Tamerlane Sacks Aleppo and Damascus
In the winter of 1400–01 Timur (Tamerlane) led his army into Mamluk Syria. Aleppo fell after a battle outside its walls, and Damascus was besieged, surrendered, and then systematically plundered and burned despite negotiations conducted in part by the historian Ibn Khaldun. Timur's troops massacred inhabitants and deported the city's renowned artisans — weavers, metalworkers, and armourers — to Samarkand to enrich his own capital. The invasion came on top of the long demographic contraction caused by the Black Death and accelerated the decline of Syria's urban economy. For the Mamluk Sultanate, already strained by the Bahri-to-Burji dynastic transition and a shrinking agricultural tax base, the conquest of its northern provinces was a structural blow that the iqta' military-fiscal system had no mechanism to repair.
- Year: 1400 CE
- Category: Military
