His deputy in the protected province of Syria was Sayf al-Din Yalbugha al-Nasiri (1). The judges of Syria were the same men who had served the previous year, except that Qadi ʿImad al-Din al-Hanafi resigned in favour of his son, the Chief Judge Najm al-Din, who assumed office while his father was still alive; the ḥājib al-ḥujāb (chief chamberlain) was Fakhr al-Din Iyas.
The year opened with the viceroy displaying great energy in the construction of the congregational mosque he had begun to build west of the Horse Market, on the site formerly known as Tall al-Mustaqin (2).
On the third of Muharram the Chief Judge Sharaf al-Din Muhammad ibn (3) Abi Bakr al-Hamadhani, a Maliki, passed away. The funeral prayer was performed for him in the Great Mosque, and he was buried in his family plot at Maydan al-Hasa. People lamented him for his standing, piety, fine character and generosity to many—may Allah have mercy on him.
On Sunday, the twenty-fourth of Muharram, the diploma appointing Qadi Jamal al-Din al-Musallati (4)—who had previously served as Sharaf al-Din’s deputy—arrived, and a robe of honour was bestowed upon him late in the day.
In Rabiʿ al-Awwal they procured many columns from around the city for the renewed mosque in the Horse Market. On the outskirts they would shore up the superstructure, remove the column, and set a wooden prop in its place. They also took columns from Darb al-Sayqal, and they removed the column that had stood in the ʿUlubiyyin Market, in that recess whose top looked like a ball containing iron. Al-Hafiz Ibn ʿAsakir recorded that it contained a talisman: should an animal have difficulty urinating, leading the beast around the column would loosen its urinary passages (5).
On Sunday, the twenty-seventh of the same month, they uprooted the column after it had stood there for about four thousand years—Allah knows best. I myself saw it that day, laid out in the ʿUlubiyyin Market on wooden sleds so that it could be dragged from the Great Market to the aforementioned mosque and taken out through the Great Bab al-Jabiyah. There is no god but Allah!
Toward the end of Rabiʿ al-Akhir the walls of the mosque founded by the viceroy had risen high, and the spring that had lain beneath its foundations dried up once they were set—praise belongs to Allah.
On the last day of Rabiʿ al-Akhir news arrived from Egypt that a number of leading emirs—including al-Hijazi and Aq Sunqur al-Nasiri (6) and those associated with them—had been arrested. The troops in Syria at once stirred, and a disturbance ensued.