Institut für die Kulturen des Alten Orients

History of Balis

The Arabic name Balis derives from Barbalissos, as the city was known during the Roman-Byzantine period (Barbalisso in the Tabula Peutingeriana). Barbalissos, however, was only the Greco-Roman adaptation of Aramaic Bayt Bala, a name used for the city during the time of the Achaemenid kings of Iran during the second half of the first millennium BCE. But even though these names cover almost 2000 years of the city's history, Balis/Barbalissos/Bayt Bala was nevertheless only the successor of the much older city of EMAR on the same spot the origins of which go well back into the third millennium BCE. Forty-five hundred years of settlement history--though not exactly rare in this part of the world--suggest that Emar had benefited, as did later Barbalissos/Balis, from features that did not change over the thousands of years of its existence.

This crucial element is easy to define: the Euphrates. The river not only provided for settlers the means of living, creating fertile and arable fluvial plains in the otherwise arid environment of the Syrian steppe: Balis is situated where the Euphrates, coming down from modern Turkey in the north, bends to turn towards the south-east to continue further into modern Iraq and towards the Persian Gulf.

It is easy to see that in ancient as well as medieval times, Emar/Balis would have been the place for merchants coming from the coastal cities of the Mediterranean Sea or from the north to embark on a ship bound for Mesopotamia and for cities such as Babylon or later Baghdad. Likewise caravans, coming from the south, would have followed the river up to this point and then turned west to reach the coast. The bend in the river offered another attraction for merchants and travelers as it appears that the Euphrates could be forded at a place south of the city. This ford also made the city a strategic point of first rank within Syria. It is likely that the armies of Kyros the Younger (5th century BCE) and Alexander the Great (late 4th century BCE), crossed into Mesopotamia here without having to ferry across the river. The military importance of this Euphrates crossing is mentioned directly by the Sasanian king Shahpur I in his report of his campaign against the Roman empire in 252 CE which is preserved on the Ka’aba-ye Zardusht in Naqsh-e Rostam near Persepolis:

“And we annihilated a Roman force of 60,000 at Barbalissos and we burned and ravaged the province of Syria and all its dependencies […].”

Early Islamic Period

In 632, the first Muslim armies, moving north from Arabia had entered Syria. Damascus was conquered in 635, and two years later, Beroia (Aleppo) in northern Syria, surrendered as well. From here, a contingent of Muslim warriors under the command of Habib ibn Maslama, set out to secure the city of Barbalissos. They did not meet any resistance: the lords of Barbalissos, two Byzantine noblemen, brothers, and the city's inhabitants negotiated a truce. The treaty of surrender gave the people in the city the choice either to pay a poll-tax (in addition to the land tax) or to emigrate. The majority of Barbalissos' inhabitants opted for the latter and crossed the Euphrates into Mesopotamia or moved north to Hierapolis (Manbij) on the western banks of the river that at the time was still in the hands of the Byzantine army. To make up for the loss in population, Arab nomads from the tribe of Qays were settled in Barbalissos which soon changed its name to Balis. Thus, for a short period, Balis was once more a city on the frontier.

Balis under the Umayyad Caliphate

In the decades up to the end of the 8th century, the Byzantines were pushed back further into Anatolia while the operations of Muslim armies in Iran eliminated the threat of hostile attacks from the east that had haunted the Syrian cities along the Euphrates and on the Mediterranean coast for the first time in more than half a millennium. The new political stability led to an economic upturn in many of these formerly embattled cities, and Balis was one of them. Its strategic position on the Euphrates and proximity to the Mediterranean coast ensured its prosperity under Muslim rulers. Historical sources connect particularly the name of the general Maslama ibn 'Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (died in 738), with a happy turn in the city's fate.

Maslama was a member of the powerful Umayyad family from Mecca which had formed the first Islamic dynasty in 660 CE. The caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty had established their capital in Damascus, the former administrative center of Byzantine Syria. Over the next decades, Syria would become the epicenter of power for the nascent Islamic world-empire, and Umayyad armies would push westward towards the Atlantic coast and Spain and eastward far into Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

That he had been born to a concubine and not to one of the legal wives of the caliph 'Abd al-Malik (ruled 685-705 CE), excluded Maslama from succession to the position of caliph, or "Commander of the Faithful," as the official title was. As one of the empire's top military leaders and most able administrators in the years between 705 and 730 CE, however, he would hold positions that connected him to the inner circle of power in the Umayyad state.

