When safe-conduct was finally proclaimed in Baghdad, those who had been hidden away in subterranean dungeons (1), cellars, and grave-pits emerged from beneath the earth like corpses lifted out of their tombs (2). They could scarcely recognise one another: a father failed to know his own child, and a brother his brother. A fierce plague overtook them, so they perished and caught up with those who had been slain before them. Beneath the soil they were gathered together (3) by the command of Him who knows the secret and what is yet more hidden—Allah; there is no deity but He, and His are the Most Beautiful Names.

That same Jumada al-Akhirah, the over-bearing ruler Hülegü Khān (4) withdrew from Baghdad to the seat of his kingdom. He placed the city’s affairs in the hands of the amir ʿAlī Bahādur, investing him with the post of shihnah, and likewise entrusted them to the vizier Ibn al-ʿAlqamī (5). Yet Allah granted him neither delay nor reprieve; He seized him with the grasp of the All-Mighty, the All-Powerful, at the very beginning of Jumada al-Akhirah, when he was sixty-three years old. Ibn al-ʿAlqamī had some talent for epistolary style, and his two sons were competent in literature (6); nevertheless, he was an obstinate Shiʿite, a malicious Rāfiḍī. He died exhausted (7), consumed by anguish, sorrow, and remorse—

“to the place where Umm Qushʿam casts down her saddle.” (8)

After him, the vizierate passed to his son ʿIzz al-Dīn Abū al-Faḍl Muḥammad (9), but Allah joined him to his father before the year was out. To Allah belong praise and gratitude.

Abū Shāmah (10), our shaykh Abū ʿAbdullāh al-Dhahabī (11), and Quṭb al-Dīn al-Yūnīnī (12) record that in this very year a severe plague struck the people of Syria. They report that its cause lay in the corruption of the air and atmosphere (13): the multitude of corpses in the lands of Iraq had fouled it, and the putrid air spread until it crossed into the Syrian domains. Allah knows best.