‘Excess is obnoxious’

When the German doctor and botanist Leonhard Rauwolff visited the Syrian city of Aleppo during an eccentrically Teutonic herb-hunting mission across the Middle East, he was instantly impressed by the thriving trade he encountered. It was ‘admirably great’, he wrote, ‘for great caravans of pack-horses and asses, but more camels arrive there daily from all foreign countries’. The year was 1573 but the description might have been written at any point during the past several thousand years.

For Aleppo, trade and cosmopolitanism were always two sides of the same coin. They were seared into the city’s character long before the Muslim conquest of 637. Almost 1,000 years later, Rauwolff reported a story about the enlightened Ottoman Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in Aleppo. The emperor was debating a proposal from his council to expel Jews for their ‘unsufferable usury’. Suleyman showed his advisors a flowerpot containing beautiful flowers of many colours and ‘bid them consider whether each of them in their colour did not set out the other the better’. After the gentle allusion, Suleyman made his own preference perfectly clear. ‘I think it convenient that all that have been together long hitherto may be kept and tolerated so still for the future.’ And so they were.

Thus under the protective pax Ottomanica a multifaith, polyglot community prospered together in one of the oldest cities on earth. Aleppo, which dated back to the fifth millennium BC and beyond, was Arab and Turkish, Kurdish and Armenian. An ancient Silk Road trading metropolis strategically located between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates, it was Muslim, Jewish and Christian, a more or less harmonious fusion of East and West. When John Eldred, later treasurer of the Levant Company and one of the first Englishmen to trade in Aleppo, arrived in 1586, he was struck by the hustle and bustle created by Jews, Tatars, Persians, Armenians, Egyptians, Indians and many Christians, all of whom enjoyed ‘freedom of conscience’ at a time when this was virtually unheard of in Europe.