the highways were cut off, people were consumed by illness and destitution, the dead were left unburied, and all thought of amusement and play vanished (1).
He said: Then rain poured down as though from the mouths of water-skins, and the Tigris rose twenty and one-third cubits (2).
Ibn al-Athir relates in his al-Kāmil (The Complete History) that Muḥammad ibn Rāʾiq—who at that time held the title amīr al-umarāʾ (Commander of Commanders) in Baghdad—fell out with Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Barīdī, who was in Wāsiṭ, because al-Barīdī withheld the land-tax revenues in his possession. Ibn Rāʾiq therefore set out to take charge of the money, but a reconciliation was reached and Ibn Rāʾiq returned [to Baghdad] (3). The troops there demanded their stipends, his resources grew scarce, and a number of Turkish soldiers defected to al-Barīdī, so Ibn Rāʾiq’s position weakened. Al-Barīdī wrote to him seeking the vizierate in Baghdad; Ibn Rāʾiq granted the title and then struck his name from the rolls. Al-Barīdī’s fury (4) against him (5) flared up, and he resolved to seize Baghdad. He dispatched his brother Abū al-Ḥusayn at the head of an army [toward Baghdad] (5).
Ibn Rāʾiq and the caliph barricaded themselves in the Palace of the Caliphate; catapults and ballistae (6) were set up there and along the Tigris. Baghdad was thrown into turmoil, its inhabitants plundering one another night and day. Abū al-Ḥusayn arrived with his forces, and the populace fought them both on land and on the Tigris, yet the situation only worsened. The calamity—already aggravated by soaring prices, epidemic, and widespread death—became unbearable; surely to Allah we belong and to Him we shall return.
In Jumādā al-Ākhira the caliph and Ibn Rāʾiq fled. The caliph, accompanied by his son Abū Manṣūr and only twenty horsemen, made for Mosul. Abū al-Ḥusayn then took possession of the Palace of the Caliphate. The Barīdī troops killed whatever courtiers they found there and plundered everything, even the women’s quarters. They left al-Qāhir unharmed, for he was by then blind. They released Kurtakīn from prison, and Abū al-Ḥusayn sent him to his brother ʿAbd Allāh al-Barīdī; nothing more was heard of him. They looted Baghdad openly and brazenly. Abū al-Ḥusayn moved into the residence of Muʾnis, which Ibn Rāʾiq had occupied, and his men burst into houses, seizing money and slave-girls. Prices soared, and Abū al-Ḥusayn imposed an impost on wheat and barley. The people of Baghdad tasted the bitterness of hunger and fear.
A large contingent of Qarmatians was present in Abū al-Ḥusayn’s army, and they wrought dreadful havoc in the city. Prolonged and severe fighting broke out between them and the Turks; the Turks prevailed and expelled them from Baghdad, and hostilities also erupted between the common people and the Daylamites (7).