_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.
[Illustration: STREET IN OLD MISR]
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.