In 1340, a large fire broke out in Damascus, causing real estate damage and some loss of life. Following a patterned anxiety about non-Muslim intransigence in Mamluk society (as occurred, for example, after the Cairo fire of 1321), political and religious authorities identified the act as arson and prosecuted several Christians for the crime. The rousing incident was narrated—fiercely albeit briefly—by notable contemporaneous Damascene chroniclers, including adh-Dhahab?, as-Safadi, and ibn Kath?r. Until now, scholars have relied on these various narratives to reconstruct the tumultuous crisis and its place in the history of religious difference in Mamluk society. This paper is based on a newly discovered (and, to my knowledge, hitherto unexamined) manuscript in Leiden (copied in the early 16th century), whose first part includes a remarkable ‘dossier’ of various documents related to the incident and its aftermath, featuring: (i) an anonymous popular poem lamenting the destruction; (ii) a transcript of the Pact of ?Umar promulgated in the wake of the fire; (ii) the sovereign edict (mars?m) issued by Mamluk political authorities, and (iii) perhaps most interestingly, a detailed legal account (mahdar) of the trial of the Christian offenders, including verbatim transcripts of the interrogation of six named Christian bureaucratic scribes (and two monks). The latter represents a unique This paper presents a detailed analysis of the unique manuscript and the various traces of the Damascus fire and its prosecution. It will place these alternate deposits—from popular poetic lament to sovereign edicts to Islamic legal proceedings—in the framework of Mamluk moral regulation. Moral regulation, which initially targeted non-Muslims, consisted of three distinct but interrelated vectors: political regulation (consisting of sovereign edicts that reissued the Pact of Umar, but also introduced various other restrictions on dhimmi privileges); scholarly regulation (which included a boom in various ulama treatises decrying the employment of non-Muslim scribes, but also various social polemics that sought to sharpen boundaries between religious communities by problematizing shared practices), and popular regulation (which took the form of unauthorized urban violence, often led by local, non-establishment scholars and Sufis, against non-Muslim property). The paper will also compare the representation and the different anxieties revealed in the urban fires of Cairo (1321) and Damascus (1340), both ascribed to local Christians in both cities.