Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos, who has reduced…

The combined forces of Dhaher, Ali Bey, and Russia, which is at war with the Ottoman Empire, have been able to keep the majority of the Galilee free of Ottoman influence, and Dhaher is able to temporarily extend his rule along the coast as far south as Jaffa and ...

Bonaparte and his Army of Egypt, having captured Gaza, move northward to take the stronghold at Jaffa.

On March 7, within three days of their arrival, the French overwhelm the fort, taking prisoner some forty-five hundred defenders, many of them Albanians.

These would ordinarily have received parole, but Bonaparte discovers that most of them had previously given their word not to fight again and had been released after El Arish.

Furious, he consults his commanders and, after a week of deliberation, the decision is made to execute the garrison and fourteen hundred prisoners by bayonet or drowning to save bullets.

Men, women and children are robbed and murdered for three days.

Many more will die in an epidemic of bubonic plague that breaks out soon afterwards.

Both Jazzar and his predecessor, Dahir, have presided over a tightly controlled Palestine, where trade with Europe as well as taxation is increasing.

They have used their new wealth from these sources to gain influence in Istanbul, which allows them to gain local autonomy and even intermittent control of many areas outside Palestine.

This period ends with Bonaparte's abortive attempt to carve for himself a Middle Eastern empire, during which he considers establishing a Jewish state in the ancient lands of Israel.

Bonaparte, claiming that Jazzar had insulted his envoy, who had proposed the establishment of good relations and the improvement of commercial links, besieges the key port of Acre.

However, his siege artillery is lost to a Royal Navy flotilla under Commodore Sir William Sidney Smith.

Unable now to batter down the ancient walls of the city, the French attempt to seize it at bayonet point, but eight assaults fail to dislodge the Turkish defenders.

Acre is finally relieved when thirty Ottoman ships land 10,000 Anglo-Turkish troops.

With his army weakened by disease—mostly bubonic plague—and poor supplies, Bonaparte orders the burning of the harvest in the surrounding area and, for the first time in his career, is forced to retreat.

...in the ports.

After 1840, the reforms the sultan promulgates gradually take effect in Palestine.

Jewish purchase of land in Palestine begins in the mid-1850s with the first attempts to enable Jews to live productively in Ottoman Palestine without reliance on the ”old yishuv” model of overseas support.

In 1855, Sir Moses Montefiore, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, makes the first known land purchase ten hectares (twenty-five acres) of orange groves in Jaffa.

Jaffa has a population of about five thousand, a thousand of these being Christians, eight hundred Jews and the rest Muslims, as reported by American missionary Ellen Clare Miller. (Ellen Clare Miller, Eastern Sketches – notes of scenery, schools and tent life in Syria and Palestine. Edinburgh: William Oliphant and Company. 1871.)

...Jaffa are the largest and economically most important Arab towns.

Gustav Bauernfeind, a native of Germany and lifelong (as it turns out) Orientalist genre painter, met his future wife in Jaffa in 1884 and later painted this scene from the city’s market:

The first Palestinian newspapers appear in 1908: al-Asma'i in Jaffa, and ...

...Al-Quds in Jerusalem.

In 1908 also, ...