no mood to spare them, for he nursed a deep grievance against them. When he set out to (1) storm the fortress, they asked for a guarantee of safety—insisting that the sultan himself grant it. So he seated the emir Sayf al-Din Karmun the Tatar upon his royal throne, and when their envoys arrived they deposed him (2) and departed, unaware that the very man who had pledged them those covenants of safety was the emir now sitting on the throne—war, after all, is deception.

When the Hospitallers (3) and the Templars came out of the citadel—after the vile atrocities they had committed against the Muslims—Allah delivered them into our hands, and the sultan ordered that every last one of them be beheaded (4). Couriers carried the news to the provinces; victory drums were beaten and the cities were festooned with decorations. He then dispatched raiding parties to the right and to the left throughout Frankish territory. The Muslims captured numerous strongholds, nearly twenty in all, took close to a thousand captives—women and children alike—and gathered abundant spoils (5).

In the same year:
The son of the caliph al-Mustaʿṣim ibn al-Mustanṣir, whose name was ʿAlī (6), arrived after being freed from captivity. He was honored and lodged in the Asadī residence opposite the ʿAzīziyya. He had been a prisoner in Tatar hands; when Berke Khan crushed them he escaped and traveled to Damascus.

After the sultan had taken Ṣafad, some Muslim captives held there informed him (7) that the reason for their bondage was that the people of the village of Qāra (8) would seize them, carry them to the Franks, and sell them. The sultan (9) therefore mounted his horse and headed for Qāra, where he inflicted a severe punishment, killed many of its inhabitants, and took captive their sons and women in requital for the Muslims—may Allah reward him well.

The sultan [al-Malik al-Ẓāhir] next dispatched a massive army to the region of Sis. They ranged through the countryside (10), stormed Sis by force, captured the king’s son, killed his brother, plundered the town, slew its inhabitants, and took vengeance for Islam and its people. They had been among the worst offenders in the days of the Tatars: when they took the city of Aleppo and other places they carried off vast numbers of Muslim women and children—indeed, an immense multitude (11). Thereafter they continued to raid the Muslim lands during the time