Aleppo

Timur took Aleppo from the Mamluks in 1400 and massacred many of its people, ordering a tower of 20,000 skulls built outside the city. The Muslims returned after the Mongols withdrew, but the Christians who had fled could not resettle their old quarter, and in 1420 they founded a new one beyond the northern walls, al-Jdeydeh.

The Ottomans took Aleppo in 1516, and by the middle of the 16th century it had displaced Damascus as the main market for goods reaching the Mediterranean from the east. Venice opened a consulate in 1548, and the Levant Company of London made the city its headquarters, while Armenian merchants in Jdeydeh dominated the silk trade. All of this rested on the silk caravans from Iran. When they stopped coming after the fall of the Safavids in 1722, the European merchants left, and Bedouin raids on the countryside brought a famine that by 1798 is said to have killed half the city's people.