among its inhabitants, and an official deed of investiture for the city was issued in the name of the aforementioned Iqbāl. He organized the offices there and governed with commendable conduct. Poets celebrated the conquest itself and likewise praised its conqueror, Iqbāl (1). Among the finest lines one of them composed on the occasion (2) are:

O seventeenth day of Shawwāl—the day
endowed with happiness at the first and at the last!
On you congratulations were offered for Irbil’s fall,
just as on you they came when a vizier took his seat.

He means that the vizier Naṣīr al-Dīn ibn al-ʿAlqamī (3) had entered office on that very day one year earlier.

At the beginning of Ramadan this year work commenced on the Ashrafiyyah Dār al-Ḥadīth in Damascus. The site had formerly been the residence of the amir Qaymaz (4) and contained a bathhouse; it was demolished and another structure erected in its stead (5).

Al-Sibt (6) records for this same year that, on the night of mid-Shaʿbān, the Ashrafiyyah Dār al-Ḥadīth adjoining the Citadel of Damascus was opened. Shaykh Taqī al-Dīn Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ dictated hadith there; al-Ashraf endowed it with charitable trusts and placed in it the Prophet’s sandal, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.

He adds (7) that in this year al-Ashraf auditioned the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī with al-Zabīdī (8).

I note: They likewise heard it from him both at the dār itself and in al-Ṣāliḥiyyah.

He goes on (9): In this year al-Kāmil captured Āmid and Ḥiṣn Kayfā. Among the latter’s possessions he found five hundred free women kept for his bed, whereupon al-Ashraf subjected him to grievous torture.

[He further says:] In the same year the ruler of Mardin and an army from the lands of Rūm marched against the Jazīrah, killing, taking captives, and committing outrages worse than anything the Tatars had done to the Muslims.