THE MOSQUE OF EMIR MANJAK EL-YUSUFI
I was strolling one evening through the Bab el-Wazir Cemetery, as one does. The sun set, and before I even realized it, night had enclosed me within the maze of tombs. I wandered lost in the darkness, able to see the lights of the noisy, living city just beyond but unable to reach them, blocked at every turn by graves and mausoleums and silhouettes. The path I was following took me into the blackness between two crumbling walls and on the other side, I found myself suddenly out in the open, being led up a dirt hill I had never known existed.
At the top, I met this mosque.
It was awesome. It lurked in the gloom at the back of the dirt plateau. Green and yellow glows emanated from secret nooks and fell over looming angles of its façade and minaret. Alone, it brooded over the cemetery spreading out below it, a landscape of the dead sleeping in their graves.
That first vision of the mosque irrevocably colored the way I picture the man who built it in the mid-1300s, Emir Manjak al-Yusufi.
Manjak is dark and murderous. He’s a butcher. But I find him one of the most compelling characters of the Mamluk era, contemplative and melancholy – isolated from his fellow humanity by the death lodged in his heart.
He started out as the personal executioner for sultans.
He was the one they sent on missions to do away with their enemies. If Manjak showed up on your doorstep, it meant your end had come. If you met him on the road, chances are he was carrying a severed head in a sack.
He was a hardened man serving frightened teenagers – three sons of the late, great Mamluk Sultan al-Nasir Mohammed. Each of these sons was installed as sultan, one after the other in rapid succession, by the manipulative, older emirs of their father’s court. Sitting on that dangerous throne, each boy turned bloodthirsty, seeing himself surrounded by conspirators to be eliminated.
The view from the Mosque of Manjak over the Bab el-Wazir cemetery, with the Tomb of Sandal al-Mirghani in the foreground.
The first was Sultan Ismail.
The 19-year-old Ismail had been elevated to the throne after his predecessor and half-brother, Ahmed — disillusioned with power and the politics of the Citadel — left Cairo and holed himself up in the desert fortress of Karak overlooking the Dead Sea in what is now Jordan.
Fearing Ahmed as a potential rival, Ismail lay siege to Karak. For two years, Ahmed and his supporters inside managed to fend off the attackers. But finally in 1344, Karak fell.
The sultan’s men stormed in and found Ahmed inside, battered and bleeding and waving his sword futilely. They calmed him down and imprisoned him in his chambers. At first, Ahmed refused any food, until they allowed his lover, a slave named Uthman, to join him and convince him to eat.
The leading emirs back in Cairo were inclined to let Ahmed live in exiled confinement. Sultan Ismail was not. Unknown to them, he gave Manjak secret orders to head to Karak. Once inside the fortress, Manjak slipped into Ahmed’s chambers. He ordered Uthman out of the room. He then strangled Ahmed and cut off his head.
But Ahmed would have his posthumous revenge.
When Manjak returned to Cairo and presented the sultan with Ahmed’s head, Ismail turned pale and began to tremble. "It was huge and frightening, with long hair,” one chronicler of the time writes.
From that moment, Ismail saw his brother’s head every night in his dreams. He was struck with insomnia and became ill. For months, he grew sicker and sicker. He tried to win back God’s favor. He ordered prisoners freed as an act of charity. He ordered public recitations of the Quran and of the Sahih of Buhkari, the revered collection of the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings. He talked about going on the hajj pilgrimage but was too sick to leave his bed. Nothing cured him.
Ismail finally died in August 1345, just over a year after his brother’s murder.
Manjak’s missions had only just begun.
The next spring, Ismail’s successor and younger brother Sultan Shaaban sent Manjak to the Palestinian town of Safad. His target was the newly appointed governor, Emir Al Malik.
Al Malik’s crime was that he was an insufferable prig. He made it his mission in life to stamp out alcohol and licenciousness and despised Sultan Shaaban, who was notorious for his drinking and parties. Before leaving for Safad, Al Malik told his fellow emirs that the new sultan must “must not be allowed to play with pigeons!” (That’s not a euphemism; raising pigeons was seen as a frivolous and unsavory hobby.)
