Gate, where he was received by the deputy of Damascus, who lodged him in the house he owned beside his mosque. He then set off for Egypt, remained there for about forty days, and afterward returned to resume the deputyship of Aleppo.

On the tenth of Rajab the minister (ṣāḥib) Taqī al-Dīn ʿUmar (1), son of the vizier Shams al-Dīn ibn al-Salʿūs (2), was summoned to Egypt and appointed supervisor of its dīwāns, a post he held only briefly before dying soon thereafter (3).

The pilgrimage caravan set out on Saturday, the ninth of Shawwal. Its amir was Sayf al-Dīn Balṭī and its judge Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qaymarī. Among the pilgrims were the wife of the Commander of Commanders Tankiz, attended by the eunuch Shibl al-Dawlah Kāfūr (4), Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Mālikī, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn—the nephew of the minister Taqī al-Dīn Tawbah (5)—together with his brother Sharaf al-Dīn, Shaykh ʿAlī al-Maghribī, Shaykh ʿAbd Allāh the Blind, and a number of others.

On Wednesday morning, the thirteenth of Shawwal (6), Judge Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī ibn Salīm ibn Rabīʿah (7) took his seat to dispense justice in the Great ʿĀdilīyah, deputizing for the Chief Judge al-Qūnawī and replacing al-Fakhr al-Miṣrī, who had resigned that position on the nineteenth of Ramadan of the present year.

On Friday, the sixth of Dhu al-Qaʿdah, after the call to the Friday prayer, a man from among the mamluks of al-Jāwlī, named Arṣā, mounted the pulpit of the Ḥākim Mosque in Egypt and claimed to be the Mahdī, uttering a few rhymed phrases in the style of the soothsayers. He was immediately hauled down in utter disgrace—well before the mosque’s preacher had arrived.

Throughout Dhu al-Qaʿdah, and in the months just before and after—spanning the close of this year and the opening of the next—the roads and markets in and around Damascus were widened: the Arms Market, the Paved Walk, the Great Market, Bāb al-Barīd, the Mosque of al-Qaṣab as far as al-Zanjabīliyah, the stretch outside Bāb al-Jābiyah as far as the Mosque of al-Dhubbān (8), and other places that had become too cramped for ordinary traffic (9). All of this took place under Tankiz’s orders. He also directed that the aqueducts be repaired, sparing the populace the nuisance of having foul water splashed upon them (10).