Who ruled Aleppo?

Aleppo stands on the plain of northern Syria, roughly halfway between the Mediterranean coast and the Euphrates. Its fortune came from that position, on the overland routes linking Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the sea, and from a steep mound at its heart that has carried temples and fortresses for four thousand years. It has been lived in without a break for several thousand years, placing it among the world's oldest surviving cities, and for much of its history it rivalled or outranked Damascus.

The city appears as Halam or Halab in tablets from Ebla in the third millennium BCE. By about 1800 BCE it was the capital of Yamhad, an Amorite kingdom that dominated northern Syria, and its storm god Hadad was worshipped in a temple on the citadel mound. The Hittites sacked it in the sixteenth century BCE and later ruled it after a period of Mitanni control. Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian overlords followed, and Alexander the Great took the city in 333 BCE. Under the Seleucid Empire it was refounded as a Greek city named Beroea, though locals kept the old name. Rome annexed Syria in 64 BCE, and in late antiquity the city was one of the largest in the region until the Sasanian king Khosrow I burned it in 540 CE.

Arab Muslim armies took Aleppo in 637. In 944 the Hamdanid prince Sayf al-Dawla made it the capital of his own emirate, and his court drew poets and scholars, but a Byzantine army stormed the city in 962. In the twelfth century Aleppo became a stronghold against the Crusader states: it beat off a siege in 1124 and 1125, and under the Zengid rulers and then Saladin, who took it in 1183, it was a base for the Muslim counter-offensive against the crusaders. The Ayyubids rebuilt the citadel into the massive fortress that still stands.

Disaster came twice. The Mongols under Hulagu sacked Aleppo in January 1260 and killed much of its population, and in 1400 Tamerlane captured it from the Mamluks and massacred its inhabitants again. Each time the city recovered, rebuilding its markets and mosques under Mamluk rule.

The Ottoman sultan Selim I took Aleppo in 1516 after defeating the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq, and it remained part of the Ottoman Empire for four centuries. These were its great commercial years. Caravans carrying Persian silk and Indian goods met European merchants, and Venetian, French, English and Dutch traders kept consuls and warehouses in its covered markets, which grew into one of the largest souks in the world. A devastating earthquake in 1822 killed many thousands and began a long decline, made worse by epidemics and by the shift of trade to sea routes and the Suez Canal.

After the First World War Aleppo came under French mandate rule and joined the new Syrian state. The new border with Turkey cut it off from much of its hinterland, and the transfer of the province of Alexandretta to Turkey in 1939 took away its nearest port. The city absorbed many Armenian survivors of the deportations of 1915, and its Christian quarters remained among the largest in the Middle East. Syria became fully independent in 1946.

From 2012 to 2016 Aleppo was one of the main battlefields of the Syrian civil war, divided between government and rebel forces. Large parts of the old city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986, were destroyed, including the minaret of the Great Mosque. Government forces retook the city in December 2016, an earthquake caused further damage in 2023, and in November 2024 opposition forces captured it shortly before the fall of the Assad government. Aleppo remains one of Syria's two largest cities, home to well over a million people.