He devoted himself to worship, spiritual discipline, and lengthy journeys of ascetic wandering. He built a ribāṭ at Bab al-Azj to which scholars from Jerusalem and elsewhere would resort; he favored them and treated them generously. He had studied ḥadīth, recited the Quran, and was known for enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong. His death (1) occurred this very year, when he was past eighty.
[Then the year 610 AH began]
During it al-Malik al-ʿĀdil (2) ordered that on Fridays chains be fastened across the mouths (3) of the roads leading to the congregational mosque, so that horses could not come near it, thereby protecting the worshippers from harm and from being crowded (4).
In the same year al-Malik al-ʿAzīz was born to al-Ẓāhir Ghāzī (5), lord of Aleppo. He is the father of al-Malik al-Nāṣir (6), lord of Damascus and the founder of the two Nāṣirī endowments inside Damascus—one within Bab al-Farādis, the other at the foot of the mountain, remarkable for its colossal wall and solid construction, of which it was said that few buildings could match it. He was later captured by the Tatars who accompanied Hülegü, king of the Mongols (7).
Also in that year an elephant arrived from the Egyptian lands (8) to be forwarded (9) as a gift to the ruler of Georgia, and the people of Damascus were greatly astonished by it and by its extraordinary appearance (10).
That same year al-Malik al-Ẓāfir (11) Khidr, son of Sultan Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, came from Aleppo intending to perform the ḥajj. The populace went out to welcome him, and his cousin al-Muʿaẓẓam (12) [lord of Damascus] honored him. When only a few stages remained between him and Mecca, the entourage of al-Kāmil (13)