Shaaban was not pleased. Al Malik had barely arrived in Safad when he found Manjak on his doorstep. With the garrotte.
Next to employ Manjak was Shaaban’s successor, his 16-year-old half-brother Sultan al-Muzaffar Hajji. When Hajji suspected a senior emir, one of his father’s most beloved lieutenants, of plotting against him, he invited the emir to dinner. During the meal, Manjak stepped out of the shadows and hacked the man to death.
The killing prompted the governor of Damascus to raise a rebellion against Hajji, but it quickly fizzled. The governor was arrested and ordered brought back to Egypt for imprisonment. When his escorts stopped for the night at Qaqoun Fortress in Palestine, there was Manjak, waiting.
Only the governor’s head, severed from his strangled body, arrived in Cairo.
Next Manjak went to Gaza. There he waited for a slow camel caravan coming from Cairo. It was carrying Sultan Hajji’s wazir, his chancellor and another senior emir. Hajji had told them they were being appointed to governor positions in Syria, but in fact he suspected them of backing the failed revolt.
We can only imagine their realization turning to horror as they arrived and saw Manjak there.
“The fate set by God was carried out upon them,” as the chroniclers of the time put it. (1)
In a violent age, Manjak stands out as unique. Other Mamluk emirs killed in battle. Manjak was an instrument of death deployed upon the defeated, inexorable and impersonal. As the historian al-Safadi put it in a verse, using a play on words in Arabic:
"Emir Manjak, your reputation spreads and al-Muzaffar’s foes fear you in their dreams / Once, you were Manjak, but an ‘L’ replaced the ‘K’ from all the souls your scythe reaps.” (“Minjal” is Arabic for a scythe.)
Which makes the rest of Manjak’s career, when he was brought into politics, so startling.
He was as efficient and ruthless an administrator as he had been a killer. He also turned out to be unexpectedly intelligent and competent.
In 1348, Hajji was overthrown and killed, and the next younger son of al-Nasir Mohammed, Hassan, was installed as sultan. (Yes, the one who built the Sultan Hassan Mosque).
Manjak was appointed as wazir. The state coffers had been emptied by years of profligate spending by the previous sultans, and Manjak set about putting the wrecked state finances in order with sweeping cuts. He reduced stipends for Mamluk soldiers and the servants, eunuchs and concubines at court. He mowed back the payroll of the court bureaucracy and sultan’s household, which the young sultans had padded with positions for their favorites. Manjak threw out the unneeded secretaries, notaries and scribes. He fired the extra livery teams in the stables and the superfluous heralds that the sultans had added to inflate their processions’ grandeur. He pared down the sultan’s musical troupes and singers and even cut the number of hunting dog teams from 50 to 2.
Within months, Manjak was saving the treasury enormous amounts of money.
Then the Black Death that had been spreading around the Mediterranean reached Egypt’s shores. It was probably brought by trading ship from Constantinople to Alexandria. Moving south, the plague outbreak of 1348 was so horrific it became known as the Great Annihilation.
Entire towns in the Nile Delta were emptied, their inhabitants either dropping dead or fleeing to Cairo. In Cairo, recordkeepers at mosques and prayer halls first marked hundreds of deaths a day, then thousands. Over the course of the fall and winter, the plague would kill perhaps as much as half the city’s population of around 200,000. (2)
Entire families perished. “Any baby born died within a day and was quickly joined by its mother,” the historian al-Maqrizi writes. Shroud sellers couldn’t keep up with demand, cemeteries filled up from Bab el-Nasr in the north to the Qarafa in the south. It spared no one: Al-Maqrizi’s list of emirs, scholars and other elites taken by the plague goes on for nearly seven pages of his history “Al-Sulouk fi Maarafat Duwal al-Mulouk.”
Like the Black Death in Europe, the Great Annihilation traumatized a generation across Egypt and Syria with its inexplicable, unstoppable march of death.
