Once Saladin’s limestone shell was in place, the Citadel’s story rolled on under the Bahri Mamluks. In 1260 Baybars rode in, bricked a wall across the middle and posted Bab al-Qulla, the gate that split the soldiers’ northern yard from a new royal south. Inside, he set up his gilded reception hall and a domed audience chamber whose lions carved in stone still poke from a battered tower.His successor Qalawun cleared space for the palace of his vice-regent and filled the towers with slave-soldier regiments, the Burji Mamluks, who would one day rule. Qalawun’s son al-Ashraf Khalil kept the momentum: he laid a marble-paved qa'a west of today’s Police Museum and lined its walls with mother-of-pearl mosaics that caught the torchlight like river water.The master builder, though, was another son, al-Nasir Muhammad, whose fifty-year stop-start reign (1293-1341) reshaped the skyline. First he fixed the Nile aqueduct, then unfurled the striped Ablaq Palace along the western escarpment, its loggia giving him a private view of the parade ground below. Behind it he raised the Great Iwan—an immense domed throne hall that chroniclers swore outshone the city’s mosques—and in 1318 replaced the old citadel mosque with his own, all reused pharaonic columns and green-tiled minarets.Al-Nasir’s sons added sparkle rather than scale: Isma'il opened al-Duhaysha, a little wonder hung with gold tablets, and Hasan topped a sky-high domed palace before planting his vast madrasa just outside the walls. In the Burji era Qaytbay and al-Ghuri squeezed new halls into the harem court and rebuilt the aqueduct once more, ending with al-Ghuri’s reflecting pool in the hippodrome where cavalry once drilled.By the time the Ottomans marched in 1517 the Citadel was a layered hive of domes, iwans and mosaicked corridors—every new sultan eager to stamp the rock before the next swept his work away. The result was a living palimpsest of power that still clings to Cairo’s heights today.

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Bab el-Azab