The city as a weapon: Aleppo's architecture and the eternal laws of urban conflict

“ Damascus is the capital of the desert, Aleppo of the fertile plain. Damascus is the city of the Arab tribes who conquered her and set their stamp upon her; Aleppo, standing astride the trade routes of northern Mesopotamia, is a city of merchants quick to defend the wealth that they had gathered afar. So I read the history that is written upon her walls and impressed deep into the character of her adventurous sons.
At Aleppo the current of the imagination is tributary to the Euphrates. ”

“ During this season in Midwinter, the caravan trade from India, Persia and Arabia came partly overland to the Euphrates, but mainly up that river, through Baghdad. Then—the passes of the Caucasus being under deep snow—it was born over the desert from Baghdad to Aleppo, thence to the ports in the Levant. ”

“ Within ten years--in fact, since the Allied Powers drove Ibrahim Pasha out of Syria--the trade of Aleppo has increased, at the expense of Damascus. The tribes of the Desert, who were held in check during the Egyptian occupancy, are now so unruly that much of the commerce between the latter place and Baghdad goes northward to Mosul, and thence by a safer road to this city. The khans, of which there are a great number, built on a scale according with the former magnificence of Aleppo, are nearly all filled, and Persian, Georgian, and Armenian merchants again make their appearance in the bazaars. ”

“ If there be a better gate to Asia than Aleppo, I do not know it. A virile population, a splendid architecture, the quickening sense of a fine Arab tradition have combined to give the town an individuality sharply cut, and more than any other Syrian city she seems instinct with an inherent vitality. ”

“ OLD is Aleppo, mother of cities and father of thieves. Time has brought to its streets in turn the changing peoples of the earth, the Indian, the Parsi, the triumphant Israelite—saints and pharisees, princes and lepers—and the conquering Moslem. Each built upon the ruins of the other, and made of the city a labyrinth where alleys ran underground and bathing wells were the cisterns of former palaces. And where the caravans came, thither came the thieves.
Hither had come the old Arab who had stolen Michael of Rohan, and the boy Hassan, the Arab’s son. ”

“ The latter of these, the Beræa of the Greeks, was not yet illustrious as the capital of a province or a kingdom; and the inhabitants, by anticipating their submission and pleading their poverty, obtained a moderate composition for their lives and religion. But the castle of Aleppo, distinct from the city, stood erect on a lofty artificial mound; the sides were sharpened to a precipice, and faced with free-stone; and the breadth of the ditch might be filled with water from the neighboring springs. After the loss of three thousand men, the garrison was still equal to the defence ”

“ At the northern limit of the enclosure stands a high square tower, up which, if you would know Aleppo, you must climb. From the muedhdhin’s gallery the town lies revealed, a wide expanse of flat roof covering the bazaars, broken by dome and minaret, by the narrow clefts of streets and the courts of mosque and khân. The cypresses of Abu Bekr stand sentinel to the north; from that direction Tîmûr entered through the Bâb el Ḥadîd. In the low ground beyond the Antioch Gate, the armies of the Crusaders lay encamped; the railway, an invader more powerful than Baldwin, holds it now. ”

“ By their rapine, cruelty, and discord, the petty tyrants of Persia might afflict their subjects; but whole nations were crushed under the footsteps of the reformer. The ground which had been occupied by flourishing cities, was often marked by his abominable trophies—by columns or pyramids of human heads. Astrakhan, Carizme, Delhi, Ispahan, Bagdad, Aleppo, Damascus, Boursa, Smyrna, and a thousand others were sacked or burned or utterly destroyed in his presence and by his troops ”

“ Timur spread havoc and ruin throughout south-western Asia until Syria lay prostrate beneath his feet. For three days in October 1400 Aleppo was given over to plunder. Its citadel was perhaps for the first time taken by storm, the invader having sacrificed of his men enough to fill the moat with their corpses. Some twenty thousand of the city's inhabitants were slaughtered and their severed heads piled high. The city's priceless schools and mosques built by Nurids and Ayyubids were for ever destroyed. The routing of the advance forces of Faraj opened the way to Damascus. ”

“ Like the numismatic emblem of a city goddess, Aleppo wears a towered crown. The citadel lies immediately to the east of the bazaars. A masonry bridge resting on tall narrow arches spans the moat between a crenelated outpost and the great square block of the inner gatehouse. Through a worked iron door, dated in the reign of El Malik eẓ Ẓâhir, you pass into a vaulted corridor which turns at right angles under an arch decorated with interlaced dragons (Fig. 13) , and ends at another arched doorway on which stand the leopards of Sultan Baybars, who rebuilt the castle in the thirteenth century. ”