“In a time of rampant plague, don’t trust life, it’s but the blink of an eye / The graves are like a candle’s flame and mankind but moths that into it fly,” one poet of the time wrote.
“لا تثق بالحياة طرفة عين….” Poem in a manuscript of Khalil bin Aybak al-Safadi’s 14th century collection of biographies of literary figures, “Ilhan al-Sawaji’ bayn al-Badi’ w’al-Muraji’” الحان السواجع بين البادئ و المراجع
Manjak, however, saw in the tragedy an opportunity to help repair the budget.
Entire streets of Cairo were now lined with empty homes, after the plague wiped out not only the owners but their heirs and their heirs’ heirs. Manjak organized a house-by-house survey of all of Cairo and its suburbs to record every building, the names of the owners and the names of the occupants. He confiscated abandoned houses and sold them, bringing further revenue into the treasury. (3)
Heartless, yes. But also, an impressive feat of organization. (Imagine what a treasure this survey would be to historians today if it survived.) Once the plague ended, Manjak gave another show of his skill in managing bureaucracy and mass mobilization when he succeeded in building a large dike in the Nile, a major infrastructure project that several of his predecessors had failed at. (4)
During this time, Manjak also built this mosque in the Bab el-Wazir Cemetery. He staffed it with a corps of Sufis and dug a water cistern, or sihreej, under it, so the site is often better known as Sihreej Manjak.
ِA view of the Khanqah, or residence for Sufis, connected to the Manjak’s mosque, which also contains his tomb. (The distinctive dome in the background is the Tomb of Emir Younis al-Dawadar)
The tunnel adjoining the mosque leads out to Bab al-Wadaa Street, and from there it’s a short walk to the Citadel. Now half buried in dirt but still used, this was actually the main entrance gate for the mosque complex, which otherwise was cut off in its site overlooking the cemetery.
The location gave the Sufis living here a sense of isolation, while at the same time, it had easy access to the Citadel, the seat of power. This unique combination made the mosque a popular place to stay for religious scholars visiting from outside Egypt while conducting business with the court.
A view of the mosque’s interior, with the qibla
The later phase of Manjak’s career was in Syria, where he served as governor of multiple provinces, most notably two stints as governor of Damascus.
When he first arrived in Damascus in 1358, he waged a campaign against vice and became notorious for the punishment he inflicted on winemakers and others who “spread corruption”: He pierced their noses with rings, then paraded them around the city for three days by a chain from the nose as an example to others.
People were terrified of him. But their opinion changed the more good he did. He destroyed brothels, stopped the sale of girls and closed down bathhouses whose waste polluted the river people drank from.
A poem about Manjak’s brutal crackdown on alcohol with some very insider word-play. This one takes some explaining, as it pulls its puns from “Ilm al-Ansab,” or the science of genealogies, an important scholarly pursuit tracing family lines back to the early Islamic and pre-Islamic period.
The poem is roughly translated: “Oh Wine drinkers, Manjak has flipped the genealogies by enforcing right from wrong/ The drinker goes out in the evening an Al Jafna and comes back in the morning a Bani Makhzoum.”
The pun is in the names. The Al Jafna, or Jafnids, were the pre-Islamic Ghassanid Arab kingdom, to whom some liked to link their ancestry. But the name “Al Jafna” also means “People of the Grapevine.” The Bani Makhzoum were a branch of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca from the time of Muhammad. But their name also means “Those with pierced noses.”
It is, I presume, enormously clever to Islamic genealogists.
The people of Damascus rejoiced when Manjak was reappointed as governor a decade later, the chroniclers of the time tell us. He would govern for six years and came to be praised with all the qualifications that, in the era, marked a good ruler. He punished corrupt officials and enforced morality. He brought safety on the roads for merchants and travelers. And most of all, he built public works.
Little of what he built around Damascus remains today, but he was known for major constructions, including a large bathhouse near the Ummayad Mosque and a madrasa west of the old city. Across Syria, he built bridges and roads and erected bathhouses, marketplaces and caravanseries.
