Shams al-Din al-Sakhawi

Shams al-Din al-Sakhawi (1428–1497) was a Shafi'i scholar of hadith and history, and the leading student of Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, whose biography he later wrote. A prolific author, he compiled al-Daw' al-Lami, a vast biographical dictionary of the notable figures of his century, and added a supplement to al-Maqrizi's chronicle of the Mamluk sultans.

He recorded the marital histories of five hundred women in Egypt and observed that at least a third of women in Egypt and Syria married more than once. He died in Medina.