Shajar al-Durr
News of the murder of al-Muazzam Turanshah and the inauguration of Shajar al-Durr as the new Sultana reached Syria. The Syrian Emirs were asked to pay homage to Shajar al-Durr but they refused and the Sultan's deputy in Al Karak rebelled against Cairo. The Syrian Emirs in Damascus gave the city to an-Nasir Yusuf the Ayyubid Emir of Aleppo and the Mamluks in Cairo responded by arresting the Emirs who were loyal to the Ayyubids in Egypt. In addition to the Ayyubids in Syria, the "Abbasid" Caliph al-Musta' sim in Baghdad also rejected the Mamluk move in Egypt and refused to recognize Shajar al-Dur as a monarch. The refusal of the Caliph to recognize Shajar al-Durr as the new Sultana was a great setback to the Mamluks in Egypt as the custom during the Ayyubid era was that the Sultan could gain legitimacy only through the recognition of the Abbasid Caliph.&lt;ref name="Shayyal, p.115/vol.2"&gt;Shayyal, p.115/vol.2&lt;/ref&gt; The Mamluks, therefore, decided to install Izz al-Din Aybak as a new Sultan. He married Shajar al-Durr who abdicated and passed the throne to him after she had ruled Egypt as Sultana for about three months. Though the period of Shajar al-Durr's rule as a monarch was of short duration, it witnessed two important events in history: one, the expelling of Louis IX from Egypt, which marked the end of the Crusaders' ambition to conquer the southern Mediterranean basin; and two, the death of the Ayyubid dynasty and the birth of the Mamluk state which dominated the southern Mediterranean for decades.