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Rh routing of the advance forces of Faraj opened the way to Damascus. Its citadel held out for a month. In violation of the capitulation terms the city was plundered and com- mitted to the flames. Thirty thousand of its' men, women and children were shut up in its great mosque, which was then set on fire. Of the building itself only the walls were left standing. The cream of Damascene scholars, craftsmen, artisans, armourers, steel workers and glass manufacturers were carried away to Timur's capital, Samarkand, there to implant these and other minor arts. This was perhaps the heaviest blow that the city, if not the whole country, ever suffered. Timur crushed the Ottoman army at Ankara in 1402, but died two years later. His successors exhausted themselves in internal struggles, making possible the recon- stitution of the Ottoman power in Asia Minor and later the rise of the Safawid dynasty in Persia.

Rivalry between the Mamluk and the Ottoman sultanates asserted itself in the second half of the fifteenth century. Hostilities did not break out till i486, when Qait-bay con- tested with the Ottoman Bayazid II the possession of Adana, Tarsus and other border towns. Selim I (1512-1520) destroyed the Safawid army and occupied Mesopotamia. He charged that the Mamluk Qansawh al-Ghawri (1500- 1516) had entered into treaty relations with the Safawid shah against him and had harboured political refugees. Qansawh moved northward under the pretext of acting as an intermediary between the two contestants. He sent a special envoy to Selim, who shaved his beard and sent him back on a lame donkey with a declaration of war.

The Ottoman and Mamluk armies clashed on August 24, 1516, north of Aleppo. The seventy-five-year-old Qansawh fought valiantly but hopelessly. He could not depend upon the loyalty of his Syrian governors nor could his troops match the redoubtable Janissaries with their superior equipment. Khair Bey, the treacherous governor of Aleppo, who was entrusted with the command of the left Rh