a small band. The amir Dādh-Ḥabshī, mentioned above, was taken prisoner in this engagement, whereupon the amir Bazghash, one of Sanjar’s commanders, killed him. Barkiyārūq’s fortunes then declined, his troops scattered, and on the fourteenth of Rajab his name was removed from the Friday sermon in Baghdad and the sermon was once again pronounced in the name of Sultan Muḥammad.

In Ramaḍān the vizier ʿAmīd al-Dawlah Ibn Jahīr was arrested, together with his two brothers—Zaʿīm al-Ruʾasāʾ Abū al-Qāsim and Abū al-Barakāt, surnamed al-Kāfī. A great deal of their wealth was seized, and he was confined to the Caliphal Palace until he died in Shawwāl of that same year.

On the night of the twenty-seventh of that month the amir Balakābak Saramz, the shihnah (military governor) of Isfahan, was struck in the side with a dagger by a Bāṭinī assassin. He had long taken elaborate precautions against them and ordinarily wore a coat of mail beneath his clothes, but not on this particular night. (1) Several of his children died that same night, so that five coffins were carried out of his house the next morning.

During this year the king of the Franks advanced with three hundred thousand fighting men. He met Kumush-Tigin, known as the Danishmend (2) Ṭāylu, the atabeg of the armies in Damascus—also called Amīn al-Dawlah and the founder of the Amīniyyah endowment in Damascus and in Buṣrā, not the one in Baʿlabakk (3). Kumush-Tigin routed the Franks and slew such multitudes that only three thousand escaped, most of them wounded. This occurred in Dhū al-Qaʿdah of the present year. He pursued them to Malatya, captured it, and took its ruler prisoner—all praise belongs to Allah.

The people were led in the ḥajj by the Turkish amir al-Tuntāsh, who followed the Shāfiʿī school.

Among the notable deaths this year was that of ʿAbd al-Razzāq the Sufi al-Ghaznawī (4), shaykh of the Ribāṭ of ʿAttāb. He performed the pilgrimage many times in a state of complete renunciation and died this year at about one hundred years of age, leaving not even a shroud behind. While he lay dying, his wife said to him, “Today you will be disgraced.” He asked, “Why?” She replied, “Because you have no shroud.” He answered, “Had I left a shroud behind, that would be my disgrace.” May Allah have mercy on him.

The opposite case was Abū al-Ḥasan al-Bistāmī, shaykh of the Ribāṭ of Ibn al-Muḥlabān. He wore nothing but wool, summer and winter alike, and displayed outward asceticism, yet when he died four thousand dinars were found buried away. People were astonished at the disparity between their two conditions and at the coincidence of their deaths in the same year. May Allah have mercy on the first and forgive the second.