Egypt and Syria
Egypt's grain and the Syrian coast, and the long argument over whether they were one country. The provinces that left the caliphate earliest because they were richest, the Turkish atabegs who reunited them against an invasion from Europe, and the four Frankish states that held the shore for a hundred and ninety-two years and were removed from it in twenty-three.
The line below is a time axis. Position on it is date, so concurrency is visible: concurrent polities sit side by side rather than in sequence.
14 sourced edges run between this region and another, to Abbasid Caliphate, Fatimid Caliphate, Great Seljuk Empire, Ottoman Empire, Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo, Rasulid Sultanate, Byzantine Empire, Zurayid Dynasty, Tahirid Sultanate of Yemen and Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. Those are not drawn on this line — a thread that crossed regions would assert a sequence nobody cited — but they are on each polity’s own page.