In this same year (1) the caliph’s vizier Ibn Ṣadaqa died, and the vizierate was provisionally entrusted (2) to the naqīb al-nuqabāʾ.

Also this year Sultan (3) Maḥmūd met his uncle Sanjar; after a period of tension they were reconciled. Sanjar handed Dubays over to Sultan Maḥmūd on condition that the latter secure the caliph’s good pleasure for him, remove Zangī from Mosul and its territories, and assign those lands (4) to Dubays. Word spread in Rabīʿ al-Awwal, in Baghdad, that Dubays was marching on the city with a large army, so the caliph wrote to Sultan Maḥmūd: “If you do not restrain Dubays from coming to Baghdad (5), we shall go out against him and annul the pacts and peace that exist between us and you.”

In this year Atabeg Zangī ibn Āq Sunqur seized the city of Aleppo and the surrounding districts.

In the same year Tāj al-Mulūk Burī ibn Ṭughtekīn took possession of Damascus after his father’s death; his father had been one of the mamluks of Tutush ibn Alp Arslān. Burī was intelligent, resolute, just, pious, and waged many campaigns against the Franks—may Allah have mercy on him.

This year an open-air place of prayer for the ʿId was built in Baghdad outside Bāb al-Ḥalbah; it was fenced in and provided with a qibla. The people’s pilgrimage that year was led by the amir Naẓar the Chamberlain, mentioned earlier—may Allah reward him well.

[Among the notable deaths this year] al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī ibn Ṣadaqa (6), Abū ʿAlī, vizier of al-Mustarshid: he died in Rajab. Ibn al-Jawzī (7) cites, among the verses in which he went to extremes (8), the following:

from the ṭawīl metre
I found mankind like water in taste and subtlety,
while the Commander of the Faithful is its crystal spring;
I shaped the very meaning of intellect as a sculpted form,
and the Commander of the Faithful is its exemplar;
Were it not for the place (9) of religion, the sacred law (10) and piety,
out of sheer exaltation I would have said of him—Jalla Jalāluhu— (11).