Citadel of Cairo (Citadel of Salah al-Din)

Yeomans counts the Citadel on its spur of the Muqattam hills Salah al-Din's most spectacular contribution to Cairo's architectural history. ¹ Building began in 1176; the main gate, the Bab al-Mudarraj, carries a foundation inscription of 1183, which Yeomans takes to mark the end of the first stage, the year after which Salah al-Din left Cairo for good. ² Al-Kamil completed it and was the first sultan to live there. ³

Yeomans reports al-Maqrizi's story that Salah al-Din chose the site for its fresher air, testing it by hanging meat there, which stayed fresh for over two days while elsewhere in Cairo it spoiled within a day and a night. ¹ Yeomans thinks defensive necessity and the example of the Syrian and Crusader castles Salah al-Din knew were the real reasons: the spur guarded the city on the north-east and kept government and army secure within. ¹ The site was not empty: the Abbasid Dome of the Air had stood there, and Fatimid mosques and tombs were demolished to clear it. ^{4 2}

Al-Maqrizi says some of the small pyramids at Giza were demolished for stone, but most was quarried on the spot, opening a gap between the Citadel's eastern walls and the Muqattam. ¹ The Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr (1183) described countless Rumi prisoners cutting stone, sawing marble and digging the rock-cut fosse around the fortress. ⁵ Up to fifty thousand prisoners of war were estimated to be working in Egypt before 1187; Yeomans thinks the figure exaggerated and that they were probably captives of the 1179 campaigns. ²

The Citadel today divides into northern, southern and lower enclosures; from the start the residential and administrative area in the west was separate from the military compound in the north. ¹ Creswell put Salah al-Din's walls at 1,400 metres; his small semicircular towers, faced with smooth stone and built on rock, have cruciform chambers with arrow slits and project every hundred metres, and a continuous gallery runs inside the curtain walls. ² Three original gates dated 1183 survive: the Bab al-Mudarraj, the Bab al-Qarafa and the Eastern Gate at the Burg al-Imam. ² The Bab al-Mudarraj now stands between Muhammad Ali's New Gate of 1826 and the Ayyubid wall; over its entrance is the foundation inscription in one of the earliest examples of Naskhi, with restoration inscriptions of Sultans Jaqmaq, Qaytbay and Tuman Bay I, and its vestibule dome bears the name of al-Nasir Muhammad. ^{2 6} Sultan Janbalat bricked up the other two gates in 1501 against the Ottomans. ⁶

Al-Kamil strengthened and enlarged existing towers, encasing the Burg al-Haddad and Burg al-Ramla in new semicircular units, enlarging the Eastern Gate into the twin towers of the Burg al-Imam (1183-1207), and adding massive square self-contained keeps, the best preserved being the Burg Kirkilyan (Tower of the Serpents) and the Burg al-Turfa (1207), the latter almost thirty metres square. ^{3 7} Some rooms served as prisons, and the last members of the Fatimid family died in the Tower of the Serpents. ^{8 9} Al-Kamil's work is known by its embossed rusticated masonry, unlike the smooth stone of Salah al-Din's towers, a style also seen at the citadels of Damascus and Bosra. ⁹

Within the Citadel are Joseph's Well and later buildings such as the mosque of al-Nasir Muhammad and the Ablaq Palace. ^{5 6}