Who ruled Beirut?

Beirut occupies a headland on the eastern Mediterranean coast, midway along the shore of Lebanon, with the mountains of Mount Lebanon rising close behind. A natural harbour and fresh water gave it a long life as a port, but for most of antiquity and the Middle Ages it was overshadowed by neighbours such as Tyre, Sidon and Damascus. Its rise to the first rank came only in the nineteenth century, and its modern history has swung between prosperity as a commercial and cultural capital of the Arab world and repeated destruction by war.

The site has been inhabited for thousands of years, and the town appears as Biruta in the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BCE, as one of the coastal city-states of the region later known as Phoenicia. Under the Seleucid Empire it was renamed Laodicea in Phoenicia, and in 140 BCE it was destroyed in a war between rival claimants to the Seleucid throne.

Rome rebuilt it. In 14 BCE Berytus became a colony settled by veterans of two legions, with privileged Italian legal status, and it grew into a handsome Roman city with baths, a forum and a hippodrome. From the third century CE it was home to the most famous law school in the eastern empire, whose teachers helped shape the legal codification ordered by Justinian. That age ended in 551, when an earthquake and tsunami devastated the coast and killed many thousands in the city; the law school moved to Sidon and never returned.

Arab Muslim forces took Beirut in 635. In 1110 Crusader armies captured it after a siege, and it became a lordship within the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Saladin retook it in 1187, but crusaders recovered it in 1197 and held it until the Mamluks expelled them in 1291. Under the Mamluk Sultanate and, from 1516, the Ottoman Empire, Beirut was a modest walled port. The Druze emir Fakhr al-Din II fortified and developed it in the early seventeenth century, and Russian ships briefly occupied it in the 1770s during a war with the Ottomans.

Beirut's growth began in the 1830s, when Egyptian forces under Ibrahim Pasha occupied Syria and opened the region to European trade. In 1840 a British, Austrian and Ottoman fleet bombarded the town to drive the Egyptians out. Steamships, silk exports and a new road to Damascus, opened in 1863, made it the main port for the Syrian interior, and Christian refugees from the violence of 1860 swelled its population. Missionaries founded the Syrian Protestant College in 1866, later the American University of Beirut, and Jesuits opened Saint Joseph University in 1875. In 1888 the city became the capital of its own Ottoman province.

After the First World War France made Beirut the capital of Greater Lebanon under its mandate in 1920, and it remained the capital when Lebanon became independent in 1943. In the 1950s and 1960s banking, tourism and a free press made it a regional centre. The civil war from 1975 to 1990 divided the city along the Green Line between mainly Christian east and mainly Muslim west, and Israeli forces besieged West Beirut in 1982. Much of the ruined centre was rebuilt in the 1990s.

Since then the city has suffered the assassination of former prime minister Rafic Hariri in 2005, Israeli bombing of its southern suburbs in 2006 and again in 2024, and a financial collapse from 2019. On 4 August 2020 a huge store of ammonium nitrate exploded at the port, killing more than 200 people and wrecking surrounding districts. Greater Beirut is home to around two million people, a large share of Lebanon's population.