One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world: capital of the Umayyad caliphate, base of Nur ad-Din and Saladin against the crusader states, and a Mamluk provincial capital sacked by Timur in 1401.
Damascus lies on the edge of the Syrian desert at the foot of Mount Qasioun, where the Barada river spreads through the Ghouta, the oasis of orchards and gardens that fed the city. It is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and in the Middle Ages it was one of the great capitals of the Islamic world: seat of the Umayyad caliphs, base of Nur ad-Din and Saladin in their wars against the crusader states, and the second city of the Mamluk sultanate.
Its medieval heart survives in outline. The Umayyad Mosque, built by the caliph al-Walid I between 705 and 715 on the site of a Roman temple and the church of St John the Baptist, still stands at the centre of the walled old city, with Saladin's tomb in a small garden against its northern wall and the Ayyubid citadel at the north-western corner.
Damascus was already ancient when it became Roman. The Aramaean city of the Bible was refounded on a Hellenistic grid, counted by Pliny among the cities of the Decapolis, and given the colonnaded Straight Street that still crosses the old town. In the Byzantine centuries its great temple enclosure was converted into the cathedral of St John the Baptist.
The Arab conquest came in the 630s. Khalid ibn al-Walid and Abu Ubayda took the city by agreement in 635, withdrew before the Byzantine counter-offensive, and recovered it for good after the Battle of Yarmouk in 636. Mu'awiya, governor of Syria for two decades, made Damascus his capital when he became caliph in 661, and for ninety years it governed an empire that eventually ran from the Atlantic to the Indus.
The Umayyads made the city a monument to their rule. Al-Walid I demolished the church inside the old temple precinct and raised the Great Mosque, faced with gold-ground mosaics of trees, rivers and palaces by craftsmen whom Arabic tradition says were sent from Byzantium. When the Abbasids overthrew the dynasty in 750 and moved the capital to Iraq, Damascus lost its political primacy and spent two centuries as a restless provincial city.
Under the Abbasids, then the Tulunid and Ikhshidid governors of Egypt, and from 970 the Fatimid caliphs of Cairo, Damascus was fought over by distant powers and held by their garrisons. The Turkmen commander Atsiz took it in 1076 for the Seljuk sultans, and after 1104 the atabeg Tughtekin and his Burid descendants ruled it as a small independent state, squeezed between the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem to the south-west and the Zengid rulers of Aleppo and Mosul to the north.
That position made the Burids cautious allies of Jerusalem against Imad ad-Din Zengi, until the Second Crusade threw the alliance away. In July 1148 King Louis VII of France, King Conrad III of Germany and Baldwin III of Jerusalem attacked Damascus from the orchards on its western side, moved their camp to the waterless plain on the east, and abandoned the siege after four days. The failure pushed the city toward Zengi's son Nur ad-Din, who entered it with little resistance in 1154 and made it his capital.
Nur ad-Din made Damascus the ideological centre of the war against the crusaders. He founded the Nuri hospital, which treated patients and trained physicians for centuries, built madrasas and a hall of justice, and made the recovery of Jerusalem a public cause. When he died in 1174 his lieutenant Saladin, already master of Egypt, took Damascus within months and used Syria and Egypt together to encircle the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
After his victory at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, Saladin returned to Damascus and died there on 4 March 1193. He was buried beside the Great Mosque, in the mausoleum that still holds his tomb. His brother al-Adil I reunited the Ayyubid lands and from 1203 rebuilt the citadel as a great rectangle of massive towers, and for half a century Ayyubid princes fought one another for Damascus as the prize that confirmed a claim to lead the family.
The Ayyubid city was also a centre of Sunni learning. Madrasas multiplied inside the walls and in Salihiyya, the suburb founded on the slopes of Mount Qasioun by refugees from crusader Palestine, and scholars such as the historian Abu Shama and the jurist al-Nawawi taught there in the thirteenth century. The traveller Ibn Jubayr, who saw the city in 1184, called it the paradise of the East.
In March 1260 the Mongol general Kitbuqa took Damascus without a siege after the last Ayyubid ruler of Syria had fled. Six months later the Mamluk sultan Qutuz defeated Kitbuqa at Ain Jalut, and the city passed to the Mamluks of Cairo, who governed it as the capital of their Syrian provinces for more than two and a half centuries. Baybars, who died in Damascus in 1277, was buried there, and armies raised in its province took part in the campaigns that ended with the fall of Acre in 1291.
The Mongols came back twice more. The Ilkhan Ghazan occupied the city in 1299–1300 while its citadel held out, and in 1401 Timur besieged Damascus, extracted a huge ransom, and then sacked and burned it; the fire gutted the Umayyad Mosque, and the city's craftsmen were carried off to Samarkand. The historian Ibn Khaldun, trapped in Damascus during the siege, was let down from the walls to meet Timur and left an account of their conversations.
Medieval Damascus was compact: an oval of walls with seven principal gates around the Great Mosque, cut through by the old Roman Straight Street, with the citadel guarding the north-west corner and the Barada running just outside the northern wall. Suburbs spread beyond it, above all Salihiyya on the mountain slope and the Maydan quarter along the southern road, by which the pilgrim caravan left each year for Mecca.
Its wealth came from its oasis and its markets. The Ghouta supplied fruit and water, the city's workshops produced silk textiles, enamelled glass and inlaid brasswork, and Damascus stood on the routes linking Baghdad, Cairo, Aleppo and the Mediterranean ports. European merchants carried its patterned silks home as 'damask', and its name was attached in Europe to the watered-steel blades traded through its markets.