the Tatars (1). The caliph had until then remained behind a curtain of seclusion, but now the people beheld him face-to-face, and afterward he even rode through the marketplaces.

The Damascenes held a grand khatma in the Green Parade Ground beside the Ablaq Palace (2). Numerous complete recitations were performed; after them Shaykh ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Fārūthī (3) addressed the congregation, followed by Ibn al-Bazūrī, and then by the customary orators. Couriers arrived ordering preparations for a campaign against Iraq, and the proclamation was made to the populace. Great chains were forged for use with the bridges over the Tigris at Baghdad, and rewards were disbursed for the intended undertaking—even though the undertaking itself never materialized—while some people suffered harm on account of it (4).

In the same year the Syrian deputy al-Shujāʿī announced that no woman was to wear an oversized turban. He demolished the buildings that stood on the Banias River, along with all its canals, blockhouses (5), and watering stations on every river. He also tore down the Zallābiyya Bridge together with the shops that sat upon it. He proclaimed that no one was to walk about after the final night prayer, though he soon rescinded every restriction but this one. He razed the bathhouse that al-Malik al-Saʿīd had built outside Bab al-Naṣr—there had been nothing finer in Damascus—and he enlarged the Green Parade Ground on its northern side by roughly one-sixth, leaving only a narrow strip between it and the river. He himself, together with the emirs, worked on the parade-ground’s retaining walls (6).

In the same year the emir Jamāl al-Dīn Āqūsh al-Afram al-Manṣūrī was imprisoned in the Citadel, together with another emir.

That same year the emir ʿAlam al-Dīn al-Duwaydārī was carried in fetters to Egypt.

Shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn Maḥmūd (7) composed a poem on the conquest of Acre (8), in the baṣīṭ meter:

Praise be to Allah: the rule of the Cross has (9) disappeared,
and through the Turks the faith of the Arab Chosen One has been exalted.

This is the vision that, (10) had hopes sought to glimpse it even in sleep,
shame would have stayed them from the asking.

After Acre—its very foundations laid low—
no further gain remains for idolatry, (11) whether by sea or on land.