324
thirty millions of dirhems[1] is entered as the aggregate amount bestowed, in money and goods, on Jaafer the Barmecide, and Fekhreddin Razi mentions (on the authority of the historian El Amrani), as occurring in a similar list, shortly before Jaafer’s death, the almost incredible item, “Four hundred thousand dinars[2] for a dress of honour[3] for the Vizier Jaafer ben Yehya,” to be shortly followed by the entry, tragic in its terrible contrast, “Ten carats[4] for naphtha and reeds for burning the body of Jaafer the Barmecide.” Again, at the instance of his great vizier, he gave Abdulmelik es Salih a sum of four millions of dirhems;[5] nor was he less lavish in his gifts to the poets, musicians and literati who tickled his intellectual palate with apropos recitals, songs, stories and pleasantries, as well as to the men of learning and chicane who extricated him by their ready wit from some dilemma of conscience or by a legal quibble enabled him to conciliate orthodoxy with the enjoyment of some prohibited pleasure. His wife Zubeideh was equally prodigal, especially in matters religious, having (according to Ibn el Jauzi) spent three millions of dinars,[6] in the course of a single pilgrimage, in expenses, gifts to the learned men of Mecca and Medina and public works.
- ↑ About £750,000.
- ↑ About £200,000.
- ↑ A khilaah or dress of honour (lit. that which one takes off from one’s own person to bestow upon a messenger of good tidings or any one else whom it is desired specially to honour) included, however, a horse, a sword, a girdle and other articles, according to the rank of the recipient and might more aptly be termed a complete equipment of honour.
- ↑ About five shillings.
- ↑ About £100,000.
- ↑ About £1,500,000.
