al-Muʿazzam

Al-Malik al-Muʿazzam ʿIsa Sharaf ad-Din ( Arabic الملك المعظم عيسى شرف الدين, DMG al-Malik Muʿaẓẓam ʿĪsā Šaraf ad-Dīn ; * 1176 in Cairo ; † November 12, 1227 in Damascus ) was an emir of Syria and Palestine from the Ayyubid dynasty . He was one of the sons of Sultan al-Adil I. Abu Bakr (Saphadin) and thus a nephew of the famous Saladin .

When his father died in 1218, al-Muʿazzam was the second son to rule Syria, including the city of Jerusalem and Damascus as the capital, and should be subordinate to his eldest brother, Sultan al-Kamil . But al-Muʿazzam and his third brother, al-Ashraf , who ruled in Mesopotamia, did not want to accept this. Before it came to the fratricidal struggle, however, the Ayyubids had to fend off the Fifth Crusade , which was just beginning and was directed against Egypt and thus threatened the most important center of rule of the Ayyubids.

In the run-up to this threat, al-Muʿazzam had the city fortifications of Jerusalem down to the Tower of David torn down and the surrounding castles razed because he feared surrender to the crusaders and did not want to leave a defensible city to them. From then on, until the modern city wall was built under the Ottomans in the 16th century , Jerusalem remained an unfortified and militarily insignificant city for more than 300 years.

At first, al-Muʿazzam concentrated his struggle in the Syrian region against the Christian rulers, who represented the remnants of the Kingdom of Jerusalem . He fought back the knights of the Hungarian King Andrew II and conquered Caesarea Maritima . But when the crusaders set off from Damiette for Cairo in the late summer of 1221 , al-Muʿazzam and al-Ashraf also went to Egypt with their armies to support their brother. Together they managed to lead the crusaders into a trap near al-Mansura and thus seal their defeat. In September 1221 the crusaders had to leave Egypt defeated.

After this threat was averted, the Ayyubid brothers began their power struggles among each other, al-Ashraf and al-Muʿazzam now ruled in their areas virtually independently of al-Kamil. During this conflict, the Roman-German Emperor Frederick II, banished by the Pope, prepared in Italy for a new crusade to regain Jerusalem, which made him an important factor in the conflict among the Ayyubids. Al-Kamil was the first to successfully contact the emperor and offered him the prospect of surrendering Jerusalem for an alliance against al-Muʿazzam and al-Ashraf. During his life, al-Muʿazzam was able to assert himself against his brother until he died in November 1227. His young son and successor, an-Nasir Dawud , was subsequently unable to assert himself against al-Kamil and al-Ashraf, who jointly took action against him.

literature

• Wolfgang Stürner : Friedrich II. 1194-1250 . 3. Edition in one volume, fully bibliographically updated and expanded to include a foreword and documentation with additional information. Primusverlag, Darmstadt 2009, ISBN 978-3-89678-664-7 .
• Hans Ludwig Gottschalk : Al-Malik al-Kāmil of Egypt and his time. A study of the history of the Middle East and Egypt in the first half of the 7th / 13th centuries. Century. Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1958.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans L. Gottschalk: Al-Malik al-Kāmil of Egypt and his time. Wiesbaden 1958, p. 88.

predecessor	Office	successor
al-Adil I. Abu Bakr	Emir of Damascus (Syria) 1218–1227	an-Nasir Dawud