بصرى الشام- BUSRA

Busra

Bushra is an Arabic feminine given name meaning "good news or omen". Bushra also means the most perfect. Variants include the Turkish Büşra, which was among the top five names given to girls born in Turkey in the last decade. This name is also given to girls in Pakistan and India.

The settlement was first mentioned in the documents of Thutmose III and Akhenaten (14th century BC). Bosra was the first Nabatean city in the 2nd century BC. The Nabatean Kingdom was conquered by Cornelius Palma, a general of Trajan, in 106 AD.
Roman and Byzantine

Under the Roman Empire, Bosra was renamed Nova Trajana Bostra and was the residence of the legio III Cyrenaica. It was made capital of the Roman province of Arabia Petraea. The city flourished and became a major metropolis at the juncture of several trade routes, namely the Via Traiana Nova, a Roman road that connected Damascus to the Red Sea. It became an important center for food production and during the reign of Emperor Philip the Arab, Bosra began to mint its own coins.[3] The two Councils of Arabia were held at Bosra in 246 and 247 AD.

By the Byzantine period which began in the 5th-century, Christianity became the dominant religion in Bosra (Βόσρα in Greek-Byzantine). The city became a Metropolitan archbishop's seat (see below) and a large cathedral was built in the sixth century.
Bosra was conquered by the Sasanian Persians in the early seventh century, but was recaptured during a Byzantine reconquest.

Bosra played an important part in the early life of Muhammad, as described in the entry for the Christian monk Bahira. The forces of the Rashidun Caliphate under general Khalid ibn Walid captured the city from the Byzantines in the Battle of Bosra in 634. Throughout Islamic rule, Bosra would serve as the southernmost outpost of Damascus, its prosperity being mostly contingent on the political importance of that city. Bosra held additional significance as a center of the pilgrim caravan between Damascus and the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the destinations of the annual hajj pilgrimage.Early Islamic rule did not alter the general architecture of Bosra, with only two structures dating to the Umayyad era (721 and 746) when Damascus was the capital of the Caliphate. As Bosra's inhabitants gradually converted to Islam the Roman-era holy sites were utilized for Muslim practices.In the 9th-century Ya'qubi wrote that Bosra was the capital of the Hauran province.

After the end of the Umayyad era in 750, major activity in Bosra ceased for around 300 years until the late 11th-century. In the last years of Fatimid rule, in 1068, a number of building projects were commissioned. With the advent of Seljuk rule in 1076, increasing focus was paid to Bosra's defenses. In particular, the Roman theater was transformed into a fortress, with a new floor added to the interior staircase tower.With the coming to power of the Burid dynasty in Damascus, the general Kumushtakin was allotted the entire Hauran plain as a fief by the atabeg Tughtakin. Under Kumushtakin, efforts to enhance the Muslim nature of the city increased with the construction of a number of Islamic edifices. Of these projects was the restoration of the Umari Mosque, which had been built by the Umayyads in 721.Another mosque commissioned was the smaller al-Khidr Mosque built at the northwestern part of the city, which was established under Kumushtakin, in 1134. Kumushtakin also had a madrasa constructed alongside the Muslim shrine honoring the mabrak an-naqa ("camel's knees"), which marked the imprints of the camel the prophet Muhammad rode on when he entered Bosra in the early 7th-century.

A golden age of political and architectural activity in Bosra began during the reign of Ayyubid sultan al-Adil I (1196–1218). One of the first architectural developments in the city was the construction of eight large external towers in the Roman theater-turned-fortress. The project began in 1202 and were completed in 1253, towards the end of the Ayyubid period. The two northern corner towers alone occupied more space than the remaining six. After al-Adil's death in 1218, his son as-Salih Ismail inherited the fief of Bosra who resided in its newly fortified citadel. During Ismail's rule, Bosra gained political prominence. Ismail used the city as his base when he claimed the sultanate in Damascus on two separate occasions, reigning between 1237–38 and 1239–45

In 1596 Bosra appeared in the Ottoman tax registers as Nafs Busra, being part of the nahiyah of Bani Nasiyya in the Qada of Hauran. It had a Muslim population consisting of 75 households and 27 bachelors, and a Christian population of 15 households and 8 bachelors. Taxes were paid on wheat, barley, summer crops, fruit- or other trees, goats and/or beehives and water mill

Ecclesiastical history

As capital of the late Roman province of Arabia

Petraea, Bosra was its Metropolitan Archbishopric, under the jurisdiction of Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East.[17] Later it also became a Latin titular see. The Latin apostolic succession was ended, but the city was made eponymous of the Melkite Catholic Archeparchy of Bosra-Hauran, which has its actual Marian cathedral see in Khabab city

Notable people from Bosra

Shimon ben Lakish, 3rd century, amora of the second generation and rabbi
Titus of Bostra, fl. 4th century, Christian theologian
Saint Antipater of Bostra, fl. 5th century, Christian bishop
Bahira, c. 600, Assyrian monk
Ibn Kathir (1301–1373), Islamic scholar

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