Usama ibn Munqidh (1095-1188) was born at Shayzar on the Orontes in northern Syria, into the Munqidhite family of the Banu Kinanah who held the castle. Trained in war, hunting and letters by his father Murshid and his uncle Sultan, he fought Franks, Byzantines and rival Muslim forces from his youth. After leaving Shayzar in 1138 he served the atabeg Mu'in al-Din Unur of Damascus, the Fatimid court in Cairo (1144-1154), Nur al-Din in Damascus, and the Artuqid ruler of Hisn Kayfa, before Saladin summoned him to Damascus in 1174. Most of his family died in the earthquake that destroyed Shayzar in 1157. A poet and anthologist as well as a soldier, he wrote some dozen works, and he died in Damascus at the age of ninety-three.
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“Which wouldst thou prefer, living with one leg or dying with two?”
Usama ibn Munqidh dictated these reminiscences, known in Arabic as the Kitab al-I'tibar (the Book of Learning by Example), when he was nearly ninety lunar years old and living in Damascus under Saladin's patronage. The book is not a continuous autobiography but a sequence of anecdotes, grouped loosely by subject and linked by association, meant to teach that the length of each life is fixed by God and that neither daring nor caution can change it.