The wisdom of the Arabs saying: “The king is sterile” is valid for every time and place, valid for explaining the behavior of the authority and its members towards society and even toward some of the other wings of power that may cause concern to the Sultan and the leader in the sole rule and authority, for the king is sterile means that the king / leader not be contested in The throne of anyone, even if that Sunday is his brother or father, and in history are examples of these patterns repeated all the time.
Not only history, but the current Arab reality is a good example of that phrase. The Arab presidents are in constant fighting, eternal struggle, and a sterile stampede that does not end. Just as the Gulf today wrestles with each other, Saudi Arabia stands in front of Yemen, and Egypt wrestles with its neighbors, and the Levant fights with battles, while The armies of the West stood victorious, the Ayyubids were also.
The example of the struggle of the Ayyubid family over the throne and influence in Egypt and the Levant had its dire effects that brought the soul and strength back to the Crusaders once again after it had wiped out a large part of their power, the great Sultan Salahuddin Al-Ayyubi, when he recovered the cities of Levant and Jerusalem on the head from them.
The death of Sultan Salah al-Din Yusef bin Ayyub in the year 589 AH / 1193AD was the beginning of a long struggle between his successors from the Ayyubid family over power and authority, and the beginning was between his two best sons, Ali and Aziz Othman, and soon their uncle Abu Bakr bin Ayoub took advantage of this dispute and their lack of political experience to dominate the reins The situation in the Euphrates and the Levant and Egypt, and the death of Sultan Al-Adil in the year 615 AH / 1218 CE was a renewal of the same tragedy among his children, especially the trio of the Most Mighty Isa in the Southern Levant, Ashraf Musa in the Northern Levant, and the Complete Muhammad in Egypt.
The three brothers had divided the Ayyubid state between them, and despite that, the dispute remained most intense among them, at times the honorable and most of the brothers united with the whole and at the opposite, and sometimes one of them used the forces of the state algorithm that was like mercenary forces in that period after the dissolution of their state on the Euphrates Island and Diyarbakir And a third time, without shame, they seek the help of the remnants of the Crusader forces in the Levant, and it was not enough for them that they were afflicted with the Fifth Crusade against the Levant and Egypt, and the siege of Damietta and the location of Al-Mansoura where the state almost fell in the year 615 AH.
The struggle for the throne
The enemy brothers remained in this state until most of Jesus died in the year 624 AH, then the death of Al-Ashraf Musa in the year 635 AH, the owner of the island countries in the north-eastern part of the Levant, Iraq, and some of the countries of the Kurds and Kamel Muhammad, the owner of Egypt and Palestine in the same year in the year 635 AH.
Historian Mustafa Badr says: “If we look carefully at the history of the Ayyubid countries, we will find that many wars were taking place between members of the Ayyubid house, and one of the results of these wars was that some members of these ruling houses sometimes extended their influence over the property of others, and so was what happened when he seized Ashraf Muzaffar al-Din Musa, the owner of the island countries (north-east of the Levant, northwestern Iraq, and some areas in southern Turkey) over Damascus in 626 AH, and similar to what happened after that when the complete owner of Egypt extended his authority over Damascus in the year 635 AH, and he followed in that second Al-Adel in the same year then Al-Saleh Ayoub in 637 AH and 643 AH after Al-Saleh Ismail, the owner of it, had regained influence Where (637-643 AH) "[1]. This is unlike the difference of the young princes from the owners of one city or a few castles. This internal conflict, which lasted for more than 50 years after the death of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi in the year 589 AH, led to serious consequences at the political and military levels.
Where "the Ayyubids abandoned their historical role in confronting the Crusaders, and opted to adhere to the policy of appeasement until they devoted themselves to their internal disputes, then their state, which came as a successful response to the challenge posed by the Crusader aggression on the region - because the founder of the state Salahuddin committed to the policy of jihad and attack the crusaders - this state It has lost the justifications for its existence since the kings of the sons of Ayoub and their sultans abstained from the attack against the Crusaders, and resorted to a policy of truce and peaceful coexistence. One of the striking things in this way is that the wars that the Ayyubids fought against the Crusaders were mostly defensive wars that came as a reaction to the attack Or campaigns waged by the Crusaders against Muslims in Egypt and Syria, and in the midst of the campaign events of the Crusader seventh emerged a new force has demonstrated its ability to deal with the Crusaders and claim the Arab and Islamic region in the confrontation - that is the strength of the Mamluk "[2].
Alliances of the enemy brothers
The appearance of Prince Muhammad bin Sultan Al-Adil, fully nicknamed, had started since the advent of the Fifth Crusade against Egypt, since the Crusaders' arrival to the western side of Damietta in the month of Safar in the year 615 AH / May 1218AD, and they were able, at first, and because of the complete withdrawal in the south to easily occupy the city of Damietta However, the supply of Al-Muazzam Issa and Al-Ashraf Musa to their full brother Muhammad, and the relocation of Al-Kamil and his soldiers near the city of Mansoura on the Nile raised the morale of the army, and inflicted defeat on the Crusaders and signed a reconciliation agreement according to which they withdrew from Egypt in the year 618 AH / 1221 AD [3].