He had a mystique around him, one that residents told tales about. One story went that Governor Manjak was passing through the streets of Damascus when he heard the screams of a woman coming from inside a house. The woman, he was told, had been in labor for days but the baby would not come out. Manjak gave them his underpants and told them to lay them on top of the woman. They did so, and the baby slid right out of her. Amazed, the neighbors asked Manjak how this happened.
“It’s because my loins have never been exposed in sin,” he replied.
He established a family line that would be a prominent part of Damascus’ elite for generations. His grandson Mohammed built two mosques in Damascus that still stand. Later descendants served as governors under the Ottomans, who gave the family control over imperial endowments in the city, further increasing their wealth. Most famous was a great-great-great-great-great-great grandson, also named Manjak, who was one of the best known Ottoman poets of the 1600s.
The Hammam of Manjak, in the Syrian city of Bosra, one of the few structures built by Manjak still standing.
© Museum für Islamische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, collection Michael Meinecke
ِThe Manjak Mosque in Damascus, built by Emir Manjak’s grandson, Nasir al-Din Mohammed ibn Ibrahim ibn Manjak around 1409. The main part that survives from his mosque is the square minaret, seen in the recent photo surrounded by a rather over-the-top modern mosque. (Photo by Syrian researcher Emad al-Armashi, who has written a detailed history of the mosque in Arabic.
The other photo shows the minaret in the 1930s. Nasir al-Din Mohammed was a leading emir in Damascus who was close to Sultan al-Muayyad Sheikh (builder of the gorgeous mosque next to Cairo’s Bab Zuweila.) Sheikh held Nasir al-Din in high esteem and repeatedly offered him prominent posts. But Nasir al-Din always refused, perhaps scarred by the torments he had suffered while backing Sheikh in the long, brutal civil wars that brought the sultan to power. Instead, Nasir al-Din grew in wealth in Damascus, and whenever he visited Cairo, the sultan would seat him in the most prominent place in court, higher than his other emirs.
Nasir al-Din also completely renovated and rebuilt an Ommayad-era mosque in Damascus, the Aqsab mosque, pictured here. Photo by محمود الجبور
The front two pages of the Diwan of Manjak Basha, the poetry collection of Emir Manjak’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, who lived in the 1600s under Ottoman rule in Damascus. “Born into an immensely wealthy house, Manjak Basha enjoyed a carefree youth and devoted himself to his pleasures, which included the study of poetry and participating in scholarly gatherings attended by the most learned men in Damascus,” Prof Alev Masarwa of University of Munster writes of him. He was famed for his command of Arabic and innovative metaphors. But he squandered away his family’s wealth and died in poverty and seclusion in 1669. (Photos from manuscript at Open Collections Program at Harvard University)
Manjak ended his life at the height of power.
In 1374, Sultan al-Ashraf Shaaban summoned him to Cairo and appointed him as his deputy. Shaaban had been installed as sultan at the age of 10 by a powerful Mamluk factional leader, who later tried to oust the boy and take power himself. Shaaban was saved by an alliance with another elder emir, who also then tried to seize the throne – only to be defeated with the help of yet another grandee.
Now a young adult trying to stand on his own, Shaaban may have seen in Manjak a way to break the cycle. In his 60s, Manjak was respected, capable and an outsider, unconnected to the conspiring factions of Cairo. Shaaban made Manjak sultan in all but name, giving him full powers to make appointments to state postings and oversee the treasury. When a famine hit soon after, Manjak assigned every emir an allotment of poor to feed and care for.
But after just over a year, Manjak fell ill. In a rare honor, the sultan himself came to visit him in his palace at the beginning of Souq el-Silah street, where he lay sick and dying. Manjak spread silk carpets on the ground for the sultan's horse to tread on as he entered, then offered the sultan 10 mamluks and a number of horses as gifts. The sultan accepted the gifts, then returned them to him as a sign of respect.
A few days later, Manjak died.
