This was because, when the Caliph sent a detachment of his troops against him,(1) he fled and left the city a desolation,(2) — “Indeed we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we shall return.”
In that same year al-Muqtadir dismissed Hāmid ibn al-ʿAbbās and ʿAlī ibn ʿĪsā from the vizierate and, for the third time, reinstated Abū ʾl-Ḥasan ibn al-Furāt. He handed over to him both Hāmid and ʿAlī ibn ʿĪsā. As for Hāmid, al-Muḥassin, the vizier’s son, guaranteed him before al-Muqtadir for five hundred million dinars, took him into custody, subjected him to various kinds of torture, and extracted from him vast sums that are beyond reckoning.(3) He then dispatched him, under guard, to Wāsiṭ so that his property and stores there might be seized, and he ordered them to give him poison on the road. They placed the poison in some roasted eggs he had requested, and he died in Ramadan of that year.
As for ʿAlī ibn ʿĪsā, he was fined three hundred thousand dinars, and other secretaries were likewise mulcted. The total taken from these men, together with what had earlier been confiscated from the qahramāna in gold, amounted to an immense figure—many thousands of thousands of dinars—and other valuables besides.(4)
The vizier Ibn al-Furāt then advised the Caliph al-Muqtadir billāh to remove Muʾnis al-Khādim from his presence and order him to proceed to Syria. Muʾnis had just returned from Byzantine territory,(5) having captured a great many of their towns(6) and acquired exceedingly rich booty. He asked that the matter be deferred until the close of Ramadan,(7) and he had already informed the Caliph of what the vizier’s son was doing in torturing people and seizing their wealth.(8) Nevertheless, the Caliph acceded to the vizier and banished Muʾnis al-Khādim, sending him off to Syria.
That year locusts became abundant and destroyed much of the harvest.
During the same year, in Ramadan,(9) an order was issued returning the remainder of inheritance assets to relatives by blood ties.
On the fifteenth of that Ramadan an effigy of Mani(10) and four large bundles of the books of the heretics(11) were burned at the Bāb al-ʿĀmmah; much gold that had adorned them fell out as they burned.