Chapter IV: Misr

ON the downfall of the House of Tulún Egypt reverted to the dependent position of a province of the Baghdád caliphate. “The Wards” having been laid low by the conquerors, the new governors took up their residence in ‘Askar, but the name was soon dropped, and the “cantonments” became merged in the city of Fustát or Misr. During the whole time of the rise and decay of the official suburbs, Misr, the real metropolis of Egypt, had been increasing in prosperity. The segregation of the troops and palace officials at the faubourgs, whilst depriving the towns-folk of a certain amount of trade, relieved them from the violence of the black soldiery and the tyranny of the bureaux, and left them free to pursue their commerce. A large part of the Indian and Arabian trade with Europe, which afterwards developed to great importance, passed through Misr, and the quays were laden with the wares of many foreign lands. It is true, for thirty years after the ruin of the Tulúnids, Egypt and its capital were a prey to military despotism, and the caliphs’ generals, weakly controlled from distant Baghdád, did what seemed best in their own eyes. These were wild times in Misr, when a hotheaded youth, el- Khalángy, upholding the claims of the fallen dynasty with the enthusiastic approval of the mob, drove out the hated troops, seized the capital and Alexandria, and even defeated a fresh army from Baghdád, till, after eight months of amazing impudence, he was betrayed and executed (906). As if this were not enough diversion for a generation, the schismatic Fátimid caliphs of Kayrawán offered the good people of Misr the spectacle of an African army marching through Egypt, and even attacking the camp across the river at Gíza, where the Baghdád army of occupation, under the command of Dukas the Greek, lay timidly intrenched. The Africans were at last driven out (920), but the state of the country did not improve. The Turkish governor had to quarter his troops in his own palace for his protection, and, when he died, “his son was hooted out of the country by the army clamouring for arrears of pay; the treasurer Madará‘y was in hiding; rival governors contended for power, mustered their troops, and skirmished over the distracted land; and a fearful earthquake, which laid many houses and villages low, followed by a portentous shower of meteors, added to the terror of the populace.”

The people who profited most in the confusion were the lords treasurers, who seem to have done what they pleased with the revenue. Three members of the talented family of Madará’y, taking their name from their original village of Madaráya, near Basra on the Tigris, successively held the lucrative post of treasurer or comptroller of the taxes, and one of them enjoyed this office not only under Khumáraweyh and his two sons, but also under some of the caliphs’ governors, and afterwards under two of the succeeding dynasty. In spite of several reverses of fortune, Mohammad Madará’y contrived to scrape together the not contemptible income of over £200,000 a year, without counting his rents. But if he largely received, he greatly gave. Every month he distributed a hundred thousand pounds’ weight of meal to the poor; he freed many thousands of slaves, endowed charitable and religious foundations, and spent from £60,000 to £80,000 on each of his twenty-one annual pilgrimages to Mekka; for he was a devout man, diligent in prayer and fasting, with the Korán ever in his hand. It was said of his vast charity during the pilgrimage that there was not a soul in Mekka who did not sleep in repletion by his beneficence. Madará’y and the great judge Ibn-Harbaweyh, who used to receive seated even the state visits of the governors, were two bright exceptions in a crowd of petty tyrants.

At last another strong Turk took the reins. If Mohammad “the Ikhshíd,” who derived his title from his ancestors the kings of Ferghána on the Iaxartes, did not leave any monument in Misr to rival that of his great predecessor Ibn-Tulún, and if his cautious policy was content with a kingdom extending no further than Damascus, instead of to the Euphrates, he at least restored order in Egypt, kept the African invaders at a distance, waged on the whole successful war in Syria, and maintained kingly state in his beautiful palace in the “Garden of Kafúr,” west of the present Nahhasín. A delightful trait of chivalry is recorded in his war with Ibn-Ráik, a Turkish chief, who dominated Syria for a time. This emír was “so distressed to find the corpse of one of the Ikhshíd’s brothers among the slain that he sent his own son to his adversary as an atonement, to be dealt with as he chose. Not to be outdone in generosity, the Ikhshíd clothed the intended sacrifice in robes of honour, and sent him back in all courtesy to his father. Of course the youth married the daughter of his chivalrous host.”

