As for the Khwarazmians, they were not present when the armistice was concluded. When word of it reached them they flew into a rage, marched on Darayya, plundered it, and then moved off ⦗1⦘ toward the eastern lands. They wrote to al-Ṣāliḥ Ismāʿīl and entered into an alliance with him against al-Ṣāliḥ Ayyūb; delighted, he tore up the treaty he had signed. The Khwarazmians returned and blockaded Damascus, and al-Ṣāliḥ Ismāʿīl came down from Baalbek to join them. The plight of the Damascenes grew unbearable: provisions ⦗2⦘ disappeared and prices soared. A single ghararah (sack) of grain ⦗3⦘ cost 1,600, a qintar of flour 700 ⦗4⦘, bread—just under two uqiyyas (ounces)—one dirham ⦗5⦘, and a ratl (pound) of meat seven. Properties were traded for flour ⦗6⦘; people ate cats, dogs, carrion, and putrid carcasses ⦗7⦘. Corpses lay in the streets, and the living lacked the strength to wash, shroud, or bury them ⦗8⦘, so they hurled their dead into wells until the city reeked and the people were driven to despair. To Allah we belong and to Him we shall return.
During these days Shaykh Taqī al-Dīn Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ, head of the Dār al-Ḥadīth and other colleges, passed away. His bier was brought out of Bāb al-Faraj only after great difficulty, and he was buried in the Ṣūfiyya cemetery—may Allah have mercy on him ⦗9⦘.
Sibt ⦗10⦘ said: “Despite all this, wine was flowing, open vice was rampant, and the customs taxes remained in force.”
Shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn ⦗11⦘ records that prices in this year became exorbitant and that the vagrants died along the roads. At first they begged for a single mouthful of food ⦗12⦘, then for a crumb of bread, and finally for one fals—enough to buy a little bran, which they would moisten and eat like chickens. He adds, “I witnessed this myself.” He set down the details of the soaring prices in foodstuffs and other goods, and then—praise and gratitude be to Allah—all of it vanished ⦗13⦘ at the end of the year, after ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā.
When al-Ṣāliḥ Ayyūb learned that the Khwarazmians had turned against him and made common cause with his uncle al-Ṣāliḥ Ismāʿīl, he wrote to King