Shawar

It is Shirkuh, Yusuf's uncle, the fierce and battle-tested commander whose exploits Yusuf has admired from a respectful distance for his entire adult life, whom Nur ad-Din begins to consider as the instrument of this Egyptian intervention.

The internal Fatimid crisis has produced a deposed vizier, Shawar, who has fled to Damascus seeking Nur ad-Din's military support to reclaim his position, offering in exchange a substantial portion of Egypt's revenue and implicitly a foothold of influence that Nur ad-Din has long sought without quite finding the pretext to pursue openly.

It is an opportunity too significant to refuse, and by the last months of 1163, the shape of what will become the first Syrian expedition into Egypt is already taking form in the councils of Nur ad-Din's court, a form that will require, in the year immediately following, an experienced commander to lead it.

Yusuf, in these closing months of 1163, is aware of these developments in the general way that any well-placed administrator in Damascus would be aware of them.

But this one, he sensed, was different.

This one had the weight of something that would not simply burn itself out by morning.

The letter Shirkuh referred to had come from a man named Shawar, and Shawar's situation was, even by the standards of Fatimid court intrigue, remarkable.

He had been vizier of Egypt, effectively its ruler in all but name, since the Fatimid caliphs by this point were ornamental figures wrapped in ceremony and kept carefully away from anything resembling power, until a rival named Dirgham had driven him out in a coup that left blood on the palace floors and Shawar himself fleeing north on a fast horse with nothing but his life and his fury.

In November he took Bilbeis, 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 Shawar, the vizier of the Fatimid caliph of Egypt, to order the burning of Misr.

On the twelfth of November twenty thousand nafta barrels and ten thousand torches were lighted.

The fire lasted fifty-four days, and its traces may still be found in the wilderness of sand heaps stretching over miles of buried rubbish on the south side of Cairo.

His mosque, still to be seen near the Bab Zuela, bears witness to his pious munificence.

He tried his best to turn aside from Egypt the storm that was threatening from the political complications in Syria and Palestine, but the palace women found that they had called to their rescue an austere moralist and ungratefully put him to death.

His last words were a regret that he had not conquered Jerusalem and exterminated the Franks and a warning to his son to beware of Shawar, the Arab governor of Upper Egypt.

The regret and the warning were well-founded.