Site and urban network
[Picture source: © 1999 Julia Gonnella ] [Picture source: © 1999 Julia Gonnella ] Historians from Aleppo have written that the present Madrasa al-Halawiyya occupies the site of Aleppo’s ancient Byzantine cathedral – or at least parts of it – that had supposedly been built by Helena (died around 330 AD), the mother of Emperor Constantine. Situated in the immediate neighborhood of the Umayyad Mosque, the uncontested religious center of Aleppo, this building represented a privileged spot for a future madrasa. As the mosque was a place for teaching the religious sciences and law – and to a certain degree remained so until the modern period (cf. Umayyad Mosque) – we may suppose a close relationship between the two institutions, the Umayyad Mosque and newly established madrasa.
The Madrasa al-Halawiyya played a role for an important aspect of urban infrastructure: the water supply. During Zengid and Ayyubid times (12th and 13th centuries AD), the rulers Nur ad-Din and az-Zahir Ghazi profoundly restored and enlarged Aleppo’s water network. The old cathedral had most probably been connected to the network since antiquity, as was the Umayyad Mosque next door, at least since early Islamic times. Allen argues that the Madrasa al-Halawiyya plays an important role as a new point of diversion from which new pipes would provide fresh water for newly founded religious institutions in the western part of the intramural city, like the Madrasa al-Muqaddamiyya (established around 545/1159-51 by a certain ʿIzz ad-Din ʿAbd al-Malik al-Muqaddam) and the Bimaristan Nuri, established by Nur ad-Din in 543-49/1148-55.[1]
