Then the year 533 AH began.

Events of this year:

• A severe earthquake (1) struck the city of Ganja (2); two hundred and thirty thousand people perished because of it (3). The site of the city turned into black water, ten farsakhs long and the same wide. The people of Aleppo were also shaken eighty times in a single night.

• In the same year Sultan Masʿūd (4) abolished many customs duties from the populace, and supplications for him (5) became plentiful.

• A great battle was fought between Sultan Sanjar and the Khwarazm-Shah. Sanjar routed him, and the Khwarazm-Shah’s son (6) was killed in the fighting, a loss that plunged his father into deep grief.

• The ruler of Damascus, Shihāb al-Dīn Maḥmūd b. Tāj al-Mulūk Būrī b. Ṭughtakīn, was assassinated (7) at night by three of his close attendants. They fled the citadel; two were captured and crucified, while one escaped.

[After him, authority passed to his brother Kamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Tāj al-Mulūk, who had previously been in Baalbek. Later, in Baalbek, ʿImād al-Dīn Zangī died, and he appointed over it the commander Najm al-Dīn Ayyūb—the father of Sultan Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn and al-Malik al-ʿĀdil Abū Bakr—and their descendants] (8).

• That year the Jews and Christians were dismissed (9) from administrative posts (10), but they were reinstated less than a month later (11).

The pilgrimage that year was led by Naẓar the chamberlain—may Allah reward him.

Among the notable deaths of the year was Zāhir (12) b. Ṭāhir (13) b. Muḥammad, Abū al-Qāsim b. Abī ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Abī Bakr al-Shahhāmī, the prolific ḥadīth scholar and indefatigable traveller. He heard a vast amount of ḥadīth and dictated one thousand sessions in the congregational mosque of Nīshāpūr.

It is said that he suffered from an illness that caused him frequent