until he was in the very midst, while he was accompanied by only a small detachment. His ranks broke and scattered; a Berber hurled a missile at him, so he toppled to the ground and was slaughtered. His head was hoisted upon a spear and his clothes were stripped away, so that his nakedness had to be covered with weeds. Afterwards they levelled the ground over him and erased every trace of his grave.⦗1⦘

Al-Ṣūlī relates that the man who killed him was a slave belonging to Buliq,⦗2⦘ one of the champion warriors. People were astonished at the feats of horsemanship he displayed that day. He charged al-Muqtadir with his lance and ran it clean through him; when the crowd shouted at him, he rode toward the Palace of the Caliphate intending to bring out al-Qāhir. On the way he collided with a load of thorn-brush, which squeezed him in by the butcher Qinnar;⦗3⦘ the butcher caught him with a meat-hook. His horse bolted from beneath him at full gallop, whereupon the people dragged him down and burned him together with the thorn-brush.⦗4⦘

It was said that in al-Muqtadir’s residence there were eleven thousand eunuch slaves, apart from the Slavs and the Byzantines. He squandered the treasuries until he himself was in need, lavishing the money on his favorites; to one of them he presented the celebrated “Orphan Pearl,” which weighed three mithqāls. His female steward carried off a rosary of jewels the like of which had never been heard.⦗5⦘ He likewise distributed sixty Chinese porcelain jars⦗6⦘ filled with the costly perfume ghālya.⦗7⦘

Al-Ṣūlī says that on the Day of ʿArafah al-Muqtadir would distribute ninety thousand sacrificial animals. It is also said that he squandered eighty million dinars, bringing ruin upon himself with his own hand.