'IRAQ AND THE PERSIAN GULF' [‎333v] (669/862)

518 ports and inland towns
with fine mosques, markets and hostelries, houses and palaces built
of the local stone with vaulted roofs, a great castle and double city
wall reaching to the river bank, and suburbs extending along the
Tigris beyond the walls. There were also many Christian monasteries,
particularly for the Nestorians. The connexion of Jonah with the
ruin mounds of Nineveh, Tel at Tawba or the ‘hill of repentance’,
was already established in the Abbasid period.
When Abbasid power decayed, Mosul became the capital first of
an independent Arab kingdom under the Hamdanid dynasty, stretch
ing west to Aleppo, and later, from 1095 to 1154, a Seljuk fief ruled
by Atabegs. The greatest of these was Nur ad Din, the champion of
Islam against the Crusaders (p. 246). After him Mosul was taken by
Saladin and held by his successors, such as the ‘Pearl Sultan’ Lulu, a
great builder of mosques, who ruled from 1213 until the disastrous
sack by the Mongols of Hulagu in 1259. In 1400 its ruin was com
pleted by Tamerlane, who also used it as his headquarters. From
these blows and the attendant depopulation of the countryside it
never fully recovered. In the sixteenth century the rising Safawid
Empire of Persia extended its power for a time to Mosul, but the
Ottoman Sultan Selim I wrested it from them (p. 256). Thereafter it
remained directly or indirectly under Ottoman rule. In the eighteenth
century Mosul was ruled by an oligarchy of local notables, principally
the Jalili, a family of Christian origin, one of whom led the heroic
resistance of the city against the Persian Shah Nadir Quli in the siege
of 1743* The factions in the town were active in intrigues and street
battles; but in the nineteenth century Turkish authority was revived
and the local families went into eclipse, although the Jalili’s descend
ants remain there to this day. In 1878 Mosul was made the capital
of a separate vilayet. In the days of its greatness it was famed for its
craftsmen and for its textile work, the word ‘muslin’ being derived
from the name of the town. It had been of comparatively little
commercial importance in the Ottoman Empire for the last 300 years,
when, after the surrender of the Turkish army on the Tigris, the
town was occupied by the British on 3 November 1918.
General Description (fig. 82; photo. 200)
Mosul is perhaps the most interesting old town in Iraq and presents
a complete picture of a mixed Islamic and Christian community.
Before 1918 it had a reputation for dirt remarkable even in the
Ottoman Empire, but since then it has been very greatly improved,
though it still lacks a modern sanitary system. It has always had a