Tripoli, also known as Tarabulus, is the second-largest city in Lebanon, located 53 miles north of Beirut. Known to the Phoenicians as Derbly or Athar, it was founded in 1400 BC and became a trade outpost during the 9th century BC. The later Greek colonists named the city Tripolis, meaning "three cities", during the Hellenistic era. The Seleucids used Tripoli as a naval shipyard until its fall to the Roman Republic in 64 BC, and the Roman-Byzantine city was destroyed by an earthquake in 551 AD. Tripoli was later conquered by the Arabs amid the early Muslim conquests and became an important trading center for the Mediterranean. It became a prosperous commercial and shipbuilding center, and, by 1047, it had a population of 20,000, the majority of whom were Shia Alevis. Tripoli was conquered by the Crusaders in 1109 and became the chief town of the County of Tripoli, and it also became the seat of a Roman Catholic bishopric. In 1289, the Egyptian Mamluk sultan al-Mansur Qalawun conquered Tripoli, and it became a provincial capital of the Mamluk kingdom. Mamluk Tripoli came to have up to 40,000 residents, including the city's original inhabitants, Syrian immigrants, North Africans who served in Qalawun's army, Orthodox Christians, some Western European families, and a minority of Jews. In 1516, the Ottoman Empire conquered Tripoli from the Mamluks and established Tripoli Eyalet in 1579. It continued to be a hub of mercantile trade under the Ottomans, and it was captured by the British in 1918 during World War I. It was later occupied by the French during their rule over Lebanon, and it became the largest city in northern Lebanon before and after independence. The 1948 termination of the Syrian-Lebanese customs union led to Tripoli losing its prosperity, and it suffered from sectarian violence during the Lebanese Civil War and the Syrian Civil War as its Sunni-majority population in the Bab al-Tabbaneh neighborhood clashed with the Shia population of Jabal Mohsen. By 2020, Tripoli had almost 230,000 residents, with the vast majority being Sunni Muslims; 5% of the population was Christian, while there was also a significant community of Alawites.
Advertisement