Building the Mustansiriyya madrasa in Baghdad

The caliph al-Mustansir billah founded the Mustansiriyya madrasa on the Tigris on the eastern side of Baghdad. Building began in 625 AH and was completed in 631 AH. ²

Al-Suyuti quotes Ibn Wasil saying that nothing finer had been built on the face of the earth, and none with more endowments. It had four teachers for the four schools of law, a hospital, a kitchen for the jurists, a bath, and allowances of mats, oil, paper and ink, and each jurist received a dinar a month. ²

The income of its endowment reached about seventy thousand mithqals a year. Books were moved into it in a hundred and sixty loads, and its jurists numbered two hundred and forty-eight, with teachers of hadith, grammar, medicine and inheritance, and thirty orphans. ²

It was opened on a Thursday in Rajab in the presence of judges, teachers and notables. ²