Its sultan was murdered before it was finished, and his body was never found.
This is the Mosque and Madrasa of Sultan Hassan in Cairo, Egypt. Work began in 1356 for the Mamluk sultan an-Nasir Hassan, and was largely complete by 1363.
It is a mosque and a madrasa in one building, about one hundred and fifty metres long, with a stone portal said to rise thirty-eight metres. The surviving minaret is said to reach about eighty-four metres.
In 1361, while it was being built, one of the minarets fell, and about three hundred people were reportedly killed. Soon afterwards, the sultan was assassinated by one of his own commanders.
His body was never found, so the tomb behind the prayer wall holds his two young sons instead.
Inside, four great vaulted halls, called iwans, open onto a central courtyard with a domed fountain. Each is said to have been devoted to one of the four Sunni schools of law.
The mosque faces the Citadel, so rebels later used its roof as a fortress. In 1391 a ruler had its doorway blocked, and in 1500 another tried to pull it down, but gave up.
Sultan al-Nasir Hasan (full name: An-Nasir Badr ad-Din Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Qalawun) ascended the throne at the age of 13 in 748 AH (1347/1348 CE). When he reached maturity in 1350, he arrested the Emir Manjaq who controlled all of the state's affairs. Prior to that arrest, the emir was restricted to an allowance of just one hundred dirham per day. This pocket change was collected by servants for the Sultan. It is especially striking considering that during that time, the emir Shaykhu was estimated to have an income of 200,000 dirham per day. This deprivation may be viewed as a prompt for his later extravagance. Upon taking over the reins, Sultan Hasan placed people of his own favor into positions of power. This happened at the expense of dignitaries currently in position; it upset many of them. Discontented Emirs arrested the Sultan in 1351, held him in jail for three years, and promoted his brother as-Salih Salih to the throne. Hasan spent his time in jail studying and his obituaries commented on his learning as a result. He returned to power and again reshuffled the ruling establishment attempting to solidify power, but Sultan Hasan was assassinated by his commander in chief of the army, Yalbugha al-Umari, a Mamluk thought to be loyal. Because of the Sultan's extravagance in spending fortunes on women and other forms of favoritism, the commander rebelled against the Sultan. A contemporary Syrian historian, Ibn Kathir, backed this reputation. Ibn Kathir blamed the sultan for his greed and squandering of public funds. The lavish expenses noted coincide with the Sultan's extensive mosque. After his assassination in 1361, Sultan Hasan's body was never found; the mausoleum never served its purpose.
Construction
The mosque's construction is considered all the more remarkable as it coincided with the devastation wrought by the Black Plague, which struck Cairo repeatedly from the mid-14th century onwards. Its construction began in 1356 CE (757 AH) and work proceeded for three years "without even a single day of idleness". In fact, work appears to have continued even up to 1363, even after Sultan Hasan's death, before eventually ceasing. An inscription on the mosque notes the name of amir Muhammad ibn Biylik al-Muhsini as the supervisor of the construction of the mosque. Unusually, his name was placed near Sultan Hasan's in the inscription, which demonstrates how important the undertaking of the project must have been. The amir's high standing otherwise was another indication of this prestige, as he was appointed governor of Cairo in 1330 and oversaw other construction projects including the renovation of the hippodrome established by al-Zahir Baybars near the Citadel.
Architecture and design
The site
The mosque occupies almost 8000 square meters in a location close to the Citadel of Cairo. It stands on the site of a lavish palace which had previously been built at great cost by Hasan's father, Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, for one of his amirs, Yalbugha al-Yahawi, and which was demolished to make way for the mosque. The construction of monumental buildings on this location was likely meant in part to create a pleasing sight for the Sultan to look down on from his palace in the Citadel.
During the medieval era, an open square, known as Rumayla, lay between the mosque and the Citadel. Today, the square is occupied by a large traffic circle and has been renamed Salah ad-Din Square. The square and the former hippodrome nearby (on the southwestern side of the Citadel) were historically used for military parades, equestrian games, and official ceremonies, thus giving the location added symbolic significance.
Exterior
The building is about 150 meters long, 68 meters wide, and 36 meters high. Like all mosques, it is oriented towards Mecca, which is to the southeast of Cairo. The building's southwestern and northeastern facades (its longer sides) are marked by vertical rows of eight windows each (spread across four stories inside) which are a unique feature that helps to visually emphasize the structure's height. The top edge of the exterior facades are crowned by a thick cornice of muqarnas (stalactite-like carving) projecting 1.5 meters over the rest of the wall, another unprecedented feature in Mamluk architecture, although it does not extend around the entire building. Likewise, a crest of fleur-de-lis-shaped crenellations also ran along the whole length at the very top edge of the walls, but today it is only preserved around the mausoleum's walls on the southeastern side. The southeastern or Citadel-facing walls of the mosque and mausoleum have windows framed by more elaborate stone decoration in various patterns. The triangular-shaped spaces above the bottom windows here were once filled with geometric ceramic decoration, possibly of Anatolian Turkish inspiration.
Near the bottom of the southwestern wall, below today's street level, is a row of stone corbels projecting from the wall which likely served to support the roof of a covered market along the street on this side.
The minarets
The mosque today has two minarets flanking the mausoleum chamber on the southeastern side of the structure. The southern one of this pair, which is still in its original form, is the highest minaret of Mamluk architecture, its summit being 84 meters above the street level at the time. The northern one collapsed in 1659 and was rebuilt in its current form in 1671-72. The original northern minaret was said to be more monumental, and its summit was "double-headed"; in other words, it culminated in two lantern structures (instead of the usual one), a feature that reappeared much later in the minaret of Sultan al-Ghuri at the al-Azhar Mosque and in the minaret of the nearby Mosque of Qanibay ar-Rammah.
The History, Architecture and later sections are adapted from the Wikipedia article “Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Hasan”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article. Text has been shortened.
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