A 1921 photo of the gate to the Palace of Emir Manjak, the only part of it that stands today. Photo by K.A.C. Cresswell ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London
A photo from the late 1800s showing the start of Souq al-Silah Street. The Palace of Emir Manjak is on the left. In the background is the minaret of the Mosque of Uljay.
Photo by the Syrian-Armenian photographer Jean Pascale Sebah ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London
What I’ve left out of this story, however, is the arduous, twisted journey Manjak took throughout his life, going from the heights of power, to prison, and back again.
In the Mamluk era’s dangerous politics, it was common for prominent emirs to suffer startling falls from power. Some went from the top to being executed in prison. Some were freed after long imprisonments but disappeared into obscurity. And some made dramatic comebacks, regaining their former prominence.
But Manjak fell over and over and over again, and not only survived his falls but each time rose back to the heights. He was imprisoned three separate times over the decades in the notorious Alexandria Prison. His time as wazir, for example, ended when Sultan Hassan had him arrested in the middle of court and threw him into prison. He was lucky; in the same purge, Hassan had his other top emirs killed or blinded.
Sidelined and stripped of wealth on multiple occasions, Manjak spent two years living here in his own mosque as an ascetic among his Sufis. Visitors describe him sitting on a straw mat on the ground wearing a simple robe (granted, he woud weep to them over his lost wealth.) Another long exile he spent in Jerusalem, where as an act of piety he built a madrasa on the al-Aqsa Compound that still exists today.
A view of the Madrasa al-Manjakiyya, on the western side of Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif. Photo by Bukvoed via Wikimedia Commons
A 1969 photo of the Haram al-Sharif, with the Dome of the Rock on the left. The Madrasa al-Manjakiyya is the dome at the bottom right.
His strangest reversal came in 1359. He was serving as governor of Safad at the time, and the sultan unexpectedly called him back to Cairo. Manjak feared a trap, that he was being lured back to be killed.
So on the way to Egypt, he vanished into the desert outside Gaza.
For a full year, his fate was a mystery. The sultan hunted for him, fearing he might one day resurface at the head of a revolt. One rumor claimed he was seen hiding among the Turkomans in Anatolia. Another said he’d run off to Iraq. In fact, he was under their noses the whole time. He was discovered living in a house just outside the walls of Damascus. He had been circulating in the city normally, even attending gatherings in the main Ummayad Mosque in disguise.
Maybe Manjak would have preferred to go on living in this anonymous isolation?
He never seemed driven by the grasping ambition that tainted some other emirs. He never seemed to maneuver for position or rank in court or play an active role in conspiracies for power. He is always summoned to office, which he performs it with a cold but impressive competence.
And this is what makes him so compelling to me. I imagine him marked throughout his life by the murders he committed.
How must he have felt, killing men he had no personal quarrel with on behalf of rulers he knew were fools? And he killed them in the most intimate way, locked together in the embrace of strangulation. He watched up close the final thoughts in their eyes as the mind flickered out. He saw firsthand what simple meat we all become when we are dismembered after death.
Wouldn’t this knowledge forever push him away from the world and its folly? He must have looked at all the people around him — rich or poor, powerful and weak, going through their lives loving, fighting, aspiring, suffering, enduring — and thought: They are the dead, delaying. From that distance, everything that motivates us seems easily abandoned.
OK, I know, it’s ridiculous to psychoanalyze a man from 700 years ago. Manjak is nothing but a few lines scattered here and there in books. This is just my imagination running down dark corridors.
Perhaps I am too influenced by events of the world now, by too many videos of human beings turned to mangled flesh. Perhaps it’s easier to take that and read it into history and a place. Whatever the case, this mosque and its site are an evocative place. By day, the garbage strewn over this neglected hill is all too visible. But at night, the scene becomes otherworldly, with that striking view of the cemetery stretching out below. The moon hangs, gibbous, in the purple sky. The men in the workshops nearby on the hill grind seashells to use in decorating furniture, spreading a pale dust. Boys come out to play football in the empty expanse before the mosque, uninterested in the dangerous, dark man who built it, until from the light of an upper-story window, a mother calls out — more wary, perhaps — and tells them come back home.
