In the early days of Ṣafar the illness intensified; his leg became so swollen that it grew enormously large. Cold applications such as ice were laid upon it, and his couch had to be borne in relays by forty men—twenty at a time.
One day he said to them, “I imagine you have grown weary. Would that I were one of you, eating as you eat and drinking as you drink in sound health.”
He also remarked, “On my payroll are one hundred thousand stipendiary troops, yet none of them is worse off than I.”
His death occurred in the Ḥusaynī Palace on the night of Thursday, with eight days remaining in the month. Ibn al-Jawzī said (1): in this very year. Ibn al-Athīr said (2): in Ṣafar of this year. Ibn al-Jawzī also said (3): He was forty-seven years old, less a month and a few days.
When Abū Aḥmad al-Muwaffaq died, the emirs gathered to take the oath of allegiance for the succession after him in favor of his son Abū’l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad. Al-Muʿtamid therefore invested him with the succession after his own son al-Mufawwaḍ, had the Friday sermons delivered in his name following that of al-Mufawwaḍ, and entrusted to him all that had been his father’s—the authority to appoint and dismiss, to bestow and withhold, to bind and release. He was given the honorific al-Muʿtaḍid bi-Llāh.
Among those who also died this year were:
• Idrīs ibn Sulaym al-Qaʿnabi (4) of Mosul; Ibn al-Athīr said (5): He was abundant in hadith transmission and devotion.
• Isḥāq ibn Kindājiq (6), governor of the Jazīra, a man of sound judgment; after him, his son Muḥammad (7) assumed the post.
• Yā Zamān (8), governor of Tarsus: while besieging a Byzantine town he was struck by a stone from a mangonel and died of the blow in Rajab of this year. He was buried in Tarsus, after which Aḥmad al-ʿUjayfī was appointed to the frontier governorship by order of Khumarawayh ibn Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn, but he was soon dismissed and replaced by his cousin Muḥammad ibn Mūsā ibn Ṭūlūn.
• ʿAbdah ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥīm—may Allah disgrace him. Ibn al-Jawzī recorded in al-Muntaẓam (9) that this wretch was among