“ Aleppo is not without evidences of a remote antiquity. Every archæologist in turn has tried his hand at the half obliterated Hittite inscription which is built, upside down, into the walls of the mosque of Ḳiḳân near the Antioch gate; among the ruins of the citadel are two roughly worked Hittite lions (Fig. 2; Mr. Hogarth was the first to identify them) , and I found in the French Consulate a headless eagle carved in basalt which belongs to the same period (Fig. 3) . The steep escarpment of the castle mound is akin to the ancient fortified sites of northern Mesopotamia. ”

“ To the summit of this natural stronghold, there is no approach, except on the western side, where a gradual but narrow ascent is defended by the walls and bastions. From the earliest ages it has consequently been the acropolis of the city, and no position could be stronger before the discovery of the engines of [Pg 322] modern warfare. The fortifications and castle, of a comparatively recent date, are now in ruins, and are scarcely defensible, with their few rusty guns, against the attacks of the neighbouring Kurds.
According to Armenian history, the Assyrian queen Semiramis founded the city ”

“ If you are so fortunate as to have many friends in Aleppo, you will find that the domestic architecture is no less admirable, and drinking your coffee under panelled ceilings rich with dull golds and soft deep reds, you will magnify once again the genius of the artificers of Asia.
The walls and gates of the city, though they are not so well preserved as those of Diyârbekr, are fine examples of{14} mediæval fortification. To the north a prosperous quarter lies beyond the older circuit and the heraldic lions of the Mamlûks look down upon streets crowded with traffic. ”

“ One hundred thousand women and children were sold into slavery. The walls of Aleppo were leveled, its mosques were demolished, its gardens uprooted and ruined. One month later on the citadel yielded. The victors found immense booty in the stronghold and also many artisans whom they spared for captivity.
Prince Nassir was in his camp at Berze near Damascus, when he received news of the sack of Aleppo. His general advised to retreat upon Gaza and implore the Sultan Kutuz for assistance. ”

“ Within these walls, on an elevated mound, is the smaller square of the citadel, where there are some curious ancient buildings and a prison, which I must describe afterward; a ditch, where it is not filled up with rubbish and neglect, surrounds the walls of the city; and beyond this are the suburbs, where the greater part of the population reside. Beyond this, an immense work was accomplished as a defense against the Russian invaders. ”

“ The city was taken after a siege of seven days and given up for five days to pillage and slaughter. "When the carnage ceased, the streets were cumbered with corpses. ... It is said that 100,000 women and children were sold as slaves. The walls of Aleppo were razed, its mosques destroyed, and its gardens ravaged." Damascus submitted and was spared. Khulagu was meditating, it is said, the conquest of Jerusalem, when news of the death of the Great Khan called him to the East.
H. H. Howorth, History of the Mongols, pages 209-211. ”

“ The defense was conducted with equal ferocity. Thousands fell on both sides in every mangled form of death. At last the besiegers undermined the walls, and placing beneath hundreds of barrels of gunpowder, as with the burst of a volcano, uphove the massive bastions to the clouds. They fell in a storm of ruin upon the city, setting it on fire in many places. Through the flames and over the smouldering ruins, Poles and Tartars, blackened with smoke and smeared with blood, rushed into the city, and in a few hours thirteen thousand of the inhabitants were weltering in their gore. ”

“ Modern Aleppo is obviously an Arab city, the language is Arabic, French has not yet displaced it as at Beyrouth, while it possesses a few broad streets, where the badly written French signs of Greek, Armenian, and Syrian shopkeepers, photographers and hotel-keepers hang. The majority of its ways are stone-paved alleys between high walls, with the lattice-windows always associated in the Western mind with Aleppo. ”

“ Damascus was well fortified on the east and on the south; but on the north, a multitude of gardens, inclosed with hedges and canals, formed its principal bulwark. And let399 not our readers smile at such a fortification; when every one of the innumerable hedges formed admirable ambuscades, and when every one of the thousands of trees was filled with archers instead of birds, the Crusaders found these gardens no “bed of roses.” It was these places, cut through by a vast number of sinuous paths, in which the Crusaders had to make their first assaults ”

