the finest of kings in conduct, the wisest, and the most steadfast in war ⦗1⦘. When he was slain, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī ⦗2⦘ was in his company. Al-Rāzī would sit and preach in the monarch’s presence, admonishing him, and the sultan would weep whenever he concluded the session by saying ⦗3⦘: “O Sultan, your sovereignty will not endure, nor will al-Rāzī remain; our final return, all of us, is to Allah.” After the sultan’s assassination, al-Rāzī accused certain members of the royal household of the deed. Fearing their vengeance, he sought refuge with the vizier Muʾayyid al-Mulk ibn Khwāja, who conveyed him to a place of safety. Thereafter Ghazna passed to one of the sultan’s mamluks, Tāj al-Dīn al-Durr, and events followed whose enumeration would be too lengthy ⦗4⦘—they have been fully recorded by Ibn al-Athīr and Ibn al-Saʿī.
In the same year the Georgians raided Muslim territories, reaching Khilāṭ, where they killed, captured, and plundered, while both the soldiers and the common folk fought them off.
That year as well, the lord of Irbil, Muẓaffar al-Dīn Kūkburī ⦗5⦘, accompanied by the ruler of Marāgha, marched to fight the king of Azerbaijan, Abū Bakr ibn al-Bahlawān ⦗6⦘, because he had shirked the war against the Georgians and devoted himself day and night to (so-called) grateful devotions. They were unable to defeat him. Later, he married the daughter of the Georgian king, whereupon their aggression ceased. Ibn al-Athīr ⦗7⦘ remarks: “He sheathed his sword and unsheathed his phallus.”
In that year the caliph appointed Naṣīr al-Dīn Nāṣir ibn Mahdī al-ʿAlawī al-Ḥasanī to the vizierate, invested him with its robes of honor, and ordered the kettle-drums to be beaten before him and at his gate at the times of prayer [fajr, maghrib, and ʿishāʾ] ⦗8⦘.
In the same year the ruler of the Armenian realm, the son of Leo, raided the lands of Aleppo ⦗9⦘, killing, capturing, and looting. Al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Ghāzī ibn al-Nāṣir set out against him, and the son of Leo fled before him. Al-Ẓāhir then demolished a fortress that [the son of Leo] had built ⦗10⦘ and razed it to the ground.
In Shaʿbān of that year the Roman bridge by the Eastern Gate was demolished, its stones being spread out to pave the congregational mosque.