Zangid Dynasty

Edessa

Drafted from Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999)formation

Imad al-Din Zangi was an atabeg — a Turkish officer appointed guardian to a Seljuk prince, an office that inverted into a dynasty with total predictability wherever it was granted. He got Mosul in 1127 and Aleppo the year after, and for sixteen years he did what the Turkish commanders of Syria and the Jazira did: fought other Muslim rulers, mostly, for cities.

In December 1144 he took Edessa.

It was the first of the crusader states to be founded, in 1098, and it was the most exposed — a Frankish county east of the Euphrates with Muslim territory on three sides, held by a small ruling class over an Armenian and Syriac Christian population. The count was away; Zangi came fast, invested it for four weeks, mined the walls and took the city.

What followed matters more than the siege. In the Islamic world, Zangi became the first ruler of the crusading period with a reputation as a fighter of Franks. He had done a great deal else, and there is no need to pretend he was a holy warrior by temperament: the sources closest to him describe a man of exceptional brutality who was murdered in his tent by his own servants two years later — but the reputation was real and it was politically usable.

In Europe, the fall of Edessa produced the Second Crusade. Bernard of Clairvaux preached it, two kings led it, and it achieved nothing at all: the armies crossed Anatolia badly, arrived in Syria, decided to attack Damascus — which was a Muslim city hostile to Zangi's son and therefore the one place in Syria that had been useful to them — besieged it for four days and went home.

That failure is the hinge of the whole period. It destroyed the Damascene appetite for accommodation with the Franks, and it delivered Damascus to Nur al-Din, who took it in 1154 without a fight. Syria unified because a crusade attacked the one Muslim power that had been prepared to deal with the crusader states.

Yaranqash

Drafted from al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (1932)expansion

Zangi was killed in his sleep on the night of Saturday 14 September 1146, in his own camp, while besieging a castle on the Euphrates.

The man who did it was an attendant of Frankish origin named Yaranqash, for whom Zangi had a particular affection and in whose company he took pleasure, and who had been nursing a grudge over some injury done to him earlier. He found his moment when his master was off guard in his drunkenness, and he had help from some of the other attendants.

Zangi had taken every precaution. He surrounded himself with armed men and weapons and kept a strong guard posted around the enclosure of his tent. He was cut down on his bed with a number of effective blows to the vital parts, and nobody knew anything about it until the killer had got away — into the fortress Zangi had been besieging.

What happened to the army

It scattered, in Ibn al-Qalanisi's phrase, like the bands of Saba. His money and his treasuries were plundered. He was buried on the spot without a shroud, and his body was afterwards moved, so it was said, to a tomb near Raqqa.

The conqueror of Edessa, two years after the most celebrated victory in the Islamic world in half a century, was left in the ground unwashed by his own soldiers while they went through his baggage.

The roads became unsafe at once, and the Turkmen and the brigands were loose in the country districts after what Qalanisi calls a grateful period of security and a noteworthy respect for authority — which is what a Damascene official says about a man his own government had spent twenty years trying to keep out.

The division

His two sons split the inheritance without fighting over it, which is the unusual part.

Sayf al-Din Ghazi rode for Mosul, where the governor kept him out for a few days until terms were agreed, and then opened the gate; he took his father's place. Nur al-Din Mahmud went to Aleppo, and the moment he was inside he began assembling troops and paying them, and order was restored.

That is the whole of Nur al-Din's accession: he arrived, he paid the soldiers, and the city was his. He was about twenty-nine, he had the smaller and more exposed half of his father's state, and the half he had was the one facing the Franks.

Everything the dynasty is remembered for — the unification of Syria, the madrasas, the justice halls, the recovery of Jerusalem carried out by somebody else with his furniture — comes from the younger son getting Aleppo because his brother wanted Mosul.

The orchards, and the field at Inab

Drafted from al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (1932)expansion

Nur al-Din got Syria because the Second Crusade came to take Damascus and failed, and Ibn al-Qalanisi, who was an official of the city that was being besieged, wrote down both halves of it.

