It is related from Ṣāliḥ, the son of Imām Aḥmad, that he said:
“My father saw this genealogy written in one of my books and remarked, ‘What benefit is there in this?’ yet he did not contest the lineage (1).”
They also said: “His father brought him from Marw while his mother was still carrying him, and she gave birth to him in Baghdad in Rabīʿ al-Awwal of the year 164 AH. His father died when he was three years old, so his mother became his guardian.
Ṣāliḥ reports from his father: ‘She pierced my ears and placed in them (2) two pearls. When I grew older she handed them to me, and I sold them for thirty dirhams.’
Abū ʿAbd Allāh Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal died on Friday, the twelfth of Rabīʿ al-Awwal in the year 241 AH (3), at the age of seventy-seven—may Allah have mercy on him.
In his early years (4) he would attend the study circle of the qāḍī Abū Yūsuf, but he later left that and turned wholly to hearing ḥadīth. His first quest for ḥadīth and his earliest auditions from his teachers were in 179 AH, when he was sixteen years old. He performed his first Ḥajj in 187 AH, then again in 191 AH—the year in which al-Walīd ibn Muslim also made the pilgrimage—then in 196 AH. He resided near the Sacred Mosque in 197 AH; after that he performed Ḥajj in 198 AH and stayed on until 199 AH with ʿAbd al-Razzāq in Yemen, from whom he, together with Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn and Isḥāq ibn Rāhawayh, wrote down ḥadīth.
Imām Aḥmad (5) said, “I performed five pilgrimages, three of them on foot; on one of those I spent no more than thirty dirhams.”
He said, “During one of those pilgrimages I lost my way while walking, so I kept saying, ‘O servants of Allah, guide us to the road!’ I continued repeating it until I found (6) the path.”
He also said, “I set out for Kūfah and stayed in a house with nothing under my head but a brick. Had I possessed fifty (7) dirhams …”