While neither his date of birth nor the circumstances of his youth are known, Maslama appears in historical sources for the first time in the years 705, 707 and 708 C.E. He is named, among the leaders of the annual military summer campaigns against the Byzantine borderlands, the area around the modern Turkish city Adana and the Taurus mountain range.

Convinced of his abilities in these military expeditions, the caliph Yazid entrusted him two years later (710) with the post of governor of the provinces of the Jazira (northern Mesopotamia), Armenia, and Adharbaijan, a huge responsibility, as these three provinces all bordered on non-Islamic territories. As a military leader, Maslama is best remembered for the bold, yet unsuccessful siege and sea blockade of Constantinople between 717-718 CE which ended when the plague decimated his army and superior Byzantine naval forces all but annihilated the Muslim fleet. Maslama appears to have retired from this position in 732 to return to Syria and may have lived on his estates until his death in 738.

Maslama had received Balis and its extensive countryside along the banks of the Euphrates as a fiefdom from the caliph, adding them to his increasingly large land holdings, which extended across northern Syria from the Euphrates far into the eastern Jazira. Balis itself benefited greatly from the association with arguably one of the richest and most influential men of the Umayyad polity and his family. Not only were the Justinianic city walls restored under Maslama's auspices but, more prominently mentioned in the sources, is the enhancement of the city's importance as a merchants' entrepot by its new role as an agrarian center. Two irrigation canals, the Nahr Maslama and the Nahr Sa'id, the latter dug by Maslama's brother Sa'id ibn'Abd al-Malik not only brought drinking water to Balis from the stream that apparently had to change its course away from the city in previous centuries but must also have created new possibilities for the development of arable land on the Euphrates plains around Balis.

Since Maslama himself spent most of his time campaigning against the Byzantines or holding the position of governor in various provinces of the empire, returning to Syria only shortly before his death in 738, it was probably his brother Sa'id who, in his brother's absence, administered the town's affairs and led the branch of the Umayyad family in Balis.

Balis during the Medieval Period

After the collapse of the Umayyad state in 750 CE, Balis and its estates were taken from the Umayyad family and annexed by the new rulers, the Abbasids. At the turn of the 8th century, one of their caliphs, Harun al-Rashid, added Balis together with other northern Syrian cities such as Antioch in the west and Rusafa in the east to the Jund al-Awasim, a large province created originally to form a military buffer zone against the Byzantine north. Two hundred years later, after the Byzantine retreat to inner Anatolia, the city returned to a rather civil structure by becoming part of an administrative district with its center at Qinnasrin, south of Aleppo.

A major catastrophe hit Balis in 859 CE when an earthquake that devastated southern Turkey and northern Syria reportedly "destroyed the city." But just after having recovered from this ordeal, Balis' position as a fortress created new threats for the city's inhabitants and their financial welfare when it became the bone of contention among feuding local Muslim leaders. In the later 9th century, Balis formed the eastern outpost of the practically independent Tulunid Empire that had its center in Egypt. Plundered by a rebel army that marched against the Tulunid government in 882, Balis was still important enough to get -- at least temporarily -- its own mint and to be chosen by the Abbasid caliph al-Mu‘tadid in 900 CE as the headquarters of a planned invasion into Byzantine Cilicia.

Geographical sources of the 9th and 10th centuries mention Balis as an important stop on the way to or from Iraq; in fact, it was deemed to be the first Syrian town to be encountered when arriving from Iraq. Its size, though, may not have been as impressive as in Byzantine and early Islamic times: some of the chroniclers start calling Balis "madina saghira" "small town." Nevertheless, intellectual life was surprisingly rich for a city of modest size during these times. Biographical dictionaries list almost two dozen experts in the Islamic science of collecting and transmitting the sayings of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, among the inhabitants of Balis.

