ir, sum up the history of Egypt during most of the eleventh century.
The wisdom and firmness of two great Armenian vezirs, Bedr-el-Gemali
(1073-1094) and his son Afdal (1094-1121), brought a large degree of
order, but the last years of the Fatimid caliphate were blotted by
savage murders both of caliphs and vezirs, and by the loss of their
Syrian dominions to Seljuks and Crusaders.

_IV.--The House of Saladin_

It was a question whether Egypt would fall to the Christian king of
Jerusalem or the Moslem king of Damascus; but, after several invasions
by both, Nur-ed-din settled the problem by sending his Syrian army to
Cairo in 1169, when the Crusaders withdrew without offering battle, and
the Fatimid caliphate came to an end in 1171.

On the Syrian general's death, two months after the conquest, his
nephew, Salah-ed-din ibn-Ayyub (Saladin), succeeded to the vezirate, and
after Nur-ed-din's death, in 1174, he made himself independent sultan,
not only of Egypt but of Syria and Mesopotamia. Saladin was a Kurd from
the Tigris districts; but his training and his following were purely
Turkish, moulded on the Seljuk model, and recruited largely from the
Seljuk lands. His fame was won outside Egypt, and only eight of the
twenty-four years of his reign were spent in Cairo; the rest was passed
in waging wars in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, culminating in the
catastrophic defeat of the Crusaders near Tiberias in 1187, and the
conquest of Jerusalem and all of the Holy Land.

The famous crusade of Richard I., though it resulted only in recovering
a strip of coast from Acre to Jaffa, and did not rescue Jerusalem, wore
out Saladin's strength, and in 1193 the chivalrous and magnanimous
"Soldan" died. In Egypt his chief work, after repressing revolts of
black troops and Shia conspiracies, and repelling successive naval
attacks on Damietta and Alexandria by the Eastern emperor and the kings
of Jerusalem and Sicily, was the building of the Citadel of Cairo after
the model of Norman fortresses in Syria, and the encouragement of Sunni
orthodoxy by the founding and endowment of medresas, or theological
colleges. The people, who had never been really converted to the Fatimid
creed, accepted the latest reformation with their habitual nonchalance.
This was really the greatest achievement of Saladin and his house. Cairo
succeeded to Baghdad and Cordova as the true metropolis of Islam, and
Egypt has remained true to the most narrow sch