(1) One of member of this ill-fated trio, Baydamur al-Badri, spent the last weeks of his life haunted in his dreams because of his own brutality, much like Sultan Ismail.
Baydamur served briefly as the governor of Aleppo in Syria. Aleppo’s elites and public alike immediately disliked him because he replaced the local leadership with his own retainers, who then abused the populace.
Then came the incident that did him in. A young girl from a prominent family in a nearby village had been betrothed to marry a man she loved. But her father died, and a wealthy man paid off her new guardian to give her to him in marriage. Repulsed by her new groom and determined to prevent the wedding, the girl loudly proclaimed that she was renouncing Islam.
It was clearly just an impulsive act. But the governor Baydamur heard of it and decided to punish the heresy. He arrested the girl. They shaved her head bare. Then they sliced her nose in two. Then they cut off her ears and hung them around her neck by a cord. Then they paraded her around Aleppo.
The people of Aleppo were horrified by this cruelty. The women of the city – Muslims, Christians and Jews united in shock and pity – all turned out for a mass mourning ceremony for the girl. Word of the outrage reached Cairo, where the sultan ordered Baydamur removed from his post.
Meanwhile, the poor disfigured girl appeared to Baydamur in a dream. She moaned at him, over and over, “Get away from me. Get away from me. Get away from me.” Then she told him, “I have complained to God Almighty about you.”
Baydamur woke up terrified. He contacted the girl and offered her money for her forgiveness. She refused. Five months later, Baydamur had his fateful encounter with Manjak.
(2) “Refugees of the Black Death, Quantifying rural migration for plague and other environmental disasters,” by Stuart Borsch and Tarek Sabraa. https://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-de-demographie-historique-2017-2-page-63.htm
(3) The plague eventually passed, and odd thing happened months later. A new fashion spread among the women of the sultan’s harem: They started wearing their tunics longer. They seemed to delight in pushing the style as far as they could, and their tunics became so long the ends dragged behind them on the ground. They started seeing how wide they could make their sleeves as well. Their sleeves billowed out 3 meters wide, impractical but playful, a style that became known as the “bahtala”. They added on luxuries like silk sashes and silk slippers.
Women around Cairo imitated the style and appeared in public flowing in grandiose bahtala sleeves and swathed in silk.
The sources don’t make the connection, but you have to wonder whether this extravagance was a reaction to the plague. After enduring months of fear, horror and death, wouldn’t people go grasping for pure, frivolous pleasure?
Of course, that wasn’t how the usual policemen of women’s dress saw it. Judges issued fatwas banning the bahtala and silk fineries. It was Manjak who led the crackdown. His mamluks patrolled the streets and cut the bahtala sleeves off any women found wearing them. They raided laundries and tailors and confiscated silk fripperies. A number of women were arrested. Manjak even had effigies of women wearing long-sleeved tunics hanged from city gates as a warning.
(4) The story of the dikes in the Nile is proof that some things about major public works projects have never changed. It will look familiar to anyone aware of infrastructure building today, with competing expert assessments, political fights over funding and cost overruns. Manjak’s achievement in getting it done was impressive on multiple levels – the engineering, the financing and the mass mobilization.
The Mamluk-era historian al-Maqrizi gives the most detailed account. It all began a decade earlier, in 1337, when Nile flooding overflowed the eastern, Cairo side of the river, flooding Boulaq and destroying a mosque and several houses.
The sultan of the time, al-Nasir Mohammed, decided to build a dike across the Nile that would direct the current away from the east bank toward the west bank.
Two emirs were put in charge of the project, and they carried it out with brutality. They ordered a levy of forced labor, pulling commoners off the street and putting them to work dragging blocks of limestone down from the desert plateaus around Cairo to the river. The stones were put on boats, which were then sunk in the Nile for the foundation of the dike. It was the middle of summer, and no tents were put up for the workers. The sultan himself would come out on a boat on the river and shout at the overseers to work the men harder. Workers died in the heat, but the project was done in a few months.
