Site and Urban Network
[Picture source: © 2011 Issam Hajjar] [Picture source: © 2011 Issam Hajjar] The Sharaf Mosque is located in the western part of the northern suburb of Aleppo. Information on this part of Aleppo is rare before the Mamluk period. The suburb most probably did exist in Ayyubid times, since historian Ibn Shaddad mentions the extra muros Hazzaza neighbourhood that might have been located about where the modern neighborhood of the same name is found.[1]
A large urban infrastructure project then changed the course of this part of Aleppo: During the last decades of the 15th century, a new water network was constructed running from east to west through the northern suburb and provided a number of mosques, as well as public baths (hammams) and private houses with fresh water from the water supply system of Aleppo.
Aleppo’s water supply system originally dates from the Roman period, but was substantially renewed and enlarged by the Ayyubids, particularly by the Sultan az-Zahir Ghazi, Saladin’s son, who ruled Aleppo from 582/1186 until his death in 613/1216. Subsequently, in Mamluk and Ottoman times, rulers of the city and other affluent persons engaged in extending the system, branching into new parts of the city by establishing new pipes and new public fountains. The already mentioned Burdbak was responsible for the most important such infrastructure intervention in Mamluk Aleppo. We do not possess much information about the initiator of this project, Burdbak ibn ʿAbdallah. An inscription calls him ‘tajir al-mamalik’ (Mamluk trader), meaning that he was involved in the slave trade that provided new “slaves” (Mamluks) for the state. These Mamluk traders were often high-ranking emirs (thus Mamluks themselves), and in any case important and affluent personalities.[2] Along this new water pipe, public fountains (qastal, pl. qasatil) were built, usually in connection with mosques, which on this occasion got equal access to the fresh water supply. Burdbak himself restored and enlarged the Qastal al-Harami mosque, which is very similar in size and importance to the Sharaf Mosque.
In roughly the same period, we observe an intensified presence of Christians along with their churches in the western part of the northern suburb. Already historian Ibn al-Shihna speaks of a Christian quarter that he calls al-Judayda (the little new one) in that place. Between the mid-15th century and the first decade of the 16th century – before the Ottoman conquest – we can observe the construction or renovation of churches of the four main Christian communities (Armenian, Maronite, Orthodox, and Syrian). This development continues in Ottoman times and even intensifies,[3] as exemplified -- if only in legend -- by the story of forty Christian families that were resettled in Aleppo by Ottoman Sultan Salim after the city’s conquest in 1516, engraved in Aleppo’s history by the name of one of its neighborhoods: Zuqaq al-Arbaʿin (‘alley of the forty’).[4]
