قلعة صلاح الدين الأيوبي
Midan Salah ad-Din, Egypt
About
Below the citadel were the maydan, or parade ground, and stables, where the Mamluks played polo and put on military reviews. From that point one went up to the citadel to observe or participate in the functions of the royal court. There the sultan dispensed justice and injustice, rewarded and punished received ambassadors and supplicants, examined criminals and officials and carried on the business of ruling personally and arbitrarily in Mamluk fashion. Salah El Din Ibn Ayyub, founder of the ayyubid dynasty in Egypt, came to power as the result of a threatened attack by a crusader force against the Fatimids, whose strength was ebbing in 1168. They appealed for help to Nur El Din, the powerful Seljuk overlord of Damascus, who dispatched a military aid mission of which Salah El Din was the second in command. The crusaders were successfully repulsed, but the rescuers remained and seized control of Egypt. Salah El Din became the ruler of Egypt in 1169 and in 1171 he suppressed the Fatimid Khalifate and Egypt returned once more to the sunni fold. Salah El Din gave orders to the citadel as a secure seat of government. He also built the city walls with which he intended to enclose El Qahira Al Fustat, the commercial economic center of the greater Cairo complex. Many parts of the city walls still exist and are visible along the northern walls and along the Darb Al Ahmar. The most interesting and easily accessible section is the corner which remains where the extension to the northern Fatimid walls turned south towards the citadel. One way to get there is to drive east along sharia Al Azhar to the traffic circle beyond the modern section of the university and make a turn around it, and on to sharia Al Mansuriya, continue north slowly five hundred meters or so until you see four palm trees on the right, just before a left turn which leads to the north gates. The citadel was built on an articially detached spur of the Muqattam range with limestone quarried from it and large blocks supplied by the small pyramids at Giza, it includes two enclosures the northern and the southern. The northern half was the military area with its long thread of curtain wall and half round towers, it was completed by Salah El Din between 1176 and 1182. his brother and successor Al Adil was responsible for the strengthen of many towers in 1207. two of them, built around Salah El Din original corner towers, are the burg al-Ramla and the burg al-Haddad. They stand above sharia Salah Salim as it curves behind the citadel and passes between it and the Muqattam range. The southern half was developed by Salah el Din nephew al Kamil as a royal residence. The buildings mosques, an audience hall, private palaces, a library, a mansion for the wazir were torn down by Sultan al-Nasir Muhammed. These buildings in turn were pillaged and allowed to fall to ruin by the Ottomans and the French and finally demolished by Muhammed Ali there have thus been three major building periods in the citadel history: Ayyubid, fourteenth century Mamluk, and nineteenth century Mohammed Ali the two enclosures are connected by the Bab Al Qulla which stands just to the northeast of al-Nasir Mohammed mosque. The citadel is divided into three major sections: the fortress proper on the northeast, the walls of which are largely Ayyubid and Turkish, the southern enclosure with nineteenth century wall, and the lower enclosure marching down the face of the hill on the west which is almost exclusively from the Mohammed Ali period, its walls are nineteenth century, except for the Bab al-Azab, the great lower gate opening on the Maydan built by Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda in 1754 – 1168.
