Zengids, Ayyubids and Seljuqs 751
his reign he scrupulously respected the confederative structure of the empire.
If he was planning a radical reshaping of this structure, he died before he could
take any concrete steps toward that goal. In the siege of 1238 he had even
promised to restore Damascus to al-Nasir Da
ud, the nephew whom he had
dispossessed nine years before. (We cannot of course be sure that he would
have kept his promise; al-Kamil was always a man of flexible principles.) Upon
his death in Damascus in March 1238, al-Kamil’s personal dominions went to
his two sons, al-
Adil II in Egypt and al-Salih Ayyub in the East. Damascus
was left to the discretion of his amirs; they assigned it to one of his nephews,
al-Jawad Yunus, a prince of surpassing obscurity.
In principle, then, the Ayyubid confederation was still intact, along lines
not much different from those laid down by Saladin and al-
Adil. In reality,
everything had changed. No one was happy with the new settlement. It would
break down almost at once, and the internecine wars of the next decade, far
bitterer than any that had preceded them in Ayyubid times, would utterly trans-
form the political system created by Saladin. The dissolution of the Ayyubid
confederation led finally to the centralized military autocracy of the Mamluk
sultanate, but the analysis of these events must be reserved for another chapter.
The century and a half between the death of Malikshah and al-Kamil
Muhammad was clearly a period of intense political decentralization in western
Iran and the Fertile Crescent. However, only sporadically was it an era of po-
litical chaos. What we observe is a competition for autonomy or paramountcy
among local rulers and senior amirs who possessed roughly equal resources.
That competition was governed by well-understood if rarely articulated rules
of politics. Moreover, it was carried out within a rather stable set of fiscal and
administrative practices (the iqta
, the mamluk system, the atabeg and so on).
The dynastic succession, passing from Seljuqids to Zengids to Ayyubids,
marked no deep changes in these rules or practices. However, each of these
dynastic formations did incorporate them in a distinctive way. The Seljuqid
legacy left by Tutush in 1095 was so inchoate that his immediate successors were
unable to organize effective states, nor could any one of them hope to impose
a lasting order on the whole region from Damascus to Mosul. Zengi, schooled
in the Great Seljuqid politics of Baghdad, was no doubt more talented and
determined than his predecessors. He was also luckier, because there was al-
most no one to oppose him between Mosul and Aleppo at the beginning of his
career, and because he lived long enough to convert his first acquisitions into
a solid political structure. He was also fortunate in his successors, particularly
his second son Nur al-Din Mahmud, who knew how to extend and strengthen
his father’s legacy over a long reign. Nur al-Din created an enduring political
framework for his successors; in effect he trained the amirs and administrators
who would build the Ayyubid empire. Saladin, finally, began his career as a
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