In the summer of 935 the people of Misr saw the procession of the Ikhshíd’s war-vessels advancing up the Nile from Damietta, and occupying the island of Roda, which was connected with the city by a bridge of boats; and in August the troops entered the capital and plundered it for two days, till called to order by their stern master. After the anarchy of the past thirty years the firm if rapacious hand of the new ruler was a grateful change, and the enthusiastic son of el-Khaláty, who jumped upon the carved wooden horse that stood before his palace, and let fly a pigeon sweetly anointed with musk and rosewater at the new emír, expressed the sentiments of the people.[24] The Old Mosque of ‘Amr recovered its former importance as the chief place of worship, and the Ikhshíd furnished it with beautiful new rush-mats, lamps and perfumes, and himself attended the service in state on the last night of Ramadán, clad in white, and followed by five hundred squires carrying maces and torches. On the following day, the Lesser Festival, he held a review, after the example of Ibn-Tulún. The army, numbering 400,000, marched by all day long, followed by the household corps of 8000 mamlúks in shining armour, beneath the daïs at the gate of the Government House. On the second day of the feast the emír attended the prayers at the mosque, and held open house for the people. When the caliph sent the Ikhshíd an official robe of honour, with necklace and bracelets, the streets and bazars were decked with rich cloth and rugs, and the doors of the Old Mosque were covered with gold brocade, as the emír dressed in his new robe pranced in stately procession to the Wednesday prayers.[25]

Those were glorious days in Misr, and the people almost forgot the immense confiscations and severities of the new régime in the enjoyment of its refulgence. Arabic literature began to flourish in the capital beside the Nile, though still far from rivalling the intellectual supremacy of the caliphs’ city on the Tigris, where Persian influences had produced a quickening of varied studies that were long in finding their way to the more orthodox capital of Egypt. Arabic learning was still in its infancy in the days of the Ikhshíd. Poetry indeed had never died, though it had become mannered and imitative; but history had only begun to be written, science was scarcely touched upon save in the distorted form of astrology, and the great names of Arabic literature had hardly begun to make themselves known. The lives of the Prophet were gradually being enlarged into wider histories, and two of the earliest and the most famous chroniclers, Tabary and Mas‘údy, were contemporaries of the Ikhshíd. Mas‘údy indeed visited Egypt in 942, and though, greatly to our loss, he does not describe the capital as he saw it, he gives a vivid account of the “Night of the Bath,” a Christian festival adopted by the Muslims, which shows us how the people of Misr could make merry. “The Leylat el-Ghitás,” he says, “is one of the great ceremonies and the people all go to it on foot on the 10th of January. I was present in 350 [942 A.D.] when the Ikhshíd lived at his house called “The Elect” in the island that divides the Nile. He commanded that the bank of the island and that of Fustát should be illuminated each with a thousand torches, besides the illuminations of private people. Muslims and Christians by hundreds of thousands thronged the Nile on boats or looked from kiosks over the river or from the banks, all emulous for pleasure and outdoing each other in their display and dress, gold and silver vessels and jewels. The sound of music was heard all about, with singing and dancing. It was a splendid night, the best in all Misr for beauty and gaiety. The doors of the separate quarters were left open [instead being barred as usual at sunset], and most people bathed in the Nile confident in its power [on that night] of preventing and curing all illnesses.”[26]

The traveller tells how people came to the Ikhshíd and begged to be allowed to dig for treasure, the clue to which they said they had found in ancient manuscripts; but when permission was given the treasure- seekers found only caves full of statues of bone and dust—in short, they had opened some mummy-pits. Mas‘údy mentions the two Nilometers on the island of Roda, which he calls “the island of the shipbuilders;” the first built by Osáma and still in general use; the second made, or rather restored, by Ibn-Tulún, being used only for very high Niles; and he saw the bridges connecting Misr with the island and the island with Gíza on the west bank. He met merchants from Constantinople at Misr, but of the city itself he tells us nothing. From Ibn-Sa‘íd and others, however, we learn that the Ikhshíd built a new dockyard at Misr, which took the place of the inconvenient docks on the island of Roda, where a garden and pleasure-house were laid out instead; and it was characteristic of his parsimony that when the estimate was laid before him he exclaimed, “What? Thirty thousand dinárs for a pleasure-garden!” and immediately cut the cost down to five thousand. As the dockyard of Roda was superseded by that of Misr, so was the latter replaced by the port of Maks, a mile lower down the river, in the next generation. The Ikhshíd’s economical pleasure-house on the island has left no traces; but Roda was a favourite resort of successive rulers, and his building was doubtless pulled down to make way for the Hawdag or “litter- pavilion” of el-Amir and the more elaborate constructions of the Ayyúbids.

