the Maʿshūq palace that had stood in Surra Man Raʾā (Sāmarrā); he tore out the iron gates of Madīnat al-Manṣūr, of al-Ruṣāfa and its palace, and installed them in this new mansion of his—the delight he took in it seemed boundless.

In that same year the judge Abū al-Sāʾib ʿUtbah ibn ʿAbd Allāh (1) died and his estates were confiscated. After him the judiciary was assigned to Abū [al-ʿAbbās] (2) ʿAbd Allāh [ibn] (1) al-Ḥasan ibn Abī al-Shawārib, who undertook to pay Muʿizz al-Dawla two hundred thousand dirhams each year. Muʿizz al-Dawla invested him with robes of honor, and he made his way home accompanied by kettledrums and trumpets. He was the first to assume the office of judge on the basis of a monetary guarantee. Because of this arrangement the caliph al-Muṭīʿ li-llāh refused to grant him audience or allow him to join the formal procession. Muʿizz al-Dawla then leased out the police department and likewise the office of ḥisbah (market inspection).

That year a home-bound column from Antioch set out for Tarsus, with the city’s deputy governor among them. The Byzantines attacked them and captured them to the last man (3); only the deputy escaped, wounded in several parts of his body.

During the same year Najā, a mamluk of Sayf al-Dawla, penetrated Byzantine territory, killing, taking captives, and seizing booty before returning safely.

Deaths in this year included:
• Emir ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Nūḥ al-Sāmānī, ruler of Khurasān. He fell from his horse and died, after which his brother Manṣūr ibn Nūḥ al-Sāmānī assumed power.
• al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Umayyad (4), sovereign of al-Andalus in the Maghrib. His caliphate lasted fifty years and six months; he died at seventy-three and left eleven sons. Fair-skinned, handsome, massive in build, long-backed and short-legged, he was the first of the Umayyads who had entered the Maghrib to take the title “Commander of the Faithful.” He adopted it twenty-three years before his death, when news reached him of the weakness of the caliphs in Iraq and the ascendancy of the Fāṭimids in the Maghrib. Upon his death authority passed to his son al-Ḥakam, who took the title al-Mustanṣir. Among al-Nāṣir’s other sons was ʿAbd Allāh, a Shāfiʿī in jurisprudence, devout and poetic, and nowhere