lay in the Khad rāʾ ⦗1⦘. The mosque’s celebrated beauty and matchless ornamentation—proverbial throughout the world—were all destroyed in the fighting that broke out between the Egyptian and Iraqi armies ⦗2⦘.

In 462 AH the tyrant of the Byzantines advanced with an immense host and, after encamping at Manbij, put the town to the sack. Yet scarcity of provisions soon forced him to wheel about; in his camp a single ratl of bread sold for one dinar. Egypt itself was caught in an even harsher famine. It was on this occasion, says the author of The Mirror, that a woman in Cairo went out carrying a mudd of jewels and cried, “Who will take it for a mudd of wheat?” No one so much as glanced at her, whereupon she flung the jewels away, saying, “They were of no use to me when I needed them; I want nothing of them.”

No one would pick them up. Ruin threatened the whole province: a dog fetched five dinars, a cat three; the price of an irdabb ⦗3⦘ of grain reached one hundred dinars. People began to eat one another, and the people of Egypt scattered throughout the land ⦗4⦘.

In 463 AH the great battle between Islam and Christendom took place. Ibn al-Athir ⦗5⦘ reports that Armanus set out with two hundred thousand men, intent on striking the Muslims, and reached the region of Khilāṭ ⦗6⦘.

At that time Sultan Alp Arslan was in Khuy ⦗7⦘. When word reached him of the enemy’s vast numbers—while he had but fifteen thousand horse—he declared: “I shall confront them myself; if I come through alive…"