Early on Tuesday morning, the twenty-eighth of Shawwal, the eminent shaykh, imam, and scholar, chief of the chancery clerks, Shihab al-Din Mahmud ibn Sulayman al-Halabi, arrived in Damascus by postal courier from Egypt. He assumed the post of state secretary (kitabat al-sirr) in place of Sharaf al-Din ʿAbd al-Wahhab ibn Fadl Allah—may Allah envelop him in His mercy (1).

In Dhu al-Qaʿdah, on a Sunday, a lesson was inaugurated in the Ṣamsāmiyya (2), which had been refurbished for the Maliki school. Its patron, al-Sahib Shams al-Din ibn Ghabriyal, endowed it as a teaching institution and gave the first lecture in jurisprudence (3). He assigned its regular instruction to the deputy judge, the jurist Nur al-Din ʿAli ibn ʿAbd al-Nusair (4) al-Maliki. The judges and notables attended, among them Shaykh Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya, who had known him earlier in Alexandria.

That same month Shaykh Jamal al-Din Muhammad, son of Shaykh Shihab al-Din Ahmad al-Kahhal, lectured in the Dakhwariyya (5). By decree of the viceroy of the sultanate, Tankiz, he was appointed head of medicine in place of the physician Amin al-Din Sulayman, Tankiz having personally chosen him for the post.

It also happened this month that a company of merchants gathered in Mardin, joined by a multitude of indigent folk fleeing the high prices, all bound for the Syrian lands. When they were two stages from Ras al-ʿAyn, sixty mounted Tatars overtook them, attacked them with arrows, and killed every last one. None remained save about seventy of their children. The raiders then said, “Who will kill these?” One of them replied, “I will—on condition that you allot me a share of the booty.” He thereupon slew them all. In all, six hundred merchants and three hundred of the refugees—nine hundred Muslims—were slain; surely we belong to Allah and to Him we return. Their bodies were used to fill five cisterns there until the cisterns overflowed (raḍiya Allāhu ʿanhum), and only a single Turcoman escaped. He fled to Ras al-ʿAyn and informed the people of the appalling calamity he had witnessed.

The governor (mutasallim) of Diyarbakir, Sūtāy (6), vigorously pursued those Tatars until he annihilated them all, leaving only two alive—may Allah never unite them, never greet them with welcome and ease, nor restore to them on the Day of Resurrection wealth or family (7). Amen, O Lord of the worlds.