At the beginning of the 10th century, political circumstances threw all of Syria into turmoil and triggered a period of serious decline for the city as well. In Aleppo, the Hamdanids, a dynasty with Shi'ite leanings, established itself, which led to difficulties with Baghdad and the waning power of the Abbasid caliphs. In the same period nomads ravaged the region of the Middle Euphrates with no government in a position to check their advance effectively.

Finally, after several hundred years, the Byzantines again bring war into Muslim territory. In October of 966, Byzantine troops appeared suddenly in front of Balis' city walls and managed to capture three hundred of its inhabitants. It does not come as a surprise that trade and traffic in those times had all but subsided and Balis' reputation as an economical hub had become a thing of the past. As the 10th century geographer Ibn Hawqal writes about the city at the end of the 10th century:

"Balis is a small town on the west bank of the Euphrates. It (once) was the "Port of Syria" on the Euphrates. But today its remains have been (but) gone, the caravans and traveling traders have disappeared. It is a town surrounded by a very ancient wall. In the space that separates it from the Euphrates, there are gardens. Of agricultural products, there is wheat and barley, and they produce soap in great quantities."

While Balis' economic situation did not change for the better over the next century, its inhabitants, formerly Sunnites, now apparently embraced various versions of the Shi'ite creed, among them the Isma'iliya which had been championed by then for more than a century by the Fatimid dynasty ruling over Egypt and parts of Syria. Around the city limits shrines were built during this period that commemorated the Shi'ite Imams and prophetic figures."

The new, 6th/12th century CE did not provide any respite, as the fragmentation of power in Syria among several Muslim factions continued to discourage trade, formerly the city's main source of income: For groups vying for possession of the main prize, the northern Syrian metropolis of Aleppo, Balis and its fortifications became alternately the stepping stone and staging ground in the quest for Aleppo or a place to retreat and regroup after a military defeat. As a result, Balis was besieged, pillaged and again besieged, changing owners up to four times in one year. In the midst of all of this chaos, the Crusaders arrived on the scene as well: In 1110, Tancred of Antioch marched against Manbij and Balis. Their inhabitants did not wait to be killed or enslaved, the choice offered to other cities in Tancred's way, but chose to flee. The Crusaders found both cities empty and retreated to their own territory. Thirty years later, however, the Crusader state of Edessa (modern Urfa in southern Turkey) managed to conquer and hold Balis for a short period of time.

The stabilization of politics in the Levant under the auspices of first the Zengids, followed by Saladin and the Aiyubids in the 12th and 13th centuries CE would finally bring something close to a renaissance for Balis. Its population at this time consisted of "a mix of Arabs and non-Arabs" (probably Turks) and it was home to small religious minorities, Christians and Jews. The city and its hinterland became again important enough to be given as a fiefdom to princes of the ruling dynasty. In addition to makeshift repairs to older structures, new building projects such as a theological school (second half of the 12th century), a minaret for the Great Mosque (1211), and a new canal (mid-13th century) testify that investments in the battered city were again deemed to be worthwhile.

This brief period of prosperity, expansion and retrieval of its former status was, however, only the prelude to Balis' final chapter: the Mongol armies of Jengiz Khan had been moving steadily westward from Central Asia since the 1220s. In 1258 Baghdad was taken and the last Abbasid caliph killed. The next year, the Mongol general Kitbogha Noyan set out to conquer the Levant. The fact that the Mongol army began the siege of Aleppo in January of 1260 must mean that it had arrived at Balis shortly before that date, probably in the winter of 1259. Archaeological research has shown that there had been no attempts to defend the city, and only minor destruction took place. Small cashes of objects hidden under flagstones in courtyards and houses further suggest that the inhabitants fled with the intention of returning one day. They never came back, of course, and Balis slowly became a field of ruins.

Literature:

  • André Raymond and Jean-Louis Paillet, Bâlis II. Histoire de Bâlis et fouilles deîlots I and II , (Damascus 1995).
  • Ibn 'As âkir, Ali ibn al-Hasan, Ta'rikh madinat Dimashq, 19 vols. (Amman 1980)