And truly I complain of the sting of your sidelocks—scorpions whose stars gleam upon your cheeks;
I shed tears for the pearls of your smile, though I still have a father—so how could an orphan keep on laughing?

[Then the year 468 AH began]

Ibn al-Jawzī said (1): In Shaʿbān a swarm of locusts as countless as sand and gravel arrived. They devoured the grain, harmed most of the people, and famine ensued. The people ground carob (2) with millet flour and ate it, whereupon plague broke out. Thereafter Allah, exalted be He, restrained the locusts from causing further damage; they would pass over yet do no harm, and prices fell.

He added: A severe dearth befell Damascus and lasted three years.

In this same year, Naṣr ibn Maḥmūd ibn Ṣāliḥ ibn Mirdās captured the city of Manbij and drove out the Byzantines.

Also in this year al-Aqssīs seized Damascus. He expelled al-Muʿallā ibn Ḥaydarah, the ʿUbaydid governor of al-Mustanṣir, to the city of Nablus, where the Friday sermon was delivered in the name of al-Muqtadī and the mention of the Egyptians was removed—an omission that has lasted to this day. All this took place in Dhū al-Qaʿdah of that year. Al-Mustanṣir then summoned his deputy, imprisoned him, and he remained in jail until he died—praise be to Allah.

I say: This Aqssīs was Atsiz ibn Uwaq al-Khwārizmī, surnamed al-Malik al-Muʿaẓẓam. He was the first to wrest the lands of Syria from the Fatimids and he abolished from the call to prayer the phrase “ḥayya ʿalā khayri al-ʿamal,” which had been proclaimed from the pulpits of Damascus and the rest of Syria for one hundred and six years. At the doors of congregational and other mosques inscriptions cursing the Companions—may Allah be pleased with them—had been posted, so he ordered the muezzins and preachers to invoke Allah’s good pleasure upon all the Companions instead. He spread justice, revived the sunnah, and was the first to lay the foundations of the Citadel of Damascus—for before that the city had possessed no stronghold to which Muslims might retreat from an enemy. He built it on the very site it occupies today, at the city gate known as Bāb al-Ḥadīd, opposite the house of Riḍwān. Construction began in the following year, and it was completed after him by al-Malik al-Muẓaffar Tutush ibn Alp Arslan the Seljuk, as will be explained below (3).

The leader of the pilgrimage that year was the iqṭāʿ-holder of Kūfa, the emir al-Sukaynī Khatlagh al-Tafkīn al-Turkī, known as al-Ṭawīl. He had scattered the tribe of Khafāja throughout the land and subdued them. Accompanied by only sixteen Turks, he reached Mecca safely. When he lodged in one of its houses, a band of slaves attacked him; he slew a great number of them and routed the rest in a crushing defeat,