—rejoicing exceedingly at Allah’s victory—and Allah strengthened Islam and its people with firm support, humbled the Christians, the Jews, and the hypocrites, and made His religion manifest while they detested it.

At that, the Muslims hastened to the Christian church from which the cross had been carried; they plundered everything inside, set it aflame, and spread fire round about it, so that many of the Christians’ houses were burned (1). Allah filled their homes and their graves with fire, and part of the Jacobite church was likewise burned (2).

A group then thought to plunder the Jews, but they were told that the Jews had not shown the same tyranny (3) as the worshippers of the cross.

Meanwhile the common people, in the very middle of the congregational mosque, killed a Rāfiḍī (sectarian Shiite) shaykh who had been collaborating with the Tatars over the people’s wealth; his name was al-Fakhr Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf ibn Muḥammad al-Kanji. Vile in disposition and an easterner, he had sided with them concerning the Muslims’ property—may Allah disgrace him. They also killed a number of others like him from among the hypocrites [those who had sided against the Muslims]. Thus the last remnant of the wrongdoing folk was cut off, and praise belongs to Allah, Lord of all worlds.

Hulagu (4) had already sent a decree appointing Kamāl al-Dīn ʿUmar ibn Bandar al-Tiflisi as chief judge over all the cities (5)—Syria, al-Jazira, Mosul, Mardin, [Mayyafariqin], the Kurdish lands, and other regions (6). He had served for fifteen years as acting deputy in Damascus on behalf of the judge Ṣadr al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā ibn Hibat Allah ibn Sanī al-Dawla (7). When the decree arrived on the twenty-sixth of Rabiʿ I (8), it was proclaimed in the Green Square, and he assumed sole judicial authority in Damascus; he was a man of learning (9).

The two deposed judges (10)—Ṣadr al-Dīn ibn Sanī al-Dawla and Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn al-Zaki (11)—traveled to present themselves before Hulagu Khan in Aleppo (12). Ibn al-Zaki ingratiated himself with Ibn Sanī al-Dawla, offering him large sums of money, and he obtained the judgeship of Damascus; they both returned, whereupon Ibn Sanī al-Dawla died in Baalbek, and Ibn