The great business of men of learning in those days was the interpretation of the sacred law as laid down in the Korán, in the traditions of the Prophet, and in the decisions of the canonical theologians. A Mohammedan lawyer was necessarily a divine, since the law depended on revelation, and the earliest scholars of Misr were chiefly theological jurisconsults. Of the four recognized schools of orthodoxy—the Hánafy, Máliky, Sháfi‘y and Hánbaly—the Málikis and the Sháfi‘is each had fifteen porticoes in the mosque of ‘Amr, to only three for the Hánafis, and the great court rang with their disputes. To us their distinctions may seem trivial, but to the Muslims of that age they were quite as vital as the _filioque_ was to the Orthodox Eastern Church or the difference between ἐκ and ἐν to the Copts. The divines waxed so furious in their arguments in the Old Mosque that the Ikhshíd was obliged for a season to take away their rush mats and cushions and close the mosque except at prayer time. Mosques were then, as some are still, the academies of Islam, and not merely divinity schools. In the old days before Mohammad the Arabian poets used to recite their verses at the great fairs before critical audiences of their countrymen. In Mohammedan times the criticism of authors was equally public but in a different fashion. “When a man had produced something he thought particularly good, he hastened to the mosque to share it with his critics. He was sure to find them there, doctors learned in the law, poets, commentators, seated cross-legged on their carpets in the arched porticos round the court, expounding the refinements of style to a circle of squatting students. To this audience he would recite his latest achievement, proud but tremulous. It must have been a searching ordeal, for the listeners were some of them rivals and all of them keen critics, on the alert for the least flaw, the slightest halt in the rhythm, the smallest lapse from the purity of the classical idiom. They had, too, a way of expressing their opinions which was more forcible than kind. There was a hot debate, much citing of precedents and quoting of the Masters, exploring of memory, and examination of texts. The new comer defended his diction and produced his authorities; the rest cut him up in remorseless verbal vivisection.”[27]

It was not only theology that echoed in the Mosque of ‘Amr in the days of the Ikhshíd. Though the long list of worthies whose biographies Ibn- Sa‘íd unrolls in his “String of Trinkets of the Fustát Bride” consists preponderantly of lawyers and divines, men primed with serried precedents and tenacious of the authentic tracing of traditions, these were not all. There were the family of Tabátaba, famous descendants of ‘Aly, poets every one, whose verse is full of the love of nature and of love itself, and not a little of the joys of wine, always forbidden but not the less dear to the poets of all ages of Islám. Did not one of these poets sing something like this?—

Grigs chirp in the sand,

The moon is on high,

The breeze curls the runnel,

Clouds fleck the sky,

Great trees swing with joy

And merrily crack:

Now brim me the beaker

E’er life turns its back!

No friendship’s so knit

That time cannot split.

There was Abu-l-Fadl of the distinguished family of el-Furát, who, though a mighty authority on traditions, did not disdain, any more than many other learned doctors, to write a good verse now and then, though his vein might be serious:—

Whose soul is dark, a quiet life is his, no night’s unease;

When the storm breaks, it spares the low but fells the tallest trees.

Even Mansúr the lawyer condescended to a somewhat staid vein of verse, though it was he who stirred up such a turmoil by his pronouncement on the question of the legal maintenance of divorced wives in the days of governor Dukas that he had to be protected by troops, and there was a terrible scene of swords drawn and knives about his bier when the people believed that he had been murdered by a judge who disagreed with him. The Kády el-Bakár, the aged court poet, had such a fund of delightful anecdote that the Ikhshíd would often send for him of an evening and beg for a story, “were it only a finger’s length.” It was this genial old bard who wrote the lines about the morning cup and the enjoyment of that good comrade, life, ending

Allah! give me not peace! O God, I ask not content—

Only a waist to embrace and a wine cup never spent!