The Frankish armies came up to Damascus in July 1148. On Saturday 24 July the city's troops, its militia bands, its volunteers and its ghazis drew up against them in the orchards south-west of the walls and were pushed back: the Franks had the numbers and the equipment, took control of the water, spread through the orchards and camped in them, and then moved up and occupied a section of ground which, Qalanisi says, no army in ancient or recent times had managed to hold. The Malikite jurist Yusuf al-Findalawi was killed by the water near al-Rabwa, having refused to fall back in front of them; so was the ascetic Abd al-Rahman al-Halhuli. The Franks spent that night cutting down the fruit trees and building stockades out of them, and the people of the city spent it, in his phrase, discouraged and straitened in spirit through fear because of the horror of what they had witnessed.

They came out again on the Sunday and did better, and within four days the siege was over. The Franks pulled back and were pursued with arrows, and what Qalanisi remembers of the ground afterwards is the burial pits and the dead horses and a stench that almost overcame the birds in the air. Then he records the thing that mattered. Mu'in al-Din, the regent who had spent years keeping Damascus independent by dealing with the kingdom of Jerusalem against Aleppo, joined forces with Nur al-Din in the middle of September and campaigned with him, and the two of them took the castle of Arayma near Tripoli and captured a Frankish king's son and his mother in it, with a thousand horse sent down from Mosul to help.

A crusade raised to avenge Edessa had spent its strength on the one Muslim city in Syria that was not hostile to it, and pushed that city into the arms of the man it had been holding off for a decade.

The following June came the other half. Nur al-Din, reinforced by Turkmen cavalry and a detachment of the Damascus askar, moved into the territory of Antioch with about six thousand horse against roughly four thousand Frankish lancers and a thousand foot. They met at Inab. The Franks made their famous charge; the Muslims broke into detachments, came at them from several sides at once, and the whole thing was decided inside a cloud of dust. Almost nobody got away. Raymond of Poitiers, prince of Antioch — whom Qalanisi describes as one of the Frankish knights famous for gallantry, valour, cunning and great stature, and noted for the dread he inspired and his excessive ferocity — was found lying among his own guard and knights; his head was cut off and carried to Nur al-Din, who paid the man who brought it. It was Wednesday 29 June 1149.

Nur al-Din then rode to Antioch and camped at the gate. The city had been emptied of its soldiers and had nothing in it but townspeople, and he offered terms: surrender, and your lives and property are guaranteed. They answered that they could not do such a thing until they had given up hope of a rescuer. They had not yet given up hope, and he did not take the city.

That is the shape of the next five years in one sentence. He could destroy any Frankish field army that came out to meet him, and he could not take the walls behind it. What he could take was Damascus.

A rope from the wall

Drafted from al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (1932)expansion

Damascus was the largest city in Syria, it had held out against Zangi for twenty years, and on Sunday 25 April 1154 it fell in a morning to a man who then abolished the tax on vegetables.

Nur al-Din had been attacking it day after day. That morning the Damascus askar came out as usual, his troops pressed from the east, and the defenders fell back to the wall near the Kaysan Gate. And then, in Qalanisi's account — he was inside the city, and he is scathing about it — there was not a living soul on the wall, troops or townsmen, except a negligible handful of Turks on one tower, which he ascribes to the bad management of the authorities. A footsoldier walked up to the wall. A Jewish woman standing on it let down a rope. He climbed up unnoticed and a number of others followed him, and they planted a standard on the wall and shouted Ya Mansur.

At that point the resistance simply stopped — because of the affection the troops and citizens felt for Nur al-Din, says Qalanisi, and his justice and good reputation. A woodcutter ran to the East Gate with his axe and broke the bolts off it. The Thomas Gate was opened too. The army came in and went through the main streets and not one man opposed them, and then Nur al-Din came in himself, to what the chronicler calls the joy of all the people — who had been suffering famine and high food prices and were afraid of being besieged by the Franks.

Mujir al-Din, the last of the Burid rulers, shut himself in the citadel, was sent a guarantee of his life and property, came out on it, and was given districts around Homs to hold instead. There was some rioting and looting in the markets by what Qalanisi calls the baser sort, and it was stopped. Two days later the leading jurists and merchants were summoned and told what the new regime intended.

Then the decree. The duties on the melon market and the vegetable market were abolished, and so was the farming-out of the canals; it was written up and read from the pulpit after the Friday prayers. Qalanisi — a Damascene official of the administration that had just been removed, writing about the man who removed it — says that the husbandmen and the cultivators and the women and the journeymen raised their voices in the open to pray for his long life and the victory of his standards.

