the mind of its ruler, Ibn Numi (1). At times he would withdraw to the Cave of Hira, hoping—so it is related—that revelation might come to him there just as it had come to the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace. This sprang from his corrupt belief that prophethood can be acquired, that it is an overflow which descends upon the intellect once it has been purified. All he reaped from that was disgrace in this world and the next, if indeed he died persisting in it. Whenever he saw the people circumambulating the Kaʿba he would remark about them…; grave words and deeds were attributed to him. He died on the twenty-eighth of Shawwal in Mecca.
Then came the year 670 AH (2). It opened with al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah Abu al-ʿAbbas Ahmad al-ʿAbbasi as the caliph of the time and al-Malik al-Zahir as Sultan of Islam.
On Sunday, the fourteenth of Muharram, the Sultan rode down to the sea to meet the shawanī galleys that had been built to replace those that had sunk off the island of Cyprus—[forty shīnīs] (3). He boarded one of those shīnīs together with Amir Badr al-Din (4). The craft listed, the treasurer fell into the water and sank beneath the surface; a man hurled himself in after him, seized him by the hair and saved him from drowning. The Sultan bestowed a robe of honor on that man and treated him generously.
At the end of Muharram the Sultan set out with only a few of his personal guard and some emirs from Egypt until he reached al-Karak. He brought its deputy governor with him to Damascus, entering the city on the twelfth of Safar, accompanied by Amir ʿIzz al-Din Aydamir (5), the deputy of al-Karak. He appointed him deputy governor of Damascus and removed Jamal al-Din Aqūsh al-Najībī (6) from that post on the fourteenth of Safar. The Sultan then marched to Hama and returned after ten days.
In Rabiʿ al-Awwal waves of people in flight (7) from Aleppo, Hama, and Homs reached Damascus because of fear of the Tatars, and a great multitude of Damascenes likewise fled.
In Rabiʿ al-Akhir the Egyptian troops arrived in Damascus to join the Sultan, whereupon he marched out with them on the seventh