Misr had its merits in this respect, for ez-Zeyneby wrote:—

My home is in Fustát; blame me ye who chide.

Where the Muskat vines are, there do I abide.

Egypt, I’ll not leave thee: reason need I hide?

The celebrated author el-Musébbihy comes rather later, for he was not born till 977, but his work is typical of the tenth century in Egypt. Thirty books he wrote, numbering nearly forty thousand pages, and their subjects ranged over poetry and criticism, the history of Egypt and religion, treatises on wine and joviality, on choice repasts and cookery, on astrology and demons, dreams, wishes and oaths, anecdotes and maxims, besides subjects that are best described as “curious.” Literature owed much to the pleasure-loving court of the Abyssinian slave Kafúr (_i.e._ “Camphor”), who after the Ikhshíd’s death in 946 ruled the land for twenty-two years, first as regent over his late master’s two sons, who lived and died in luxurious and inactive obscurity, and for the last two or three years as titular prince of Egypt. There are few quainter figures in history than this jolly black eunuch, with his huge paunch, his bandy legs, and his immense cloven underlip, of which his guest, the poet el-Mutanebby, last of the classic Arabians, made such fun when he found that his panegyrics of the black prince brought him less returns—large as they were—than he expected. “Kafúr was at once the Lucullus and the Maecenas of his age. He had contrived to acquire some cultivation, as most clever slaves did, and he loved to surround himself with poets and critics, and listen to their discussions of an evening, or make them read him the history of the caliphs of old.” Serious scholars attended his réunions. There might be seen el-Kindy, the chronicler of the “Excellencies of Egypt” (Fadáil Misr), to whom Makrízy owed so much; el-Bakhtary the learned grammarian, as well as Ibn-el-‘Ásim, whose light lyrics won him the title of the “castanettist of the soul.” Kafúr could appreciate them all. Like all blacks he delighted in music. He had control of vast sums of money, and he scattered it liberally among his literary friends, who repaid him in fulsome flattery. When the “castanettist of the soul” explained in choice verse that the frequent earthquakes of the time were due to Egypt’s dancing for joy at Kafúr’s virtues, the pleased Ethiopian threw him a thousand dinárs. On his table, “Camphor” was lavish; he had the black’s jolly sensuality. The daily provision for his kitchen consisted in 100 sheep, 100 lambs, 250 geese, 500 fowls, 1000 pigeons and other birds, and 100 jars of sweets. The daily consumption amounted to 1700 lb. of meat, besides fowls and sweets, and 50 skins of liquor were allowed to the servants alone. A favourite drink was quince-cider, for which the kády of Asyút sent 50,000 quince-apples every season.[28]

In spite of a stern and unimaginative religion, in spite of fatalism and all its paralysing effects, the mediæval Arabs managed to enjoy life, just as their forefathers of the desert did. The wonderful thing about this old Mohammedan society is that it was what it was in spite of Mohammedanism. With all their prayers and fasts and irritating ritual, the Muslims of the Middle Ages contrived to amuse themselves. Even in their religion they found opportunities for enjoyment. They made the most of the festivals of the faith, and put on their best clothes and made up parties—to visit the tombs, perhaps, but to visit them cheerfully—and they “tipped” all their servants that they too might go out and amuse themselves in the gaily illuminated streets filled with dancers and singers and reciters, or in the mosques where the dervishes were performing their strange and revolting rites. Such diversions gave a relish to life,—even though a man had his destiny inscribed in the sutures of his skull and some ascetic souls found a consolation in staring at a blank wall till they saw the name of Allah blazing on it.