It is worth being clear about what that passage is. It is not neutral: he is writing under the new government and he had spent the previous decade recording the Zangids as a threat. But the detail is specific in a way propaganda usually is not — the melon market, the vegetable market, the canal farms — and it names exactly the classes that a market-duty abolition would benefit. A reputation for justice was the instrument that took the walls, and it had been built for years before it was used.

With Damascus, Muslim Syria was under one authority for the first time since the First Crusade. In the north the Artuqids had been brought in by a different method: in 1149 Zangi's son Sayf al-Din took Dara from Timurtash of Mardin and then besieged Mardin itself, and the peace that ended it was sealed by Timurtash giving him his daughter — and when Sayf al-Din died, his brother Qutb al-Din married her too. Later the lord of Mardin and the lord of Hisn Kayfa appear in the field alongside Nur al-Din, in a coalition that also included the Armenians of Cilicia and the Danishmendid of Sivas, assembled against the Seljuk sultan of Konya.

Nobody in that coalition was a subject. They were houses that had concluded it was better to be inside Nur al-Din's arrangements than outside them, which is what the unification of Syria actually consisted of.

Three times to Egypt

Drafted from Abu'l-Faraj), The Chronography of Gregory Abu'l Faraj, the Son of Aaron, the Hebrew Physician, Commonly Known as Bar Hebraeus (1932)peak

Bar Hebraeus, a Christian bishop writing a century later with no side to take, gives the Egyptian expeditions as what they were: a bidding war for the richest country in the region, conducted by three parties who all knew the stakes, in which the winner was the one who kept turning up.

The instrument was a Kurdish officer. Shirkuh and his brother Ayyub, sons of Shadhi, came from Dvin in Armenia and had been in the service of the eunuch amir of Tikrit; Shirkuh killed a Christian of Tikrit whom the amir was fond of, and the two brothers fled to Zangi at Mosul and prospered there. Ayyub held the citadel of Baalbek for Zangi, surrendered it to Damascus after Zangi's murder, and later helped hand Damascus to Nur al-Din. Shirkuh was given Homs. When Shawar, the Fatimid vizier, came north in flight from a rival and asked for troops, Nur al-Din looked at the men available and judged Shirkuh the best of them.

1163. Shirkuh went south with Shawar and restored him, and Shawar worked out from his behaviour that he intended to take the country, so he made peace with the Franks instead and paid Shirkuh none of the gold or the towns he had promised. Shirkuh took Bilbays; Shawar brought the king of Jerusalem down with a large Frankish army; Egyptians and Franks together shut Shirkuh up in Bilbays for three months. What released him was news from Syria — the Franks had been broken and captured at Harim — and the king of Jerusalem, needing to go home, persuaded Shirkuh to march out unmolested and leave Egypt to its owners. Shirkuh, says Bar Hebraeus, agreed readily.

1167. He went back, taking his nephew Saladin, crossed to the west bank of the Nile and went up into Upper Egypt. Shawar sent for the Franks again, and a combined army crossed after him. Shirkuh's officers advised retreat: they were outnumbered, the peasants and the soldiers and everyone in the country were enemies, and there was nowhere to fall back to. Then a slave of Nur al-Din named Bungush said that if they did not fight they would have to go back to Nur al-Din and explain themselves, and he would stop their rations and take back what they had been eating for years, because a man who trembles at the prospect of a battle is not a king's soldier but a field labourer, or else should live in the house with the women. Shirkuh said he was of the same opinion.

What he then did was a trick, and Bar Hebraeus describes it as one. He put Saladin and all the baggage in the centre of the line to make the numbers look bigger, and told him that the enemy would throw their whole weight at the centre thinking that was where he was; Saladin was not to fight hard, but to give ground little by little and not to worry about pursuit, because Shirkuh would be behind them. He kept for himself a body of trained hunting men chosen for stamina. The centre gave way, the Franks and Egyptians chased it, Shirkuh chased the chasers, the runaways turned around, and the pursuers were caught between. Bar Hebraeus puts Shirkuh at two thousand and the allies at ten. He then took Alexandria without a fight.

The terms he accepted for leaving are the clearest measure of what Egypt was worth. Fifty thousand dinars for Shirkuh to go home; Alexandria handed back to the Egyptians; and a hundred thousand dinars a year to the Franks, who were to keep an officer and a troop of horse posted at the gates of Alexandria.