“ While he spoke, Demid thrust the sword given him by the Turks under his cloak, signed for Michael to do likewise with the other weapon, and pushed his beard behind a fold of the voluminous garment. Picking up a cord, he bound one end about the wrist of Hassan and the other to Michael’s sash.
“Stoop when you walk, my friend,” he said, “and speak thickly if one addresses you. Look upon the ground, and wonder not. The reason for this will be known to you when we reach the only place that is safe in Aleppo.” ”

“ But, perceiving what appeared to be subterranean entrances at various points, I found that these tracts were upon the roofs of the houses and bazaars, verifying what I had frequently heard, that in Aleppo the inhabitants visit their friends in different parts of the city, by passing over the roofs of the houses. Previous to the earthquake of 1822, these vast roof-plains were cultivated as gardens, and presented an extent of airy bowers as large, if not as magnificent, as the renowned Hanging Gardens of ancient Babylon. ”

“ The last pestilence is supposed to have destroyed sixty thousand of the inhabitants.
The women of Aleppo are rather masculine, of brown complexions, and remarkable for indulging in the Sapphic affection.
[387] The quarries which supplied the stone for the construction of the city, are not far removed from the Antioch gate. They are every way worthy remark. On both sides of a road, cut through the solid rock, are seen the openings of caverns, capable of giving shelter to a vast number of persons. ”

“ They are supposed to have been at first the quarries, which furnished stones for the construction of the edifices of Alexandria; and, after having supplied the men of that country with the materials of their habitations, while they lived, are themselves become their last abode after death. Most of these subterraneous alleys are in a ruinous state. In the small number of those which it is possible to penetrate, are seen, on both sides, three rows of coffins, piled on each other. ”

“ For a time I feared the king of kings, who made gifts of a dagger’s point to other pashas of Aleppo, but to me he sent a damsel who is like the moon.”
The astrologer frowned.
“Why did the dog of a kazak burden himself with the maiden?”
“She was the surety of his mission—it would have put the shadow of doubt on his tale had he appeared in Aleppo without the woman.”
Sidi Ahmad fingered the scar on his cheek thoughtfully.
“Before the night is past my men will have thrust a spear into every corner of Aleppo, and the dog will be brought to me. He has not escaped the walls.” ”

“ It is probable that the city to which they belong was destroyed by some overwhelming catastrophe, laid desolate, perhaps by an onslaught of the Mitanni kings of northern Mesopotamia or of the Babylonians from the south, and so left in age-long ruin until a later generation completed the filling up of court and street which had been begun by time, levelled the whole and built their dwellings upon foundations of the past. ”

“ Its appearance at a distance is striking, and the houses are well built of stone. On a hill stands the citadel, and at its foot the governor's palace. Previous to 1822 Aleppo contained about 100 mosques, but in that year an earthquake laid the greater part of them in ruins, and destroyed nearly the whole city. The aqueduct built by the Romans is the oldest monument of [95] the town. Among the chief attractions of Aleppo are its gardens, in which the pistachio-nut is extensively cultivated. The branch railway to Hamah from the Beyrout-Damascus line has been continued to Aleppo. ”

“ The people of Syria and Egypt believed it to be the earthquake that is to precede the day of judgment. Many inhabited places totally disappeared; a vast number of men perished; the fortresses of Hamath, Barin, and Balbec were thrown down; the only part of the city of Naplouse that was left standing was the street of the Samaritans; in Damascus, all the most superb edifices were destroyed; in the city of Tyre only a few houses escaped, and the ramparts of Ptolemaïs and Tripoli were nothing but heaps of ruins. ”

“ The facings are gone, and masses left only of rubble and cement.
The ancient city has supplied materials for those public edifices, which have been erected by the Turks. The Bezestan and the Vizir khan were both raised with the white marble of the theatre. The very ruins of the stones and temples are vanished. “We saw,” says Dr. Chandler, “remains of one only; some shafts of columns of variegated marble, much injured, in the way ascending through the town to the castle. Many pedestals, statues, inscriptions, and medals have been, and are still, discovered in digging. ”

“ In many ways, it was like a scar on the face of the earth, pitted with bomb craters, strewn with the debris of toppled towers, its streets choked with fallen, crumbling masonry and blocked by the skeletons of buildings which once had stood, bare and rusted now but not always so, as monuments to the greatness of man. Yet it was a scar which could be healed, a broken, dying city which could be made great again, with men and women roving its streets, repairing the structures, making the living city function once more. ”

“ The traces left at this point of the fearful conflict are grand and awe-inspiring beyond expression—crumbling, dismantled walls, towers knocked to pieces or battered out of shape, bastions buried beneath huge masses of rubbish, loopholes burst open, the earth ploughed up, and the moat filled with colossal fragments which look like masses detached from the side of a rugged mountain. ”