But the great amusement of the mediæval Muslim was feasting. It is true the Arabs did not understand scientific cookery or æsthetic gastronomy; they drank to get drunk and ate to get full. We read of a public banquet where the table was covered with 21 enormous dishes, each containing 21 baked sheep, three years old and fat, and 350 pigeons and fowls, all piled up together to the height of a man, and covered in with dried sweetmeats. Between these dishes were 500 smaller _plats_, each holding seven fowls and the usual complement of sweetmeats. The table was strewn with flowers and cakes of bread, and two grand edifices of sweetmeats, each weighing 17 cwt., were brought in on shoulder poles. A man might eat a sheep or two without being too remarkable. And if he ate hugely, he washed it down with plenty of wine, in spite of all the Prophet’s laws. The Arab’s cup held a good pint, and he refilled it pretty often. Hence the majority of the banquets described in the Arabian histories end under the table, or would do so if there were any tables of the right kind.

There are redeeming points, however, in all this gluttony and sottishness. The Arabs did not tope moodily in solitude. They liked a jovial company round them, and plenty of flowers and sweet scents on the board; they dressed very carefully, and perfumed their beards with civet and sprinkled themselves with rosewater; while ambergris, burning in a censer, diffused a delicious fragrance through the room. Nor was the feast complete without music, and the voices of singing-men and singing- women. A ravishing slave-girl, with a form like the Oriental willow and a face like the full moon, sang soft sad Arabian melodies to the accompaniment of the lute, till the guests rolled over with ecstasy. And rarely was a banquet considered perfect without the presence of a wit—such a wit as no longer exists; no mere punster, though he could pun on occasion, but a man of letters, well stored with the literature of the Arabs, able to finish a broken quotation, and of fine taste in his compositions and recitations. It was, indeed, the heyday of literary men. So intense was the devotion of the caliphs and vezírs to poetry and song, that they would refuse nothing to the poet who pleased them. A beggar who gave an answer in a neatly-turned verse would have his jar filled with gold; and a man of letters who made a good repartee was likely to have his mouth crammed with jewels, and his whole wardrobe replenished. One poet left behind him a hundred complete suits of robes of honour, two hundred shirts, and five hundred turbans.

But Kafúr was much more than an epicure and a dilettante. Strong as a horse, but gentle as a giant, his hard work and unfailing good-humour were phenomenal. He was no mean statesman and devoted much time and pains to the management of public business, working often far into the night, and then throwing himself on his knees, crying, “O God, give no created thing power over me!” His justice, clemency, open-handedness, and piety were renowned, and though he left immense wealth in gold and precious stones, slaves and beasts, he used his possessions in a large- minded and charitable spirit. He died in 968, and on his grave at Damascus was written—

“How fares it with thee, Kafúr, alone in the grave amid the rattle of
the hail, who once didst revel in the din of battling hosts?

Men’s feet now trample over thy head, where of old the lions of the
sandy waste crouched before thee.”

The warlike epitaph was not very apposite, for Kafúr, brave as he was, cannot be described as a successful general, in spite of two victories in his earlier days in Syria. It was to the credit of his statesmanship and his officers that the whole of the kingdom, now extending to the northern frontier of Syria and including the Higáz with the holy cities of Mekka and Medína, was preserved in undiminished prosperity and rarely ruffled peace throughout his regency and reign, and this in spite of several bad Niles and consequent scarcity, portentous earthquakes, and a disastrous fire which consumed 1700 houses in Misr in 954. The big black eunuch knew how to keep order. Unhappily, like most great autocrats, he left no successor, and the weakness of the government of the new prince, the infant grandchild of the Ikhshíd, invited the invasion which the Fátimid caliphs had long been preparing.

We have no description worth quoting of the city of Misr during this prosperous period. The traveller Ibn-Hawkal gives a brief account of it a little later (978), and estimates its size as about a third of Baghdád. He notes its handsome markets, its narrow streets, with brick houses of five and even seven storeys high, large enough for two hundred people to live in, and the gardens and pleasure-grounds surrounding the city. The Mosque of ‘Amr in its midst was still the most striking of its buildings, which shows that there were as yet no great palaces or government houses. Kafúr’s own palace was outside, probably in the park called the “Garden of Kafúr,” though at one time he built a new palace, at the cost of 100,000 dinárs, by the pool of Karún, near the mosque of Ibn-Tulún; but the miasma from the stagnant water soon caused its desertion. The capital was of course very differently situated from the present Cairo. The Nile had then hardly begun the slow shifting of its bed towards the west which resulted in the formation of the island of Bulák or el-Gezíra. The river in the Ikhshíd’s time flowed under the walls of the castle of Babylon, skirted el-‘Askar, and passed by the points now known as the Bab-el-Luk and Bab-el-Hadíd.[29] All the districts of Masr-el-‘Atíka, Kasr-el-‘Eyny, Kasr-ed-Dubára, and Bulák were then under water, and the capital spread along the banks of the Nile and stretched inland to near the mosque of Ibn-Tulún.