1168-69. The Franks came back for the rest, and Shawar tried to buy them off with a million dinars, of which he paid a hundred thousand down. Bar Hebraeus gives his reasoning to them in the first person: you know what I owe you, and if I thought the Arabs would let me hand you Egypt I would hand it over now, but they would destroy me for it — so take as much gold as you like, go home, and be my tax collectors as before, and do not let Nur al-Din come and take the country, because then you will have neither the country nor the tribute. The Franks took the down payment and left.

Nur al-Din sent Shirkuh anyway. Bar Hebraeus explains why in eleven words: it was not his object to do good to the Egyptians, but to rule over them.

What followed in Cairo was three months of everyone plotting to murder everyone else and being prevented by procedure. The caliph received Shirkuh honourably and then, because Shawar ran the administration, put him off with empty words and provided nothing for him or his men; the caliph was planning a feast at which to seize Shirkuh and his nephew, and was stopped by Shawar's son. Saladin wanted to kill Shawar and was stopped by his uncle. Then one day Shawar came to call and found Shirkuh out — he had gone to get a blessing at a holy man's tomb — and Saladin, riding with him and talking, threw himself off his horse and took hold of him, and could not kill him without his uncle's order, and said so. They put it to the caliph, who by then had no authority over his own vizier at all, and the caliph told them to do it.

Shawar was killed and his house was plundered and Shirkuh became vizier in his place, with the titles the Fatimid viziers carried — King, and Captain of the Host. He held the office two months and died of strangury. His nephew took it, and made every soldier in the army his friend by the size of his gifts, and ruled Egypt.

Making the counter-crusade a programme

Drafted from Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999)peak

Imad al-Din Zangi was a Seljuk atabeg — a Turkish officer appointed guardian to a Seljuk prince, an office that repeatedly turned into a dynasty — who held Mosul from 1127 and took Aleppo the year after. In 1144 he captured Edessa, the first of the Crusader states to be founded and the first to fall, which prompted the Second Crusade and made him the first Muslim ruler of the period with a reputation as a fighter of Franks.

His son Nur al-Din did the more consequential thing. He turned the recovery of Jerusalem from an objective into an ideological programme: sponsoring jihad literature, endowing madrasas and Sufi lodges across Syria to build a Sunni religious establishment that supported it, commissioning a minbar to be installed in the Aqsa mosque when the city was retaken, and unifying Muslim Syria under one authority as the precondition.

He did not live to use it. He died in 1174, having sent an expeditionary force to Egypt that ended the Fatimid caliphate and left his own officer's nephew in charge there. Saladin took Damascus from Nur al-Din's heirs within months, and inherited both the unified Syria and the programme. That is why the Zangids are hard to date an ending to: the Ayyubids did not destroy them so much as replace them branch by branch over two generations, while carrying on their project.

A hospital, and a room to be complained in

Drafted from Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999)peak

The part of Nur al-Din's programme that outlasted him was not the campaigning. It was domestic, and it was built in the same years.

He built madrasas across Syria in numbers — Damascus and Aleppo especially — endowing a Sunni religious establishment with the instrument Nizam al-Mulk had invented for the Seljuks a century earlier. He built Sufi lodges. He restored the walls and the water supply of Damascus.

Two of the foundations are worth naming individually.

The Bimaristan al-Nuri at Damascus, endowed in 1154, was a hospital and a teaching hospital: wards, a pharmacy, salaried physicians, and instruction. It went on functioning as a hospital and a medical school into the nineteenth century, seven hundred years, and the doctors attached to it wrote a substantial medical literature. Ibn al-Nafis, who described the pulmonary circulation of the blood three centuries before Europe did, trained there.

The Dar al-Adl — the house of justice — was something new. Nur al-Din built the first one at Damascus around 1163: a hall in which the ruler himself sat, in public, on fixed days, to hear grievances brought by his subjects against his own officials and soldiers, with the jurists present. The institution spread; the Ayyubids and then the Mamluks built their own. What it was for is legible. A Turkish military ruler with no lineage, governing an Arab population, asking it to pay for a long war, made his answerability the public face of his government.

It is the standing problem of every Turkish dynasty in the Arab world, and it was answered in a number of ways — the Marinids with madrasas, the Almohads with a doctrine, the Fatimids with a mission. Nur al-Din built a room in which he could be complained to.