“ The walls of Aurelian, broken and war-worn and full of half-repaired breaches, enclose a desert, a world too wide for its inhabitants, a vast straggling heterogeneous [Pg 94] mass of buildings in every stage of preservation and decay, splendid temples, mossy and ivy-grown, but scarcely injured by time, then wastes of broken brick and mortar; stern dark towers of Savelli, and Frangipani, and Orsini, and Colonna, dominating and threatening whole quarters of ruins; strange small churches built of odds and ends and remnants not too heavy for a few workmen to move ”

“ The dregs and offscourings of the city employed themselves in searching through the ruins for stray valuables, locks off the doors, nails, and bits of iron, avoiding the outstretched forms of soldiers and firemen, who, unable to hold out any longer against sleep and fatigue, had dropped wherever they might happen to be. Here and there persons might be seen endeavoring by the aid of pieces of board and strips of canvas to erect temporary places of shelter above their ruined dwellings ”

“ The very means which she took to arrest the progress of her enemies predisposed the minds of her people against her, and contributed to her downfall. She destroyed all the towns and farms in which the Arabs could obtain shelter, and burnt those magnificent forests, which made the whole country between Tripoli and Tangier one continuous garden. This would naturally have been put down as an exaggeration or mere tradition, but for the chain of Roman ruins still existing to prove how richly cultivated and how densely peopled the country once was, much of which is now all but desert. ”

“ The defenders of the city made desperate efforts to strengthen it, tearing down houses that stood too close to the walls, leveling suburbs that might protect the enemy, and erecting earthen defences and new walls where necessary. ”

“ The Vandals demolished the walls of this city, that the Romans might not be able, to hold it against them, so that it was exposed to the attacks of the Moors, who ravage that country; however, the Libyan inhabitants provided for their own safety as far as they were able, by piling up the ruins of their walls and joining their houses to one another, by which means they were able to offer a precarious resistance to their assailants. ”

“ Shut up in the cellars with the dead, pinched with famine, while the pestilence rioted without mercy and without resistance, they heard around them the incessant bursting of bombs, and thunder of artillery, and explosions of mines, and crash of falling houses, till the city shook, night and day, as within the grasp of an earthquake. Thousands fell daily, and the town was a mass of ruins. Yet, unconquered and apparently unconquerable, the inhabitants struggled on. ”

“ They have destroyed glass and paintings and sculptures that were a joy to the whole world, they have undone the work of saints and heroes and masters, and they have gained no corresponding military advantage. In every city which has been subjected to air raids the inhabitants have been made more obstinate, more iron-hard in their determination to keep on fighting. The sight of shattered churches, of wrecked dwellings, of mangled women and dead babies, does not terrify or dismay a people: it infuriates them. ”

“ Nearly half of the space inclosed within its walls is now covered by heaps of ruins, and the population is daily decreasing, without the hope of change. During my residence in Baghdad no one could go far beyond the gates without the risk of falling into the hands of wandering Arabs, who prowled unchecked over the plains, keeping the city itself almost in a continual state of siege. ”

“ She saw the ascending streets of Zion and the tall fortifications mounting the heights within the city's limits. There she saw the flash of swords, swung afar off, spears brandished and the running hither and thither of defenders on the wall. Below she saw the remote constricted passages between rows of desolate houses, moving with people, sounding with clamor. There she saw combats, terrible scenes of frenzy, deaths and unnamable horrors; starvelings gnawing their nails; shadows of infants pressed to hollow bosoms; old men too weak to walk that went on hands and knees ”

“ The city is enclosed by battlemented walls, outside of which lie great tracts of desolate suburbs—vast mounds of city refuse, and countless ruined tombs and minarets standing in the desert; the mosques having in many cases disappeared, as if destroyed by violence, while these more fragile minarets remain. Even those that remain are allowed to crumble away piecemeal, no modern Egyptians caring to prop up their fine old ancestral temples, or finding in them any interest either as works of art or matters of history ”

“ On our right is a ruined bridge once leading to a large coffee-house, both also in ruins. As we advance we pass other ruins. But though it was prophesied that Damascus should be a “ruinous heap,” her position forbids annihilation. The second of Biblical cities, she has been destroyed again and again; her houses have been levelled with the ground, and the Tartar has played hockey with the hearts of her sons. Still she sits upon the eastern folds of the Anti-Libanus and on her gold-rolling river, boldly overlooking the desert at her base. ”