—surrounded by his contemporaries and childhood companions, the bier upon which he lay.

The illness that struck him after his return (1) from al-Fayyum lasted a fortnight. His death came in the seventh hour of the night preceding Sunday, the twentieth (2) of Muḥarram. As your humble servant writes these lines, he himself is beset by ailments of heart and body, by pain in his limbs (3), and by a diseased liver (4). This master’s passing has shaken him, coming so soon after the loss of the father—may Allah have mercy upon him (5)—and each new day renews the sorrow.

When al-ʿAzīz died—may Allah have mercy on him (6)—he left ten sons. His emirs therefore installed his son Muḥammad as ruler and bestowed upon him the honorific al-Manṣūr. Most of the emirs, however, secretly inclined to proclaim al-ʿĀdil, yet they deemed him (7) too distant. They dispatched messengers to al-Afdal, who was then in Ṣarḫad, and brought him at speed by the postal relay. Once he was among them, they withheld their support (8, 9); they found opinion divided concerning him, and the goal for which he had set out (10) eluded him. The senior al-Nāṣirī emirs rebelled against him, left Egypt, and took up residence in Jerusalem (11). From there they pressed the al-ʿĀdilid armies to hurry forward. Al-ʿĀdil confirmed his nephew in the sultanate and caused his name to be proclaimed (12) on the coinage and in the Friday sermon throughout that part of the realm (13).

Yet al-Afdal derived one benefit from this expedition (14): he gathered a dense host (15) of Egyptians and marched to reclaim Damascus while his uncle was absent, busy with the siege of Mardin. He did so at the instigation of his brother, the ruler of Aleppo, and of his cousin, the king of Ḥoms, Asad al-Dīn. When he reached the city and encircled it, he cut off its watercourses, felled its trees, and diminished (16) its fruit. He pitched his camp by the Mosque of al-Qadam, only to be overtaken by grief and remorse. His brother al-Ẓāhir and his lion-hearted cousin then joined him.