His reputation followed accordingly. The chroniclers of the next century, writing under the Ayyubids and Mamluks, made him the model just ruler — pious, austere, accessible — against whom later sultans were measured. Saladin, who took his state, spent a good deal of effort being seen to continue it.

A pulpit made in advance

Drafted from Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999)aside?What aside means

Nur al-Din commissioned a minbar — a mosque pulpit — at Aleppo in 1168 or 1169, carved in wood with an inscription naming him, to be installed in the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem when the city was retaken. Jerusalem had been in Frankish hands for seventy years and there was no immediate prospect of taking it.

The object is the counter-crusade in miniature: a public, dated, expensive commitment to an outcome not yet achieved, made to be seen by people in Aleppo who were being asked to pay for the campaign that would achieve it. Nur al-Din also endowed madrasas across Syria to produce a religious establishment that preached the recovery of Jerusalem, and sponsored a literature of fada'il al-Quds, the merits of Jerusalem, that gave the city a religious weight in Sunni piety it had not carried at the time of the First Crusade.

He died in 1174 without taking the city. Saladin took it in 1187 and had Nur al-Din's minbar brought from Aleppo and installed, with the original inscription naming a man who had been dead for thirteen years. It stood until 1969, when an arson attack destroyed it.

The Ayyubids did not merely replace the Zangids. They inherited the project and finished it using the objects it had already made.

Whose name was on the coins

Drafted from Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (1901)contraction

Nur al-Din died in 1174 leaving an eleven-year-old son and an officer in Egypt who had been sent there to be got rid of. What followed was not a conquest of the Zangid state. It was a slow substitution, and it can be tracked in the mint.

What Saladin struck, and when

Lane-Poole sets out the sequence, and it is a document in itself.

As vizier of Egypt, Saladin struck coins in the name of the Fatimid caliph al-Adid — 1169 to 1171. When the Fatimid caliphate was abolished he struck them in the name of Nur al-Din, from 1171 to 1174. In neither period did he put his own name on anything.

Then Nur al-Din died. Saladin occupied Damascus, and on the copper coinage he put the name of al-Salih, Nur al-Din's son — adding his own as well.

And in 1175, for the first time, gold coins from Cairo and Alexandria appeared with the titles of the king strong to aid, Joseph son of Ayyub.

Four stages, each one legible from a distance, none of them a declaration. He never repudiated the Zangids; he stood beside them on the metal, and then the metal stopped mentioning them. Lane-Poole notes the technical consequence precisely: Saladin's independent sovereignty dates from the moment he issued coins in his own name, not from any battle.

Standing next to the heir

The legal position Saladin occupied for a decade was that he governed on behalf of Nur al-Din's son, whose family he was in the process of dispossessing.

It let him take Damascus in the boy's name. It let him campaign against Aleppo, where the boy actually was, as the loyal servant rescuing him from bad advisers. It let him treat the Zangids of Mosul as rebels against a settlement he was upholding.

The Zangids could not find an argument against it, because the argument would have had to be that a subordinate who conquers in his master's name is a usurper — and that is precisely how the Zangids themselves had begun, as atabegs governing in the name of Seljuk princes.

Peace eventually reigned between Saladin and the house of Zangi, in Lane-Poole's phrase, and it was the peace of a family that had been reduced to one province. Mesopotamia was annexed. Mosul survived as a Zangid city and nothing more.

The other side of the ledger

The years in which the dynasty was being absorbed were quiet ones on the Frankish frontier, and that is not a coincidence.

There was a nominal truce with the crusaders, negotiated by Humphrey of Toron, whose friendship with Saladin had gone as far as admitting him to the rank of knighthood. The organisation of the new dominions and the fortification of Cairo took up the time — new stone walls laid out, and the Citadel begun, though it was not finished until his nephew al-Kamil's reign thirty years later. The founder's inscription can still be read over the Gate of the Steps.

So while the Zangid inheritance was being consolidated, the counter-crusade Nur al-Din had built the state around was in abeyance, and its new master was being knighted by a Frankish baron and building a citadel.

What was actually inherited

The thing to see is that almost nothing was destroyed.

The army was Nur al-Din's army. The doctrine of the holy war, the network of madrasas, the reputation for justice, the argument that Syria and Egypt had to be under one hand before Jerusalem could be recovered — all Zangid, all continued, all now attached to a different family name.

