Sack of Aleppo (1400)
Sack of Aleppo (1400) | |||||||
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Belligerents | |||||||
Timurid Empire |
Mamluk Sultanate | ||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Timur | Tamardash |
The sack of Aleppo was a major event in 1400 during the war between the
History
In 1400, Timur's forces invaded
The Mamluks decided to fight an open battle outside the city walls. After two days of skirmishing, Timur's cavalry moved swiftly in arc shapes to attack the flanks of their enemy lines, while his center including elephants from India held firm.[2] Fierce cavalry attacks forced the Mamluks led by Tamardash, governor of Aleppo, to break and flee towards the city gates.[3] Afterwards, Timur began his destruction of Aleppo, on October 30, 1400 [4] and the destruction was completed with the city's surrender by November 2.[5] Timur then massacred many of the inhabitants, ordering the building of a tower of 20,000 skulls outside the city.[3]
During Timur's invasion of Syria in the Siege of Aleppo, Ibn Taghribirdi wrote that Timur's Tatar soldiers committed mass rape on the native women of Aleppo, massacring their children and forcing the brothers and fathers of the women to watch the gang rapes which took place in the mosques.[6] Ibn Taghribirdi said the Tatars killed all children while tying the women with ropes in Aleppo's Great mosque after the children and women tried to take refuge in the mosque. Tatar soldiers openly raped gentlewomen and virgins in public in both the small mosques and the Great Mosque. The brothers and fathers of the women were being tortured while forced to watch their female relatives get raped. The corpses in the streets and mosques resulted in stink permeating Aleppo. The women were kept naked while being gang raped repeatedly by different men.[5][7][8][9] Ibn Arabshah witnessed the slaughters and rapes Timur's Tatar soldiers carried out.[10]
Aftermath
After the sack of Aleppo, Timur's forces went south where they took
Notes
References
- ^ "Lettrism and History in 'Abd al-Rahman al-Bistami's Nazm al-suluk fi musamarat al-muluk", in Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice, ed. by Farouk Yahya, et al. (Brill, 2020) p. 257
- ^ "Battle of Aleppo". Britannica. 25 October 2023.
- ^ a b "The Seven Years Campaign, Part 2: War with the Mamluks". everything2.com. 22 February 2003. Archived from the original on 2018-01-17.
- ^ Alphonse de Lamartine, History of Turkey (translated from the French) (D. Appleton and Company, 1855) p.320
- ^ ISBN 978-0816073108. Archived from the originalon 2021-09-05.
- ISBN 978-3847004110.
- ISBN 978-1134844012.
- ^ "The Invasion of Syria by Tamerlane (1400-1) and Ibn Taghri Birdi's description of the life of Tamerlane". De Re Militari » The Society for Medieval Military History.
- American University of Cairo. Archived from the originalon 2019-01-29.
- ISBN 978-0306823992.
- ^ Guy le Strange (1890). Palestine Under the Moslems: A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from A.D. 650 to 1500. Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund. p. xxiii.
Bibliography
- Tucker, Spencer C. (2011). Battles That Changed History: An Encyclopedia of World Conflict. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-59884-429-0.