Battle of Inab

The years immediately following the siege continued to reshape the political landscape around the household in ways that would matter enormously to the family's future, even if their full significance would not become clear until later.

In 1149, Nur ad-Din, Zangi's son, now firmly established as the ruler of Aleppo and steadily emerging as the most formidable Muslim leader in Syria, won a decisive victory over the Crusader principality of Antioch at the Battle of Inab, in which Prince Raymond of Antioch himself was killed on the field.

It was a victory that dramatically enhanced Nur ad-Din's prestige and power, and it marked him with increasing clarity as the rising figure around whom the fractured Muslim territories of Syria might eventually be drawn together, a role his own father had begun to play before his sudden death, and which Nur ad-Din now seemed increasingly capable of fulfilling in his own right.

For Ayyub, watching these developments from his position within Unur's Damascus, the calculus of loyalty was once again shifting.