It is noteworthy that during this conflict, Al-Kamil, before the battle of Mansoura, had sent a very generous offer to the Crusaders, which is "handing over Jerusalem, Ashkelon, Tiberias, Jableh, and Lattakia in exchange for handing them Damietta and leaving from Egypt, but the Crusaders did not accept this but rather asked for more than that to hand the fortress of Karak" And three hundred thousand dinars in compensation for sabotaging (their property) in Jerusalem ”[4], and the Crusaders’ greed and categorical rejection of them, fortunately, were the reason for reviving the spirit of resistance, fighting and confrontation!
The just king Saif Al-Din Bin Ayoub
Al-Kamil, the eldest son, was the one who assumed the reign of Egypt after the death of his father, the just Sultan Abu Bakr bin Ayoub, the brother of Sultan Salah al-Din, and it soon became clear to him that the country was indebted to him, so that the historian Ibn Khalkhan (d. 681 AH) says: “The kingdom expanded to the full king. The one who attended the sermon in Mecca - may God Almighty honor him - that when the preacher reached the supplication of the complete king, he said: the owner of Makkah and its servants, Yemen and its servants, Egypt and Upper Egypt, Al-Jazeera and her son, the authority of the two tribes, the Lord of the Two Signs, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, Abu al-Ma’ali Muhammad the perfect king, Nasir al-Din Khalil Commander of the Faithful "[5].
But the political game overwhelmed the thinking and the core of it, as he used the opportunities to impose his control on the country whenever one of the parties to the Ayyubid House in the Levant and the island weakened, although he was the strongest by virtue of his authority over Egypt and the Two Holy Places, but he always looked to the Levant and controlled it.
And "he became the king full of influence and authority, which led him to impose on the princes of the Levant to abide by calm and tranquility, and did not deviate from his obedience except the glorious king, the owner of Damascus, who sought in the year 1225 AD / 622 AH after the complete king succeeded in isolating him from other Ayyubid princes to take an ally from Outside the Ayyubid house, he called Khwarizm Shah, whose properties had become adjacent to the property of the Ayyubids, and he even raid the country and plundered the island, and in fact, one of the princes of the Ayyubid house was the one who brought the algorithm to help him. [6]
The algorithm that built on the ruins of the Seljuk state in Iran and Iraq had reached an amount of power with which the Ayyubids with whom they were reckoning, therefore, from that date in the year 622 AH until the arrival of the sixth Crusade led by the German Emperor Frederick in 626 AH / 1229 CE, the Ayyubid conflict was taking place within the framework of From Al-Khwarizmi’s pressure on the Levant and Palestine, and the “seriousness of this conflict lay in the fact that each of the two conflicting parties resorted to seeking the help of external forces, so most of them, Isa, the owner of Damascus, resorted to Jalaluddin, the two leaders of the state of the al-Khwarizmiyya, and agreed with him against his noble and honorable brothers. German Emperor Frederick Celle II Hohenstaufen, and sent him an envoy of the tip is Prince Fakhruddin Osman "[7].
It was not strange that Al-Kamil used the assistance of the German Emperor specifically, because this emperor was born in Sicily and influenced by the Islamic culture in it, but his forces and his entourage were mostly Muslims, so the Ayyubid Sultan saw in the alliance with him an opportunity not to be missed, especially since the opposite alliance was a powerful threat to the throne of the complete Muhammad In Egypt, he saw that handing over Jerusalem to the German Sultan would be tempting for his acceptance of the alliance with him against his brothers in the Levant, the historian Ibn al-Ameed says: “The complete king wrote to the Anbar the king of the Germans to come to the Levant and the coast and give him the holy house and all the conquests of Salah al-Din in the coast” [8]!
And Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Shama (d. 665 AH) records in his book “The Tail on the Two Rawdles” that the complete alliance held by the German Emperor, in turn, resulted in sending Frederick an ambassador for his part to the Most Eisa Malik al-Sham threatening him and “asking him the countries that were opened by his uncle Salah al-Din, may God have mercy on him. He has the say and said: Tell your friend what I have except the sword.
As is happening now from the normalization and use of Arab rulers to Western powers, so conflict and greed for power led to the use of brothers by their regional enemies against each other. In the time of Salah al-Din, the Crusaders were the natural and traditional enemy in the collective mind of the masses, and because of politics and personal interests, the Sultan of Egypt used the Crusaders to be Help him and his brothers, and in our next report we will see how Jerusalem was delivered on a plate of gold to the German Emperor without resistance or a single drop of blood in order to preserve the throne!