The best description is that of the Persian Násir-i-Khursau, who visited Misr in 1047, eighty years after Kafúr’s death, it is true, but it is not probable that very important changes had taken place in the interval. He knows nothing of el-Katái‘, and from his description of Misr as a city built on high ground, and other indications, it is evident that in his day “the Wards” faubourg was included in Misr and that there were still houses there in spite of the devastation that followed the fall of the House of Tulún. The mosque of Ibn-Tulún “on the outskirts of the town” was then as now surrounded by a double wall more solid than any the traveller had seen except at Amid and Mayyafarikin, and a minaret was certainly standing at that time.[30] There were altogether seven mosques in the old city, of which that of ‘Amr was the chief, with its _mihráb_ covered with white marble on which was engraved the entire text of the Korán, and its court crowded with professors and students and a multitude of people of all kinds, who used it as a general meeting place for business. It had lately been purchased by the Fátimid caliph Hákim, of whom we shall hear presently, for 100,000 dinárs (the mosque of Ibn-Tulún had cost him only 35,000), and he had made some restorations and presented a magnificent silver lamp carrying seven hundred lights. So huge was this work of art that a door had to be broken down to get it into the mosque. The chief kády still held his court there.

Outside, the gates opened into the bazars. On the north was the Street of Lamps, the like of which the traveller had seen nowhere else; he was amazed at the cut rock-crystal, tortoise-shell, and other delicate work he saw there displayed, besides ivory tusks, ostrich feathers, and other products of the Sudán and Abyssinia. On one day, to be precise, the 18th of December 1048, he counted the following flowers and fruits and vegetables in the markets of Misr: red roses, lilies, narcissi, bitter and sweet oranges, lemons, apples, jasmine, melons, _dastbuyas_, bananas, olives, dates, grapes, sugar-cane, mad-apples, gourds, _badrangs_, onions, garlic, carrots, and beetroot, though they belonged to different seasons: “but Egypt,” he adds, “is a land of great extent which produces the fruits both of hot and cold climates, and the products of all the provinces are brought to the capital and are readily sold in the markets.” Pottery he found manufactured of so fine a quality that he could see his hand through it, and so skilfully coloured that it resembled the iridescent fabric called _bukalamún_. There was also a green transparent glass of costly price. (All this is amply confirmed by the fragments which have been found among the rubbish heaps of the old city.) He saw great bowls of Damascus copper; one woman owned five thousand of them which she let out at a franc (dirhem) a month at the borrower’s risk. He was pleased to discover that there was no need to carry one’s bottle or paper to the bazars of the druggists or ironmongers: they themselves supplied the wherewithal to contain their wares; and what was more extraordinary, the shopkeepers sold at a fixed price, instead of haggling for a bargain, and if one of them cheated he was set on a camel and marched through the bazar to the ringing of a bell, crying aloud, “I have deceived and am punished! May the like chastisement befall other liars!” All the shopkeepers rode on donkeys from their houses to their shops, and asses stood for hire at the street corners to the number (he was told) of 50,000. Only soldiers rode horses.

