The caliph al-Mustaʿṣim Billah, Commander of the Faithful, was put to death on Wednesday, the fourteenth of Ṣafar, and no trace of his grave remains. He was then forty-six years and four months old, and his caliphate had lasted fifteen years, eight months, and a few days. His eldest son, Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad, twenty-five years of age, was killed with him; next his middle son, Abū al-Faḍl ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, aged twenty-three, was slain. His youngest son, Mubārak, was taken captive, as were his three daughters – Fāṭimah, Khadījah, and Maryam. From the Caliphal Residence nearly one thousand virgin girls (1) were reportedly carried off, and Allah (2) knows best. Truly we belong to Allah and to Him we return.
Shaykh Muḥyī al-Dīn Yūsuf, son of Shaykh Abū al-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī, master of the Caliphal Palace and sworn enemy of the vizier, was likewise killed, together with his three sons – ʿAbd Allāh, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (3), and ʿAbd al-Karīm. The grandees of state were then slaughtered one after another: among them the junior Dawidār (4) Mujāhid al-Dīn Aybak, Shihāb al-Dīn Sulaymān Shāh, and a company of Sunni emirs and the city’s leading notables.
A man of the House of al-ʿAbbās would be summoned from the Palace; he would emerge with his children, his womenfolk, and his slave girls, be led to the Khallāl cemetery opposite the lookout platform, there be butchered like a sheep, while whichever of his daughters and slave girls (5) the invaders desired were carried off into captivity.
The Shaykh al-Shuyūkh, the caliph’s tutor Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAlī ibn al-Nayyār, was killed; so were the preachers, the imams, and the Quran-bearers. For several months the mosques, the daily congregations, and the Friday assemblies were suspended in Baghdad. Meanwhile the vizier Ibn al-ʿAlqamī – may Allah disfigure and curse him – intended to close all the mosques, madrasahs, and ribāṭs of the city, leave only the shrines and Rāfiḍī venues functioning, and erect for the Rāfiḍīs a vast seminary from which they could broadcast their doctrines and banner. But Allah, Exalted be He, did not permit him to achieve that; rather, He withdrew His favor from him and cut short his life only a few months after this calamity, then caused his son to follow him, so that both of them – Allah knows best – met in the lowest depths (6) of Hellfire.
When the decreed matter (7) had run its course and the forty days were past, Baghdad was left a desolate ruin: no one remained save a scattered few, while the dead lay in the streets like mounds of earth. Rain fell upon them, their features became unrecognizable, and the stench of their rotting bodies befouled the city. The very air was corrupted, unleashing a severe plague that travelled on the wind as far as Greater Syria, where multitudes perished from the foul atmosphere and the tainted breeze. Thus famine, pestilence, annihilation, stabbing sickness, and the bubonic plague converged upon the people. Indeed, we belong to Allah and to Him we return.