forty thousand mann of sugar, and she bore him a son, Jaʿfar. (1)

Malikshāh entered Baghdad twice, and he also marched on Aleppo; al-Muqtadī retained nothing with him but the title itself. The sultan returned to Baghdad a third time while ill. By then al-Muqtadī had already assigned the succession to his son al-Mustazhir, but Malikshāh compelled him to depose that son, to invest Jaʿfar—his own daughter’s child—in his place, to surrender Baghdad to him, and to move to Basra. The demand weighed heavily on al-Muqtadī and left him distraught, so he asked for ten days’ respite to make his preparations. He fasted, went without food, sat upon the bare earth, and implored his Lord. The sultan’s illness intensified, and he died in Shawwal of the year 485 AH, at the age of thirty-nine. People said that he had been poisoned by a pickle he had eaten. His vizier Niẓām (al-Mulk) had been slain only days earlier. Hardly anyone of rank attended the sultan, no public mourning was held for him, and his coffin was carried to Isfahan, where he was buried in a large madrasa. (2)

The caliph al-Mustazhir later married Khātūn, Malikshāh’s other daughter. After the sultan’s death his sons contested the throne among themselves for a time; the last of them to die was his son Sanjar, lord of Khurasan, who survived his father by a little less than seventy years.

Malikshāh commanded numerous armies and travelled light. In 482 AH he crossed the Oxus into Transoxiana, marched on Bukhara and Samarkand and took possession of them, then advanced through the Turkic lands as far as Kashghar, whose ruler submitted to him and came down to serve him. (3)

Al-Muʾayyad says in his History (4): “He was among the finest of men in both appearance and character.”