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In 273, after crushing a number of Palmyran revolts, Aurelian's armies sacked and razed Palmyra. The city would never recover its political influence, but its great temples and colonnades remained. Aurelian ordered the Temple of Bel rebuilt. It became a Roman garrison town and later, under the Byzantines, a Christian village before the Arab Muslim invasions.
In the subsequent centuries, a host of empires and kingdoms would rise and fall around the ruins of Palmyra. The Umayyad dynasty, the first great Arab caliphate, built a fortress overlooking the ancient city; Byzantine and Persian architectural styles seen in Palmyra would be incorporated in subsequent Umayyad buildings elsewhere.
The Crusades raged not far from its gates; the soldiers of a succession of Arab, Kurdish, and Turkic dynasties likely marched through its arches. In 1400, a Mongol army swept through parts of Syria and and raided Palmyra, seizing some 200,000 sheep from its villagers. It went on to sack the great city of Aleppo, to Palmyra's north. A chronicler at the time described the raid "like a razor over hair" and "locusts over a green crop." A mountain of skulls was piled high outside Aleppo's city walls.
Palmyra survived, though, already a veteran of both natural and man-made disasters.
It fell into the hands of the Ottoman empire in the 16th century, and remained a dusty outpost (albeit, one with gorgeous ruins) until the 1900s. After World War I, Syria was seized by French mandate. Archaeological excavations in Palmyra began in earnest in the 1930s under French watch; villagers who had been living within the site's ruins, including inside the Temple of Bel, were relocated to new homes near the ancient city.
In 1941, as part of a wider incursion into Syria during World War II, an Allied mechanized division defeated a force loyal to Vichy France that was entrenched in Palmyra.
That would be the last major military engagement to take place by the ancient city for more than half a century. But the unraveling of the current Syrian regime has made Palmyra vulnerable to a new menace from which it may never recover.
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