Ayla

Ayla: a town whose lord, Ibn Ishaq reports, was Yuhanna ibn Ru'ba. He made peace with the Prophet at Tabuk and gave him the poll-tax. ¹

Ayla was a seaport at the north end of the Gulf of 'Aqaba, succeeded by the modern al-'Aqaba. Nelson Glueck, who excavated Ezion-geber at Tall al-Khulayfa on the Red Sea shore, concluded that the original sites of the biblical Ezion-geber and Elath, the predecessor of Ayla, are identical. Control of Elath-Ezion-geber, held since Solomon's time, was lost to the Edomites in the reign of Ahaz (735-715 BC), and the site stayed occupied until the fourth century BC. In the following century the town was moved, probably by the Nabataeans, a short distance to the south-east, where it lay at the time of the Islamic conquest. ²

Under the Ptolemies, when it was briefly called Berenike, Ayla remained a port for trade with Arabia and Ethiopia. Under Rome it was garrisoned by the Tenth Legion Fretensis and was the southern end of the road built by Trajan (AD 98-117) to Bostra in Syria. By AD 325 it was a bishopric, and four capitals from its Byzantine church could be seen in the courtyard of the customs house at al-'Aqaba in 1940. On the eve of Islam it lay in the territory that the Ghassanid phylarchs controlled for Byzantium. ³

Ayla first appears in Islamic sources in 9 AH (630-1), when its bishop Yuhanna b. Ruba made a peaceful submission to the Prophet during the Tabuk campaign. Under Islam it became an important meeting place for pilgrims from Egypt and Syria. Al-Muqaddasi, writing in 985-6, calls it "the port of Palestine", and the fourth/tenth century was the height of its prosperity. It was sacked in 415/1024-5 by 'Abd Allah b. Idris al-Ja'fari and some of the Banu l-Harrah, and in 465/1072-3 it is said to have been destroyed by an earthquake. ³

The Crusades brought a long period of strife, and at its end Ayla lay largely in ruins. Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem, took it in 1116, and it became part of the Latin kingdom under the lordship of al-Karak and Montreal. In 1171 Saladin drove the Franks out and left a garrison. Renaud de Châtillon, lord of al-Karak, briefly restored Frankish control in 1182-83 during his campaign against the coast of the Hijaz and the Red Sea. When Saladin's commander Husam al-Din Lulu destroyed Renaud's fleet in 1183, Ayla passed permanently into Muslim hands, but in a depleted state. ³

Abu'l-Fida (1273-1332) states that in his time nothing was left of the town near the shore except the stronghold. That stronghold probably was the predecessor of the still-standing late Mamluk caravanserai at al-'Aqaba, and does not represent the original fortification. The original fort lay on the island now called Jazirat Fir'awn, across the gulf from the coast of Sinai but within sight of the town; it was already occupied in Byzantine times, and it was this island fort that Renaud besieged in 1182. The first fort on the mainland seems to have been built by Renaud in 1182 or 1183. In Abu'l-Fida's day the mainland stronghold was the residence of an Egyptian governor. ³