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Construction
Construction of Mosque-Madrassa of Sultan Hassan
mosque in Egypt
- 1363
- North Africa
Construction
mosque in Egypt
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
The Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Hasan (Arabic: مسجد ومدرسة السلطان حسن) is a monumental mosque and madrasa located in Salah al-Din Square in the historic district of Cairo, Egypt. It was built between 1356 and 1363 CE during the Bahri Mamluk period, commissioned by Sultan an-Nasir Hasan. The mosque was considered remarkable for its massive size and innovative architectural components, and is still considered one of the most impressive historic monuments in Cairo today.
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.
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.
The most substantial available source concerning the mosque's construction is al-Maqrizi, writing six decades afterwards, as he had access to administrative documents that are unavailable to historians today. The manual labour needed for construction must have been partly depleted by the ongoing ravages of the plague, yet this does not appear to have been the main challenge. Maqrizi mentions that the construction of the mosque cost 30,000 dirham every day. The total construction costs amounted to over one million dinars, making it the most expensive mosque in medieval Cairo. Even the Sultan is said to have become discouraged at times by the cost of the project. Financing for the mosque was made possible by a few factors: first, the austerity measures implemented by Manjaq, one of the amirs in charge of state affairs before Sultan Hasan reached maturity; secondly, the influx of wealth to the state caused by the plague-related deaths of many Mamluk amirs whose properties were subsequently transferred to the state treasury, including the enormous wealth of amir Shaykhu; and thirdly, through extortion of the sultan's subjects during his reign.
The importance and scale of the building project also attracted craftsmen from all over the Mamluk empire, including the far-away provinces of Anatolia, which may explain the diversity and innovativeness of the mosque's design and decoration. It is also believed that limestone from the Pyramids of Giza was quarried for use in the mosque's construction.
Due to the mosque's location near the Citadel and because of its massive and sturdy construction, it was used on more than one occasion as a fortified position or as a platform from which to launch attacks on the Citadel. Al-Maqrizi, noted that "as soon as there occurred strife between the people the state, a number of amirs and others ascended to the top of the mosque and began to bombard the Citadel from there". This, in turn, persuaded more than one sultan to order the mosque to be demolished or blocked up. In 1391, rebel amirs against Sultan Barquq mounted the roof of the mosque and launched projectiles at the Citadel, provoking the sultan into ordering the stairs and platform of the entrance destroyed and the doorway boarded up. In 1500, Sultan Janbalat, anticipating another rebel attack from the mosque, ordered it demolished; however, after three days of unsuccessful demolition attempts on the mosque's southeastern (Citadel-facing) walls, he was forced to give up. In 1517, the very last Mamluk sultan, Tumanbay, took refuge inside the mosque in an attempt to evade capture by the victorious Ottoman army as it took control of Cairo, resulting in the Ottomans bombarding the mosque with cannonballs from the Citadel. In 1660, chronicles described the mausoleum's dome as still being full of holes made by cannonballs. Even in the 18th century, during the period of Ottoman control, the mosque was apparently closed for many years after unrest in 1736, and was only reopened in 1786 by order of Salim Agha. Some of these demolition attempts, however, drew criticism from Cairo's population and authorities were often subsequently pressured into repairing damages.
In 1659, the northern minaret attached to the mausoleum collapsed. In 1671-1672, the minaret was replaced with a smaller one, with a slightly different form, and at same time the original wooden dome of the mausoleum was replaced with the current dome, also in a different shape from the original.
In 1869, construction began on a monumental new mosque, the Mosque of ar-Rifa'i, right next to the existing mosque of Sultan Hasan. Completed in 1912, its size is comparable to Sultan Hasan's construction and it was built in a neo-Mamluk style. The two buildings together now dominate the old Rumayla Square (now renamed Midan Salah ad-Din) across from the Citadel.
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.
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 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.
Additionally, two more minarets were originally intended to stand above the monumental portal of the mosque, very much like in the architecture of Mongol Ilkhanid and Anatolian Seljuk madrasas and mosques around the same period (for example, the Gök Madrasa in Sivas, Turkey, or the Great Mosque of Yazd, Iran), which were almost certainly an inspiration. This would have given the mosque a total of four minarets, which would have been unprecedented in Islamic architecture in Egypt. However, in 1361, during construction, one of those minarets toppled and killed around 300 people, including children in the primary school below. After this, the builders abandoned their construction, leaving only the two minarets adjacent to the mausoleum that we see today.
The entrance portal is gigantic by the standards of mosque architecture and is 38 meters high. It was built at an angle projecting 17 degrees outwards from the rest of the wall so as to be visible from the Citadel. Its shape and the layout of its decoration indicate obvious inspiration from the portals of madrasas and mosques in Anatolian Seljuk and Mongol Ilkhanid architecture of the time, particularly the portal of the Gök (Blue) Madrasa in Sivas, Turkey, built in 1271. On the inside of the portal, behind the stone benches and flanking the doorway, are a pair of marble niches filled with geometric patterns reminiscent of Qur'an illumination and culminating in shallow muqarnas hoods (also Anatolian in style). Above these are black marble panels inlaid with white Kufic Arabic inscriptions of parts of the Surat al-Fath (Sura of Victory) from the Qur'an. The Shahada (the Muslim declaration of faith) is inscribed in "square" Kufic higher up above this, while further up is a band of inscription containing another Quranic verse (24:36-37), running along the full width of the inside of the portal, just below the muqarnas canopy.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Hasan”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.