DamascusArticle Free Pass
Though the Muslim Arabs brought with them a budding creed, with its sacred text, tentative worldviews, and still-developing legal framework, they did little to change the physical layout of Damascus. In 661 Muʿāwiyah, the first Umayyad caliph, established his court in the Syrian capital and founded a dār al-imārah (centre of government) there. For almost a century thereafter the city functioned as the capital of a widening empire stretching from what is now Spain to the borders of present-day China—the most far-reaching of any achieved in Islamic history. The principal extant monument of this period is the Great Mosque of Damascus, built by the Umayyad caliph al-Walīd between 706 and 715. Although it has been damaged, burned, and repaired several times, it is still one of the marvels of Islamic architecture. Gilded mosaic once adorned the entirety of its walled surfaces; of those embellishments, only fragments remain. They suggest that the whole composition featured largely vegetal themes and scenes made up of picturesque buildings, suburbs, and villages set in fanciful landscapes. These renditions have been variously interpreted as scenes of paradise or of Damascus as it then was.
After the fall of the Umayyads in 750, the successor ʿAbbāsids moved their capital to Baghdad. Damascus retreated to the status of a provincial town, subjected to punishments by the new dynasty for its numerous revolts. Umayyad buildings were sacked and the city’s fortifications dismantled. As trade routes changed, Damascus also lost much of its economic prominence. The situation did not improve with the transfer of sovereignty from Baghdad to Cairo in the late 9th century, or when Turkish adventurers took turns ruling Damascus—whether independently or under the nominal suzerainty of either the Fāṭimids or the Seljuqs—during most of the 11th century. The Crusades posed a serious threat to the city at the end of the 11th century, and although Damascus managed to escape direct occupation, it endured numerous attacks and sieges and lost large parts of its hinterland.
During this chaotic period, the city walls were rebuilt with strengthened gates, and a citadel was founded in the northwestern corner of the city. The appearance of homogeneous, introverted, and self-reliant residential quarters emerged in this period. By the 12th century, the city was divided into segregated communities, each neighbourhood equipped with its own amenities, including a mosque, bath, public oven, independent water supply, and small markets. The Great Mosque and central market remained loci of civic unity.
A new era opened when Nūr al-Dīn ibn Zangī, a powerful Turkish emir (military commander), captured the city in 1154 and made it once again the capital of a strong kingdom and the base for his military campaigns against the Crusaders. The town revived, and its fortifications were strengthened. Religious and civic buildings were erected, new forms of architecture were introduced, and new quarters for immigrants sprang up. Despite some military and economic setbacks, the city continued to flourish under Saladin and his Ayyūbid successors, who ruled there until 1260. Damascus developed into a major religious and educational centre, with emirs competing to build madrasahs (religious colleges) and qubbahs (funerary domes) and to bestow them with generous waqfs (land held in trust and dedicated to religious or educational purposes) to support their teachers and students. The Ayyūbid patronage was concentrated around the Great Mosque and in the Kurdish quarter on the slopes of Mount Qāsiyūn, where many Kurds, owing to their ethnic affinity with the Ayyūbids, moved to serve in the army.
After the devastating Mongol invasion of 1260, much of Syria again became directly dependent on the new rulers in Egypt, the Mamlūks. Damascus was the seat of the sultan’s deputy in Syria, with a miniature court fashioned after that of Cairo. The economy recovered quickly after the Mongol withdrawal in 1260, and it was booming by the beginning of the 14th century, particularly during the governorate of Tankiz (1312–40). The city continued to expand: a new, southern quarter grew along the road leading to Ḥawrān (Damascus’s wheat basket), Palestine, and Egypt, where most of the city’s exports of foodstuffs and luxury items were traded. Trade travel was facilitated by the numerous khāns (warehouse inns) dotting its main thoroughfare. A new northern quarter, Sūq Sārūja, emerged as a market area around the citadel. Owing to its proximity to the citadel, this area became the Mamlūks’ choice residential quarter in the 15th century.
For more than 150 years, Damascus was the base for the Muslim struggle against the Crusades. The four most celebrated leaders of that struggle—Nūr al-Dīn ibn Zangī, Saladin, al-ʿĀdil (Saladin’s brother), and the Mamlūk sultan Baybars I—are interred in the vicinity of the Great Mosque. Their tombs, featuring relatively large domes and tall arched portals with intricate muqarnas—an architectural ornamentation of honeycombed niches—are combined with madrasahs. The tombs are among the city’s most prominent medieval buildings and were all restored during the 1990s.
Damascus suffered two major disasters in close succession in the middle of the Mamlūk period. The first of these, the outbreak of plague in 1348–49 (see Black Death), wiped out perhaps as much as half of the city’s population. The second disaster was the pillage of the city in 1401 by Timur, accompanied by his policy of deporting skilled artisans to his own capital at Samarkand (in present-day Uzbekistan). Coupled with the later Mamlūks’ rapacious administration, these calamities resulted in a chronically anemic economy that was reflected negatively in the form and structure of the city. Although the built-up area increased in the 15th century, the expansion was mostly due to migration from depressed rural regions. In addition, the extended urban domain concealed countless deserted plots, called kharāb (“uninhabited,” or “in ruin”) in the waqf documents, where ruins stood as attestations to the bankrupt economy and dismal urban order on the eve of the Ottoman conquest by Sultan Selim I in 1516.
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