On Wednesday the nineteenth of the month the deputy of the Sultanate ordered punishment for a band who had robbed some vendors: eleven of them were put to the sword, while ten were nailed up as a discretionary chastisement and corrective measure. And Allah knows best.

[Then the year 749 AH began]

The year opened with the sovereign of Egypt and Syria being al-Malik al-Nāṣir, Nāṣir al-Dīn Ḥasan ibn al-Malik al-Manṣūr. His viceroy in Egypt was Emir Sayf al-Dīn Baybughā (1), and his vizier was Manjak (2).

His judges were ʿIzz al-Dīn ibn Jamāʿah the Shāfiʿī, Taqī al-Dīn al-Ikhnāʾī the Mālikī, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ibn al-Turkumānī the Ḥanafī, and Muwaffaq al-Dīn al-Maqdisī the Ḥanbalī. His secret chancery was headed by the judge ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ibn Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn Faḍl Allah al-ʿUmarī. The deputy of Syria, resident in the protected city of Damascus, was Emir Sayf al-Dīn Arghūn Shāh al-Nāṣirī, and the chief chamberlain (ḥājib al-ḥujāb) was Emir Taydamur (3) the Ismāʿīlī.

The judges in Damascus were Chief Judge Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī the Shāfiʿī, Chief Judge Najm al-Dīn the Ḥanafī, Chief Judge Jalāl al-Dīn al-Masallatī the Mālikī, and Chief Judge ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ibn Munajja the Ḥanbalī.

His confidential secretary was Judge Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ḥalabī the Shāfiʿī, who also served as military judge in Aleppo and lecturer at the Asadiyya there, though he resided in Damascus the Protected.

News came in rapid succession of a scourge striking the far reaches of the realm. Something dreadful was reported from the land of the Crimea, with heavy mortality among its people. It was further said that the plague had reached the lands of the Franks, to the extent that most of the inhabitants of Cyprus—or nearly so—had perished. A like catastrophe befell Gaza, and a dispatch from its deputy to the deputy of Damascus stated that from the Day of ʿĀshūrāʾ to the corresponding day in the month of Ṣafar roughly more than ten-odd thousand souls had died.

Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī was recited on Friday, after the congregational prayer, the seventh of Rabīʿ al-Awwal of this year. The judges and a large gathering attended; the reciters completed a quarter of the Qur’an afterwards, and the people implored Allah to lift the plague from the lands. For when the populace heard that the disease had lodged itself in the coastal towns and other regions of the kingdom, they feared its arrival in Damascus—may Allah guard and preserve her—even though a number of her own residents had already died of that same malady.