In 1249, a crusader army marched on Cairo, the Sultan of Egypt died mid-invasion, and his widow decided nobody needed to know. Shajar al-Durr, purchased at a slave market, forged a dead man's signature, broke a crusade, captured a king of France, and put her own name on the coins of Egypt. The chroniclers who wrote her story all worked for the people who came after her. So she answered in architecture instead. This one has ships carried on camels, a constitutional argument built out of grief, and the most suspiciously perfect murder weapon in medieval history.

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Primary Sources

Ibn Wasil. Mufarrij al-Kurub fi Akhbar Bani Ayyub. Mid-13th century. Excerpts translated in Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades. Translated by E. J. Costello. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

al-Maqrizi, Ahmad ibn Ali. Kitab al-Suluk li-Ma'rifat Duwal al-Muluk. Early 15th century. Written approximately 150 years after the events described. Principal source for the account of Shajar al-Durr's death; used here as evidence of the later narrative tradition rather than as a contemporary record.

de Joinville, Jean. The Life of Saint Louis. c. 1309. Translated by Frank Marzials in Memoirs of the Crusades. London: Dent, Everyman's Library, 1908. Full text available via the Internet Archive. Modern translation: Caroline Smith, Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades. London: Penguin Classics, 2008.

al-Bukhari, Muhammad ibn Ismail. Sahih al-Bukhari. 9th century. The hadith on female rulership invoked against Shajar al-Durr, transmitted from Abu Bakra, appears in Book 88 (Afflictions and the End of the World), Hadith 219.

Secondary Sources

Ruggles, D. Fairchild. Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of the 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar al-Durr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Humphreys, R. Stephen. From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus, 1193-1260. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977.

Schregle, Gotz. Die Sultanin von Agypten: Sagarat ad-Durr in der arabischen Geschichtsschreibung und Literatur. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1961. In German. Cited via Ruggles.

Gabrieli, Francesco, ed. and trans. Arab Historians of the Crusades. Translated by E. J. Costello. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.