Saladin (Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub) became effective ruler of Egypt after the death of the last Fatimid caliph in 1171 and extended his authority over Syria following the death of Nur ad-Din in 1174, founding the Ayyubid dynasty. Saladin revitalised Sunni Islamic institutions in Egypt, patronised scholars and poets, and presented himself as a chivalric leader in both Islamic and Christian imagination. His reconquest of Jerusalem in 1187 triggered the Third Crusade and made him one of the most famous figures in medieval history on both sides of the cultural divide.

Saladin became a potent literary figure in both Arabic and European traditions. Arabic court poets celebrated him in elaborate qasidas, while European poets — including the Italian tradition culminating in Dante, who placed him among the virtuous pagans in Limbo — treated him as an exemplar of noble conduct. His reputation for chivalry influenced the construction of the ideal courtly knight in European romance, and he appears sympathetically in Boccaccio's Decameron and in the matter of crusade poetry from the twelfth century onward.