The caliphate of al-Mustansir and the ‘Mustansirite hardship’

Al-Mustansir succeeded his father al-Zahir in June 1036. His mother Rasad dominated the court, while able viziers — al-Jarjara'i (died 1045) and later al-Yazuri — kept the state prosperous for some two decades. Fatimid missionaries worked from Syria to Iran: the Persian traveller Nasir Khusraw, who came to Cairo in 1047, became one of al-Mustansir's missionaries in Khorasan, and in 1058–1059 the Turkish commander al-Basasiri even had the Friday sermon read in the name of the Fatimid caliph in Abbasid Baghdad for about a year. Yet the empire was shrinking: the Zirids of Ifriqiya renounced Fatimid allegiance in the 1040s, Sicily fell to the Normans, and Syria slipped away to local rulers and Turkmen bands.

After the execution of al-Yazuri in 1058 the government fell apart. Viziers changed more than thirty times between 1063 and 1067; Turkish and black African (Sudanese) regiments fought each other in Cairo in 1062 and 1067; and a series of low Nile floods brought the famine of 1065–1072, known as the Mustansirite hardship (al-shidda al-mustansiriyya), followed by plague that emptied whole districts. Berber tribes in the Delta broke the dykes and canals. The Turks under Nasir al-Dawla ibn Hamdan extorted ever higher pay: in 1068 the treasures of the palace were sold off at a fraction of their value and the great Fatimid library was scattered, its books torn up or burned. It was said that the caliph was left with a single horse and lived on two loaves a day sent by the daughters of a grammarian. Nasir al-Dawla even offered to restore Egypt to Abbasid allegiance, and the sharif of Mecca went over to the Abbasids.

In 1073 al-Mustansir secretly summoned Badr al-Jamali, the Armenian-born commander of the Syrian coast. Sailing in winter, Badr landed at Damietta in December, entered Cairo on 27 January 1074, had the Turkish commanders killed at a banquet and became vizier with military, judicial and religious authority — in effect the first of a line of military dictators who ruled in the caliph's name. He restored order in the Delta and Upper Egypt and rebuilt the walls of Cairo in stone, with the gates of Bab al-Nasr and Bab al-Futuh (1087) and Bab Zuwayla (1092), which still stand; but Damascus and most of Syria passed to the Seljuks. Badr died in June 1094 and was succeeded by his son al-Afdal. When al-Mustansir died on 29 December 1094, al-Afdal raised his younger son al-Musta'li to the throne instead of the designated heir Nizar, splitting the Ismailis into Musta'lis and Nizaris.