Jerusalem was recovered in 1187 with the instrument Nur al-Din assembled, thirteen years after Nur al-Din died and by a man he had sent to Egypt to be got out of the way. How that officer came to be in Egypt at all is the thing that decided it, and it happened a decade before any of this.

The officer they sent to Egypt

Drafted from Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus 1193-1260 (1977)end

The three expeditions to Egypt are the reason the Zangids do not exist.

Saladin spent the five years after his uncle's death as the nominal servant of two masters and the actual master of one country. He ended the Fatimid caliphate in 1171, having the Friday sermon at Cairo pronounced for the Abbasid caliph instead. Nur al-Din, watching an officer's nephew acquire Egypt in his name and remit very little of its revenue, was preparing to march south and settle the question when he died in 1174.

His heir was eleven. Saladin took Damascus within months, and over the following twelve years took Aleppo and then Mosul's obedience from the remaining Zangid branches.

The dynasty did not end there, which is why its extinction is dated nearly eighty years later: Zangid branches went on ruling at Mosul and in the Jazira as Ayyubid vassals until the middle of the thirteenth century. The Ayyubids did not destroy the Zangids. They inherited the state, its army, its religious establishment, its programme and even its furniture, and then replaced its family one branch at a time.

It is the same mechanism that carried the Ghaznavids out of Samanid service and the Ghurids out of theirs, with one difference. The instrument that walked away here walked away with the whole project intact, and finished it. Saladin took Jerusalem thirteen years after Nur al-Din died, and put Nur al-Din's pulpit in the mosque.

The Franks fight for the Zangids

Drafted from Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (1901)afterlife

Nur al-Din died in 1174 leaving an eleven-year-old heir, and the officer he had sent to Egypt came back for the rest of it.

Saladin's case was that he was acting for the boy. Lane-Poole describes the ride: seven hundred picked horsemen across the desert to Damascus, which was handed over, and then north through Homs and Hama to Aleppo — where the child-king's vizier shut the gate in his face, because nobody in Aleppo believed the protestations of loyalty.

They were right not to. But what they did next is the part that gets left out of the story.

The alliance

The Zangids fought Saladin with the help of the Franks and the Assassins.

An attempt was made on Saladin's life by emissaries of the Old Man of the Mountain. Count Raymond of Tripoli brought a Frankish army into the field to create a diversion in favour of Aleppo — his Muslim ally, as Lane-Poole calls him without embarrassment. The siege of Aleppo was raised and Saladin was checked, and had to content himself with Syria south of it.

Nor was he left alone there. The Zangid atabeg of Mosul sent an army out of Mesopotamia to combine with his cousin at Aleppo, and the two of them marched on Hama.

So the dynasty that had made the war against the Franks into a programme, that had preached it from the pulpits of Aleppo and Damascus for thirty years and built the institutions to pay for it, spent its last decade fighting the man who was going to carry it out, in alliance with the crusaders and the Assassins.

Nobody involved thought this was strange. A dynasty's programme is one thing and a dynasty's survival is another, and when the two came apart the Zangids chose the second, the way anybody would.

The long swallowing

It took Saladin twelve years and he did it piece by piece.

Damascus in 1174. Then a decade of campaigning in which the Franks were mostly left alone. In 1182 and 1183 he went into Mesopotamia and subdued the whole country except the city of Mosul itself. Aleppo he did not storm; he bought it, by exchange, in 1183. Mosul he besieged twice without success, and in 1186 it consented to become his vassal, which brought northern Mesopotamia and part of Kurdistan into his empire permanently.

Then, with the north settled and Mosul's contingents available to him, he turned on the kingdom of Jerusalem. Hattin was the following summer.

The order of operations

The sequence is worth stating plainly, because it is usually told the other way round.

Saladin did not take Jerusalem and then consolidate Syria. He spent thirteen years consolidating Syria — most of it against fellow Muslims, and specifically against the family whose war he was continuing — and took Jerusalem in the fourteenth, in a single campaigning season, once there was nobody behind him.

The Zangids of Mosul went on ruling as vassals into the thirteenth century, and their branch in the Jazira outlived Saladin's own dynasty in Egypt. What ended in 1186 was not the family. It was the possibility that the war Zangi's sons had started would be finished by Zangi's sons.