his luxury and love of display, he unquestionably maintained law,
enforced equity, punished corruption, and valiantly defended his
kingdom. He fitted out a fleet of 600 sail at Maks (then the port of
Cairo, on the Nile), which kept the Emperor Basil at a distance and
assured the caliph's ascendancy from end to end of the Mediterranean
Sea.

After these two great rulers the Fatimid caliphate subsisted for nearly
two centuries by no virtue or energy of its own. The caliphs lived
secluded, like veiled prophets, in their huge palace at Cairo, given
over to sensual delights (Saladin found 12,000 women in the Great Palace
when he entered it in 1171), and wholly regardless of their kingdom,
which they left to the care of vezirs, who were chiefly bent on making
their own fortunes, though there were many able, and a few honest men
amongst them. The real power rested with the army, and the only check
upon the tyranny and debauchery of the army lay in its own jealous
divisions. The fanatical Berber regiments imported from Tunis, the
bloody blacks recruited in the Sudan, and the mutinous Turkish troops
long established in the country, were always at daggers drawn, and their
rivalry was the vezirs' opportunity. In such anarchy the country fell
from bad to worse.

The reign of Hakim, the frantic son of Aziz and his Christian wife, was
a personal despotism of the most eccentric kind, marked by apparently
unreasonable regulations, such as keeping the shops open by night
instead of by day, and confining all women to the house for seven years,
as well as by intermittent persecution of Christians and Jews; and also
by enlightened acts, such as the founding of the Hall of Science and the
building of mosques, for all the Fatimides were friends to the arts; and
ending in the proclamation of Hakim as the incarnation of the Divine
Reason, in which capacity he is still adored by the Druses of the
Lebanon. This assumption led to popular tumults and an orgy of carnage,
in the midst of which Hakim mysteriously disappeared (1021).

His successors, Zahir (1021-1036), and Mustansir (1036-1096) did nothing
to retrieve the anarchic situation, of which the soldiers were the
unruly masters. Palace cliques, disastrous famines (one of which lasted
seven years, 1066-1072, and even led to the public selling of human
joints as butcher's meat), slave, or rather freedmen's, revolts,
military tumults, and the occasional temporary ascendancy of a talented
vez