Architecture and Decoration

The Madrasa Sulṭānīya occupied a space of approximately 35 x 35 meters, from which a prong of masonry projected in the middle of the south façade, and the front of the mausoleum at the southern end of the east façade. The exterior of the building was marked by the large expanses of unadorned, windowless ashlar masonry, with smoothly worked surfaces on the central section of the northern façade that contained the portal, and on the walls of the mausoleum. The domes of the prayer hall and of the mausoleum rose to a modest height above the flat roof.

The portal appeared rather understated for a royal foundation, with its large niche covered by a groin vault instead of a muqarnas hood. However, the carefully drafted blocks of the vault and its frontal arch indicated that the architecture of the façade was very carefully planned and executed. Only the inscription that covered the springing of the vault on three sides without a proper frame gave the impression of a text that grew out of proportion for the space available.[1] The portal was delineated against the adjacent parts of the wall with a thin edge in the masonry. On top, it was crowned by a cavetto molding with the inscription of 620/1223 in high relief. Above the portal, the short minaret put a vertical accent on the middle axis of the building. Its octagonal shaft should probably be attributed to the Ayyubid period, while the muqarnas cornice was certainly a later replacement.[2] Parallels of other octagonal minarets, also constructed under aẓ-Ẓāhir Ghāzī, can be seen on the shrine of Joshua in al-Maʿarra and on the Maqām Ibrāhīm on the cemetery of aṣ-Ṣāliḥīn in Aleppo.[3] Some of the later Ayyubid madrasas in Aleppo were also built with minarets.[4]

Apart from the portal, the only other openings on the exterior were the three rectangular windows of the mausoleum, to the north, east and south. Each of them had a massive lintel with a relief arch above, and inscriptions in high relief. The same text was repeated on all three sides; it named the building as the turba of aẓ-Ẓāhir Ghāzī. The remarkable epithet “liberator of the ‘sanctified house’ (Bayt al-Muqaddas, sc. Jerusalem) from the hands of the unbelievers,” was the honorific following to the name of Ghāzī’s father, Saladin. It underlined Saladin’s particular achievement, thereby enhancing the glory of his son. The text terminated with the formula “may God sanctify their souls and have mercy upon both of them, and upon the one who asks God’s mercy for them.”[5] With the high relief of the three inscriptions, the mausoleum was the only decorated part of the building apart from the portal.

The four wings of the building were arranged around an oblong courtyard measuring ca. 20 x 17 m. Residential cells were lined up in the northern, western and eastern wings while the prayer hall and two adjacent rooms to the west occupied the south wing and the mausoleum was located in the south-eastern corner. In this arrangement, resulting from the restoration by Lauffray after 1944, the obligatory īwān was missing. It must have existed in the original layout, as Terry Allen has noted.[6] Like the exterior, the courtyard façades were marked by the strictest austerity possible. The three large pointed arches of the prayer hall façade were incised with sharp angles and with no particular profile.

The interior of the prayer hall was also dominated by the plain masonry surfaces. Its plan was a version of the usual oblong type of prayer halls in the madrasas of Aleppo: The domed central bay was flanked by two lateral bays, likewise built on a square plan and roofed with a pointed barrel vault. However, the prayer hall of the Madrasa as-Sulṭānīya reproduced this scheme in a slightly modified way: It had a deep recess on the qibla side of its central bay, corresponding with the middle arch of the façade and thereby creating a cross-shaped plan. In addition, the lateral bays terminated in a (mitered) groin vault. The mausoleum was built as a square with deep pointed niches on all four sides. Air shafts opened out into the northern and southern niches, while the eastern niche had windows to three sides. Below the domes of both the prayer hall and the mausoleum, groined triangles (or “split pendentives”) were used to effect the transition from the square to the round.