The dike turned out to be too successful. The river’s waters not only stopped overflowing the eastern bank, they receded too far and too permanently. The whole bank from what is now Garden City to Shubra dried up. Water carriers, who provided water for much of the population of al-Qahira, had to go further to collect from the river, and prices went up.
After years of complaints, a first attempt was made in 1346 to correct the flow by building a new dike from Giza to the Nilometer, at the southern tip of Roda Island. But it was a weak barrier made of dirt, and the builders only made it two-thirds of the way across before they ran out of money. The next flood season easily washed it away.
A more serious attempt was made the next year, under Sultan al-Muzaffar Hajji. A group of emirs went out on a boat tour with engineers and Nile boatsmen to do an assessment. They measured between Giza and the Nilometer. One of the boatsman, Rayis Youssef (you can only imagine a wizened river veteran) warned them, “This river can’t be dammed. If you do, it will turn to the shore and destroy it.”
But the emirs had conflicting proposals. The deputy sultan, Tuquzdamur, brought in an expert who proposed a dike running from about where the Four Seasons is in Gaza now to the northern tip of Roda Island. And he claimed he could do it for only 4,000 dirhams.
The expert backed by another emir, Maliktamur al-Hijazi, argued for a dike between Giza and the southern tip of Roda Island, where the Nilometer is located. He set a cost of 150,000 dirhams because he’d be using sturdier materials.
Not surprisingly, the sultan went with the cheaper plan. “If you succeed, you’ll be granted land. If you fail, you’ll be hanged,” he told Tuquztamur’s expert.
He failed utterly. He was using flimsier material to keep costs down, filling in dirt embankments with straw. Each part they dammed during the day was washed away during the night. After a week of this, the sultan was ready to string the expert up, but the deputy sultan’s intercession saved his life.
Now the other proposal, by Maliktamur’s expert, was given a chance. Maliktamur imposed a tax and managed to raise half the necessary funds.
But the project was shelved because of personnel changes at the top: Maliktamur was hacked to death in court for unrelated reasons (by none other than Manjak, as noted above), and then Sultan Hajji was killed by his top emirs.
It would be a few more years before the proposal was revived yet again.
Manjak, the wazeer, took charge. First. he tackled the financing. He had a list drawn up of all the emirs and their land holdings and charged them a dirham for every 100 dirhams they earned from their land. For the highest-ranking emirs, that got up to as much as 5,000 dirhams each. He imposed a levy on every house, shop and water cistern. Mills had to pay 5 dirhams for each millstone they possessed. The gardens and groves around Cairo were charged 10 dirhams an acre. All the elite palaces that benefited from the canal-works had to cough up 15 dirhams a meter. A fee was taken from every Islamic endowment and every church and monastery.
Manjak must have had an army of secretaries and bureaucrats out measuring properties, counting millstones and snooping through everyone’s books.
It made him unpopular among the elites. But the public was pleased because when work started on the dike, Manjak then used the money to actually pay the laborers rather than using forced labor. He paid every worker a dirham and a half a day and three loaves of bread. He also built tents to shade them from the broiling sun as they worked. Manjak mobilized a network of stonecutters, woodworkers and earth-diggers. They sank boats loaded with stone blocks into the Nile bed and erected a frame on top of it.
The emirs and elites eventually started to undermine the tax levy, and funding slowed. Manjak nearly had to give up only partway across the Nile. But with the annual floods imminent, he made a final push and successfully lay the dike from the Nilometer on Roda Island to the Giza shore.
In the end, the old river boatsman Rayis Youssef was right, and the dike worked too well. When the next floods came, the new dike sent them swelling over the river’s western banks, destroying a number of houses in Boulaq.
But what I wonder is, could the remains of the dike — those big stone blocks they sank — possibly still be there under the Nile?
The Nilometer at the southern tip of Roda Island, and the view from it over the Nile toward Giza.
