Nablus is a city in the northern West Bank, 30 miles north of Jerusalem. It was founded in 72 AD by the Roman general Vespasian as Flavia Neapolis, and it was built 1.2 miles west of the Biblical city of Shechem, which had been destroyed during the First Jewish-Roman War. By the 2nd century AD, Neapolis was entirely pagan, and it flourished until the civil war between Septimius Severus and Pescennius Niger in 198-9 AD, after which Severus stripped the city of its privileges due to its support for Niger. In 244 AD, Roman emperor Philip the Arab renamed the city Julia Neapolis, and it became a majority-Christian city at around this time, with a Samaritan minority. In 484 AD, riots broke out between the Christians and Samaritans when the Christians made plans to move the remains of Aaron's sons Eleazar, Ithamar, and Phinehas, and the Byzantine emperor Zeno responded by appropriating the Samaritan synagogues and forbidding them from the sacred mountain. Samaritan revolts would continue to occur until Emperor Justinian had the majority of the city's Samaritans slaughtered following Julianus ben Sabar's 529 AD uprising. In 636 AD, following the Battle of Yarmouk, the Rashidun Arab general Khalid ibn al-Walid conquered Neapolis and renamed it Nablus, and it became an important trade center. It came to have a diverse population of Muslim Arabs and Persians, Samaritans, Christians, and Jews, and it had a large marketplace, an abundance of olive trees, a finely paved Great Mosque, and other new architecture, and it was nicknamed "Little Damascus". It was captured in 1099 during the First Crusade, and Tancred of Galilee renamed Nablus to "Naples". The Crusaders spared the city the usual looting due to its large Christian population, but, in 1137, a force of Arabs and Turks killed many Christians and burned down their churches; they nevertheless failed to retake the city. In 1187, the Ayyubid sultan Saladin conquered Nablus, and the Latin Christians fled the city, but the original Orthodox Christians remained. In October 1242, the Knights Templar raided Nablus to avenge an-Nasir Dawud's massacre of the Christians, burning the Great Mosque and massacring or enslaving the city's Christians and Muslims for three days. In 1260, the Mamelukes conquered Nablus from the Ayyubids, building numerous mosques and schools. In 1517, the Ottoman Empire conquered Nablus and made it the seat of a sanjak. In 1771 and 1773, the Mamelukes failed to recapture the city, but the Khedivate of Egypt reconquered Nablus in 1832. In 1841, the Ottomans reconquered Nablus from Egypt, and, from 19-25 September 1918, amid the Sinai and Palestine campaign of World War I, the British Army captured Nablus at the Battle of Megiddo. A 1927 earthquake destroyed most of Nablus' historic buildings, and it played a major role in the Great Arab Revolt. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Jordan occupied Nablus and the rest of the West Bank, and Nablus' population doubled due to the arrival of Palestinian refugees amid the Nakba. Nablus was annexed by Jordan in 1950, but it was occupied by Israel following the 1967 Six-Day War; many Israeli settlements were built around Nablus during the 1980s and 1990s. It was handed over to the Palestinian Authority in 1995, but, during the Second Intifada, it was the site of fthe 2002 Battle of Nablus. The population skyrocketed from 15,947 (95.6% Muslim, .03% Christian, .009% Samaritan, and .001% Jewish) in 1922 to 146,493 in 2014 (the vast majority of whom were Muslims, with most of them being descendants of Samaritan converts to Islam, and around a quarter of thet population being refugees).
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