the waqf books that had been in Baghdad, founded a Dār al-Ḥikmah (House of Wisdom) and installed philosophers there, granting each of them three dirhams for every twenty-four hours; he also set up a Dār Ṭibb in which the physician (1) received two dirhams per day, a madrasa in which every jurist was allotted one dirham per day, and a Dār Ḥadīth in which each traditionist was given half a dirham daily.

In the same year:

The judge and vizier Kamāl al-Dīn ʿUmar ibn Abī Jarādah, better known as Ibn al-ʿAdīm (2), arrived in the Egyptian lands as an envoy from the lord of Damascus, al-Nāṣir ibn al-ʿAzīz, asking the Egyptians to join him in fighting the Tatars. He reported (3) that the Tatars were about to enter Syria, that they had already seized al-Jazīrah, Harran, and other regions [in that very year], and that Ashmuṭ, the son of Hūlāgū Khān, had crossed the Euphrates and was approaching Aleppo. A council (4) was therefore convened before al-Manṣūr ibn al-Muʿizz al-Turkumānī; present were the Egyptian qāḍī (5) Badr al-Dīn al-Sinjārī (6) and Shaykh ʿIzz al-Dīn ibn ʿAbd al-Salām (7). They (8) deliberated over the question of taking some of the populace’s wealth to support the troops, and the decisive word belonged to Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām. The gist of his opinion was this: if (9) nothing remains in the public treasury, and you have then spent (10) the gold-plated saddle trappings and other silver ornaments, so that you and the common folk are equal in clothing except for the instruments of war—leaving the soldier with nothing but (11) the horse he rides—only then is it permissible for the ruler to take something from the people’s property to repel the enemy, for when an enemy suddenly overruns the land (12), it becomes obligatory upon everyone to drive them back (13) with both their wealth and their lives.

[The Reign of al-Malik al-Muẓaffar Quṭuz in Egypt]

In this same year the amir Sayf al-Dīn Quṭuz seized his former master’s son, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAlī, known as al-Manṣūr, and that occurred in