Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/327

293 some years, the Khalif who banished the barber is described by the latter as a prince “who loved the poor and needy and companied with the learned and the pious,” a description which, though exactly tallying with the character of the good and wise El Mustensir, as given by Arab historians, is in no way applicable to the melancholy madman El Muntesir. It may, therefore, be safely assumed that the date (A.D. 1255) given by Galland’s MS. and by the Breslau and Macnaghten Editions is the correct one. For the reasons above stated, the Hunchback’s adventure can hardly be dated earlier than ten years later, i.e. A.D. 1265, or seven years after the fall of Baghdad, and in view of the fact (inexplicable, if we suppose the story to have been written at or soon after this date) of the absence of any reference to the terrible event of the sack of the capital by the Tartars and of the occupation, in immediate succession, of Bassora and the other towns of Irak Arabi and Mesopotamia, events which must for a time, at least, have agitated the whole Muslim world, we may fairly suppose some half century or more to have intervened before the composition of the story. This brings us to the second decade of the fourteenth century as the earliest period at which the