Homs

Homs, ancient Emesa, stands near the Orontes where routes from the Syrian interior pass through the gap between the coastal mountains and Lebanon. Its position linked the Mediterranean with the steppe and the road to Damascus. The city was known in antiquity for the sanctuary of the sun god Elagabal, and later became an important centre of Islamic Syria, with markets drawing on the produce of the surrounding plains.

The Ottomans incorporated Homs in 1516. Although it lost some political importance, the town continued to process agricultural and pastoral goods from its district. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tribal unrest at times reached the city, and its markets were plundered more than once. In 1832, during the war between the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, Ibrahim Pasha's army fought an Ottoman force near Homs and secured its advance into northern Syria. The city remained a meeting point between settled farmland, the routes to the coast and the desert country to the east.