the Kurds showed them no hospitality; at length they gave them two sheep and two bowls of milk. He thereupon withdrew to Nahavand and then to Mazandaran, while the clatter of their weapons filled his hearing and sight. He halted by a lake in that region, was stricken with dysentery, sought a remedy, but could not procure even a morsel of bread, and so he died.

It is said that the army entered in his register numbered three hundred thousand horsemen; another report claims that he had subdued roughly four hundred cities. His mother, Turkan, possessed a splendor the like of which had never been heard and exercised formidable power, yet Genghis Khan took her captive, and she tasted humiliation and hunger. Near the end he himself was seized by an overwhelming dread of the Tatars. They raided him; he rushed to a boat, arrows fell around him, and though they waded in after him they could not reach him. All this while he was suffering from pleurisy.

Death came upon him in fury,
unsheathing against him a ponderous sword;
no champions could shield him,
not even an elephant availed him a hair’s breadth.
Such is the lot of the gloaters—
Time consumes them, generation after generation.

He died on the Jazira in 617 AH and was shrouded in his valet’s turban.

His mother excelled in calligraphy and used to teach it; she relied on Allah alone, and her authority was equal to her son’s. Among her titles were “Chastity of This World and the Faith, Ālugh Turkan, Mistress of the Women of the Worlds.” She was bloodthirsty, descended from Turkish royalty, and possessed riches and jewels beyond description; the Tatars seized them all. Among the spoils they took from her son were two chests which he said contained wealth equal to the land tax of the whole realm.

92 – Fityān b. ʿAlī b. Fityān al-Dimashqī al-Shāghūrī*
The unrivaled man of letters, the poet of Damascus, Shihāb al-Dīn Fityān b. ʿAlī b. Fityān al-Dimashqī, al-Shāghūrī.