Qalansawe

Did You Know?

• In 2001, the population was 15,000, with 53.2% aged 19 or younger.
• In the 2022 election, 97% of voters in Qalansawe voted for Arab parties.

History

Qalansawe’s recorded history begins with a bloody purge. In 750, during the Abbasid Revolution that overthrew the Umayyad Caliphate, many Umayyad family members—including descendants of Caliphs Umar II and Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik—were sent from Egypt to Qalansawe to be killed. The 13th-century scholar Yaqut noted that “many of the Omayyads were slain there.” By the 9th century, the settlement had become a way station on the Cairo-Damascus road, situated between Lajjun and Ramla.

During the Crusader period, it went by several names: Calanson, Calansue, Calanzon, or Kalensue. In 1128, the knight Godfrey of Flujeac granted it to the Hospitallers. Yaqut described it as a Crusader fortress called “Castle of the Plains,” near Ramle, and remnants of that fortress still stand. The Hospitallers held it (except for a brief gap from 1187 to 1191) until the Mamluk sultan Baybars captured it in 1265, though the lord of Caesarea seems to have kept a superior claim over it during that time.

After the Mamluk victory, Baybars distributed Qalansawe as an estate to his followers, splitting it equally between two emirs: Izz al-Din Aidamur al-Halabi al-Salihi and Shams al-Din Sunqur al-Rumi al-Salihi. The Muslim village that grew there was built around the old Crusader fort at its center. In 1517, Qalansawe came under Ottoman rule along with the rest of Palestine and remained an important stop on the Cairo-Damascus road. Ottoman tax records from 1596 place it in the Nahiya of Bani Sa'b, part of the Liwa of Nablus, with 29 Muslim households.

They paid a fixed tax rate of 33.3% on wheat, barley, summer crops, olives, goats or beehives, and an olive or grape press, totaling 11,342 akçe. On Pierre Jacotin’s 1799 map, the village appears as Qalensawi.