The city stretched along the Nile bank, and kiosks and pavilions overlooked the river, whence one could draw up water by a rope. Sakkás carried it then as now in great pitchers on their backs, or on camels. Some of the houses were seven storeys high, and on the top of one of these was a terrace garden of orange and other fruit trees, watered by a sákiya turned by a bull that had been conveyed to the housetop when a calf. The houses were so large (30 cubits square) that 350 people could occupy a single house. Some of the covered streets and bazars had to be constantly lighted by lamps, since no sunlight penetrated to them. To cross to the island there was a bridge of thirty-six boats, but at that time there was no second bridge connecting Roda with Giza, and one had to take a boat or ferry. Fortunately there were more boats to be had at Misr than either at Baghdád or Basra. The inhabitants of the city, says Násir-i-Khusrau, were enjoying great prosperity in 1048, and in honour of a royal accouchement they decorated the town with such splendour that he would not hope to be believed if he described it. Indeed, he never knew so peaceful and orderly a country as Egypt, and tells the story of a rich Christian he met at Misr, who owned innumerable cargoes and vast estates, and who, when appealed to by the vezír in a year of scarcity, informed him that he had enough corn in his granaries to supply the capital for six years. The rents of the occupiers of a single khan or inn, called the Dar-el-Wezír, brought in 12,000 dinárs a year, and there were said to be two hundred such buildings.

The city which the Persian philosopher described in 1047-8 was probably little changed in the remaining century of its prosperity. The foundation of Káhira, or Cairo proper, had once more separated the official and court circles from Misr, eighty years before the visit of Násir-i-Khusrau, and yet the old capital retained its flourishing position as the commercial metropolis. There is no reason to suppose that it decayed during the hundred and twenty years that were left to it. We have already anticipated the course of history, in describing Misr in the eleventh century, and it will be well to finish the subject by relating its destruction in the twelfth. In 1168 Amalric, the Latin King of Jerusalem, advanced upon Cairo, intent upon the conquest of Egypt, which the Crusaders believed to be essential to their safety in Palestine. In November he took Bilbeys, and stained his name by massacring every man, woman, and child. Fear of similar atrocities and the danger of affording the invader valuable cover close to Cairo induced Sháwar, the vezír of the Fátimid caliph of Egypt, to order the burning of Misr. On the 12th of November, “twenty thousand naphtha barrels and ten thousand torches were lighted. The fire lasted fifty- four days, and its traces may still be found in the wilderness of sandheaps stretching over miles of buried rubbish on the south side of Cairo. The people fled ‘as from their very graves’; the father abandoned his children, the brother his twin; and all rushed to Cairo for dear life. The hire of a camel for the mile or two of transit cost thirty pieces of gold”[31] in that crisis of panic. The smoke rose in dense black clouds to the sky, and compelled the invaders to camp at a distance. The cruel measure may have been necessary, though Cairo was saved by other means; but as we look out upon the desolate sandhills that mark the site of the vanished Town of the Tent and recall the peace and prosperity witnessed by the Persian traveller, it seems as if a thousand Crusaders in Cairo would be a lighter sacrifice than the loss of the old city of Misr.

Though the town never really recovered from the fatal day of its burning, it must not be supposed that no efforts were made to rebuild it. People are not so easily transplanted from their old seats, and as soon as the Crusaders were driven away the inhabitants began to search for their blackened homes and tried to make them fit to live in. Ibn- Gubeyr, the Spanish Arab, who visited Misr in 1183, only fourteen years after the great fire, found a less melancholy scene than we should be led to expect from the account of the fifty-four days’ burning. He was comfortably entertained at the Inn of Master Worthy (Funduk Aby-th- Thaná) in the Street of Lamps,—so called because formerly inhabited by nobles who had each a lamp before his door—which still stood close to the Mosque of ‘Amr, and though there were sad signs of the late destruction, the people had rebuilt many of the ruined houses, “and the new buildings are in continuous lines which form a great city with the remains of the former town lying beyond and all around it, close by, showing how great was its extent in earlier days.”[32] The attempt to restore the old city did not succeed. A sign of the diminishing population is seen in the fact that although ten colleges were founded in and about Misr by Saladin and his successors, in the belief that the town would recover, not a single mosque for congregational worship was built there after the great fire. Cairo was rapidly taking its place, and when Ibn-Sa‘íd visited Misr about 1240 he was distressed at its blackened walls, ruined houses, and general state of dirt and neglect. There were still plenty of people in the narrow crooked streets, and pedlers hawking their wares among the students and children in the Old Mosque, which was covered with cobwebs and littered with refuse; the slovenly quays of Fustát were still frequented by much shipping, and there were sugar and soap factories still at work.[33] But the ruin was universal, the final decay had set in, and the glory of Misr was transferred to Cairo.