Then the year 461 AH began.
On the night of mid-Shaʿbān a fire broke out in the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus. The cause was that the young retainers of the Fāṭimids and the ʿAbbāsids quarreled among themselves, and someone hurled a torch into Dār al-Malik—the Green Palace that adjoins the mosque on the qiblah side. The palace burned, the flames reached the mosque, its roofs collapsed, the gilded tesserae on its walls were scattered, and the mosaics that had covered its floor and walls were torn up. All its distinguishing features and beauties were altered, its splendor replaced by its very opposite.
Before this calamity every ceiling was fully gilded and panelled, with gables above; its walls were faced with gilded and colored tesserae, and upon them was depicted every land on earth—so detailed that if anyone wished to behold a particular region or city, he would find it portrayed in the mosque exactly as it was, needing neither to travel nor to exert himself in search of it. The Kaʿbah and Mecca were shown in the miḥrāb, with every country east and west, each province set in its proper place. Every tree, whether fruit-bearing or not, was likewise pictured in its native soil. Curtains hung over the doors that opened into the courtyard and along the lower third of the walls; the remainder of the walls were faced with colored tesserae, and the entire floor was laid with tesserae, marble, and mosaic—there was no plain paving at all. Nowhere on earth was there a structure more beautiful, not even the palaces of kings or the residences of caliphs.
When the fire struck, however, that perfection turned into its antithesis: in winter the floor became mud, in summer dust, full of pits and holes. It remained so until its floor was tiled in the time of al-ʿĀdil Abū Bakr ibn Ayyūb, sometime after 600 AH. Everything that had fallen—marble, timber, and tesserae—was stored in the four mausoleums, two to the east and two to the west, until the judge Kamāl al-Dīn ibn al-Shahrazūrī cleared them away in the days of the just king Nūr al-Dīn Maḥmūd ibn Zankī, after he had been appointed supervisor of the mosque along with the judiciary, the oversight of all endowments, the mint, and other affairs. Kings have continued to restore its beauties down to our own time; its condition came very close to what it had been during the rule of the amir Sayf al-Dīn Tankiz ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Nāṣirī, deputy of Syria—may Allah reward him.
Shaykh Abū al-Faraj ibn al-Jawzī, in al-Muntaẓam (1), dated this fire to 458 AH, and Ibn al-Sāʿī followed him in his History (2). The correct date, however, is this year, as Ibn al-Sāʿī himself also recorded under this year, as did our shaykh, the ḥadīth-master Abū ʿAbd Allah al-Dhahabī, the historian of Islam, in his History (3), along with others. Allah knows best.