Aleppo ─ The Rise and Fall of Syria's Great Merchant City

‘Every time gardens welcomed us, we said to them,Aleppo is our aim and you are merely the route.’Few cities are as ancient and diverse as Aleppo—one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world—successively Hittite, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Seleucid, Armenian, Roman, Ummayyad, Abbasid, Mameluk and Ottoman, where it became the empire’s third largest city, after Constantinople and Cairo. Its significance was its position at the end of the Silk Road, at the crossroads of the world’s trade, where merchants from Venice, Isfahan and Agra gathered in the largest souq in the Middle East. Today, it lies in ruins—a casualty of Syria’s war. In this, the first history of the city during and after the Ottoman era, Philip Mansel vividly describes Aleppo at the pinnacle of its cultural and economic power, a poignant testament to this once-vital world city.

Philip Mansel, who has lived and taught in Paris, is one of Britain’s leading historians of France and the Ottoman Empire. His first book, Louis XVIII, together with subsequent works such as Paris Between Empires, 1814-1852, established him as an authority on the later French monarchy. Mansel’s acclaimed Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire was described by William Dalrymple as 'An impeccably researched masterpiece of exquisite historical writing.' He currently lives in London. He is the author of The Eagle in Splendour (I.B.Tauris).