the rogues, and under his administration the affairs of Cairo and the whole of Egypt were set in good order. [During Ibn Taymiyya’s stay in Egypt this man was constantly in his company] (1).
In Ramadan there arrived in Damascus (2) Shaykh Najm al-Din ʿAbd al-Rahim ibn al-Shahham al-Mawsili (3) from the lands of Sultan Uzbak (4). He possessed several branches of medical science and other disciplines, and he carried a letter recommending him for preferment. Accordingly, he was granted the chair of instruction at the Outer Ẓahiriyya, which Jamal al-Din ibn al-Qalansi resigned to him. He took up the post on the first of Dhu al-Hijja, after which he also lectured at the Jarukhiyya.
The pilgrimage caravan set out on the ninth of Shawwal; its amir was Kukunjiyar al-Muhammadi (5) and its judge Shihab al-Din al-Zahiri (6).
Among those who departed for the Hajj were Burhan al-Din al-Fazari, Shihab al-Din Qarata y al-Nasiri, deputy of Tripoli, Saruja (7), Shihri, and others.
On the fifteenth of Shawwal the Sultan increased the number of jurists maintained at his Nasiriyya Madrasa. There had previously been thirty scholars for each school of law; he raised them to fifty-four for each school and also augmented their jawāmiq (stipends).
On the twenty-third of that month Karim al-Din al-Kabir, the Sultan’s deputy, was found to have hanged himself inside a storeroom whose door he had locked from within: he tied a rope round his neck, placed a crate beneath his feet, kicked it away, and died in the city of Aswan. His biography will be given below.
On the seventeenth of Dhu al-Qaʿda Damascus was festooned with decorations in celebration of the Sultan’s recovery from an illness that had carried him to the brink of death.
In that same month Jamal al-Din ibn al-Qalansi began teaching at the Inner Ẓahiriyya in place of Ibn al-Zamalkani, who had travelled to Aleppo to assume its judgeship; Judge al-Qazwini attended the session.
A reliable letter arrived from Baghdad to Mawla Shams al-Din (8) ibn Hassan stating that Emir Choban had granted