for both land and naval operations further in the Byzantine territory. While the region was lost by the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius in 637, it is unclear when the city was permanently occupied by the Arabs as sources indicate the city was garrisoned and retaken multiple times until the 9th century.
According to the Arabic geographer Ibn Hawqal and the accounts of Arab historian Abu Amr Al-Tarsusi, Tarsus was a stronghold of Muslim forces with thousands of volunteers from across the Islamic world coming to fight in jihad against the Byzantine Empire. The city was a base of operations for the regular summer raids (ṣawāʿif) into Byzantine lands through the Cilician Gates when the mountain snows had melted and passage was possible. Later the city was used in defense of the frontier in response to a resurgent Byzantine empire in the mid-10th century. The city was lost in 965, when Nicephorus Phocas returned it to the Byzantine Empire for nearly a century. The area was retaken by the Seljuk Turks, recaptured in 1097 during the Crusades and then disputed between Latins, Greeks, and Armenians of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia(Kingdom of Lesser Armenia); these last became definitively masters until about 1359, when it was captured by the Ramadanids with Mamluks. Finally, the area was brought under the control of the Ottoman Empire by Selim I in 1516.
In the Middle Ages Tarsus was renowned throughout the Middle East; a number of Arab writers praised it as a beautiful and well-defended city, its walls being in two layers with five gates and earthworks outside, surrounded by rich farmland, watered by the river and the lake. By 1671 the traveler Evliya Çelebi records "a city on the plain, an hour from the sea, surrounded by strong walls two-storeys high, moated on all sides, with three distinct neighbourhoods inside the walls".
Despite its excellent defences, Tarsus was captured from the Ottomans in 1832 by the Mamluks of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt, son
