customs duties and taxes, dug the great canals, and founded the Abū Ḥanīfa madrasa together with its marketplace, as well as the congregational mosque in Baghdad known as the Sultan’s Mosque. (1) He built many other mosques besides, and in Kūfa he erected the “Minaret of the Horns,” fashioned from the antlers of the game he himself had hunted; he later set up a similar structure in Transoxiana. He recorded with care everything he had personally taken on his hunts—almost ten thousand head of game—and then gave away ten thousand dirhams in charity, saying, “I fear Allah, exalted is He, lest I have taken the life of any creature for other than food.”
He performed many commendable deeds and led a virtuous life. Among them is the following incident:
A farmer came to him complaining that some of the royal pages had seized a load of watermelons which constituted the whole of his capital. The Sultan said, “Today I shall restore your load to you.” He then told his steward, “Bring me some watermelons today.” They searched and discovered watermelons in the tent of the ḥājib (the chamberlain) and carried them to the Sultan. He summoned the chamberlain and asked, “Where did you get these watermelons?” “The pages brought them,” he replied. The Sultan said, “Produce the pages.” The chamberlain went, thrashed them, and then returned; the Sultan thereupon handed him over to the farmer, saying, “Take him by the hand, for he is my slave and my father’s slave; do not let him go until he restores your load to you.” The peasant left with his watermelons, holding the chamberlain by the hand, and the latter ransomed himself from the farmer for three hundred dinars.
When Malikshah set out to fight his brother Tutush, he passed through Ṭūs and entered to visit the tomb of ʿAlī ibn Mūsā al-Riḍā, accompanied by Niẓām al-Mulk. After they emerged, he asked Niẓām, “What did you ask of Allah?” He replied, “I prayed that Allah grant you victory over your brother.” Malikshah said, “As for me, I said: ‘O Allah, if my brother is better than I am for the Muslims, then grant him victory over me; but if I am better for them, then grant me victory over him.’”
This Malikshah once marched with his army from Isfahan to Antioch, and it was never reported that a single member of his force—numbering in the hundreds of thousands—wronged any of his subjects.
A Turkmen sought his judgment, saying that a man had taken his daughter’s virginity and that he wished to be allowed to kill him. The Sultan said, “My good man, had your daughter wished, she could have kept herself from him. If you must kill him, then kill her along with him.” The man fell silent. The Sultan then said, “Or would you prefer something better?” “And what is that?” he asked. “Marry her to him,” said the Sultan. So he married her to the man, and the Sultan provided their bridal gift and maintenance from the public treasury—and so it was done.
A preacher once related to the Sultan that Khosrow, while traveling alone away from his army, passed by a village, stopped at the door of a house, and asked for a drink. A young maid brought him a vessel of cane-sugar water chilled with ice; he drank and found it delightful. “How do you prepare this?” he asked. She replied, “It is easy; we press it by hand.” He requested a second drink, and she went to fetch it. In the meantime it crossed his mind to take that estate from its owners and compensate them elsewhere. She was late returning and eventually came out empty-handed. “What is the matter?” he asked. She answered, “It seems our ruler’s intention toward us has changed, and now I find it difficult to press the sugar”—for she did not know she was speaking to the ruler himself. He said, “Go back; you can now do it,” and he turned his intention toward another place. She went, quickly produced another drink, he drank it, and departed.
Malikshah said to the preacher, “That story pleases me; but tell the people Khosrow’s other tale—when he passed by an orchard and asked its keeper for a cluster of unripe grapes, for he was suffering from jaundice in his head …”