Mausoleum des Sultans Qalawun

Sultan al-Mansur Qalawun (reigned 1279-1290) built this complex on al-Mu'izz Street in Bayn al-Qasrayn, on land of the western Fatimid palace^7,2,3. It joined a mausoleum, a madrasa and a hospital, or bimaristan¹. Discover Islamic Art relates that Qalawun, cured in Syria with medicines from the Nur al-Din hospital in Damascus, vowed to build a similar hospital in Cairo². The Qalawun VR Project reads the entrance inscription as giving 13 months for the whole complex, from mid-1284 to mid-1285; the mausoleum, begun around December 1284 or January 1285, took about four months³. Amir Alam al-Din Sanjar al-Shuja'i supervised the work; passers-by and Mongol prisoners of war are said to have been made to labour on it^5,2,3.

Qalawun died in 1290 while preparing a campaign against Acre⁷. His son al-Nasir Muhammad and his grandson al-Salih Isma'il were later buried beside him⁴. His son Khalil endowed the mausoleum with land at Tyre and Acre, taken from the Crusaders³. Lectures on hadith and Quran commentary were given in the tomb chamber, and while Qalawun’s descendants ruled, newly invested amirs swore their oath before his tomb⁴. In 1776 Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda removed the dome, and the chamber stood roofless for more than a century³. In 1903 Max Herz Bey built the present concrete dome, copied from that of the mausoleum of al-Ashraf Khalil (1288)^5,3.

The stone street façade of the mausoleum and madrasa is 67 m long and 20 m high, with tall arched recesses on marble columns framing pointed-arch windows decorated with interlaced geometric patterns^2,8. A thuluth inscription band, cut low enough to be read from the street, gives the founder’s titles and the dates 1284 and 1285^2,8. Caroline Williams, quoted by D. Fairchild Ruggles, sees here the start of a phase in which vertical elements dominate Mamluk façades⁸. The stone minaret at the north end of the mausoleum front is 56.2 m high by Creswell’s measurement; al-Nasir Muhammad restored it after an earthquake in 702 AH (1302-1303), and an inscription on it dates the work to 703 AH (1303-1304)^4,2. Doris Behrens-Abouseif sees this pairing of dome and minaret as the earliest example of a layout that later marked Mamluk mausoleums⁴.

The tomb chamber is square². Four granite columns with gilded capitals and four brick piers faced with marble and mother-of-pearl stand in an octagon at its centre; they carry arches with stucco decoration on their soffits, and above them a dome on an octagonal drum². Discover Islamic Art likens this central space to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem². Wooden muqarnas turn the octagonal base into the circle of the dome⁵. The decoration combines marble revetment, carved marble, stucco, and carved, painted and gilded wood⁵. The chamber was originally reached from the west, through a small courtyard with an arcade of shallow domes^5,4. IRCICA describes the mausoleum as the best-preserved part of the complex⁶.

Visitors can now enter the tomb chamber through a side door from the entrance corridor; the original route led east from the corridor through an antechamber⁴. In the middle of the floor, wooden latticework panels enclose an empty wooden cenotaph marking the graves of Qalawun, al-Nasir Muhammad and al-Salih Isma'il beneath it^4,10. Around it rise the granite columns and marble-clad piers of the octagon, and the walls carry marble panelling inlaid with mother-of-pearl². The mihrab, in the east wall towards the street, has a horseshoe arch and is decorated with multicoloured marble panels, marble mosaic and small turquoise glass columns in its arcades^4,9,10. Discover Islamic Art counts it among the largest and most splendid mihrabs in Egypt².