ABSTRACT
The Ottomans governed Jerusalem from 1516 to 1917. The Jerusalem that the Ottomans had conquered in the sixteenth century, a small pilgrimage town and provincial center, was very different from the rapidly developing and modernizing city that they lost to the British. Egyptian governors ruled Jerusalem from 1831 until 1840, when the Ottomans were able to retake Jerusalem and the rest of the Levant with the help of British and Austrian troops. The Ottomans also invested considerably in the city and its region in the second part of the nineteenth century, in part to keep up with the enormous amount of European activity in Jerusalem. In 1872, Jerusalem became the capital of an independent district, or mutasarriflik, which was overseen directly by the Interior Ministry in Istanbul. One of the most important European settlement initiatives in Jerusalem was the work of the Templars who established the German Colony southwest of the Old City in the 1870s.
