din's true legacy was not conquest. He built the first dedicated court of justice in the medieval Muslim world, abolished illegal taxation, funded hospitals open to rich and poor alike, and personally heard the grievances of the poorest of his subjects with no armed guards between them. In Egypt, his lieutenant, a young Kurdish officer named Saladin, abolished a two-century-old caliphate on his orders, then turned that conquered domain against him. This is the story of the man Saladin's own chroniclers called the Just King: the architect, often forgotten, of everything that followed.