Mecca scholarship governed by the Hashemite Sharifs. In 930, Mecca was attacked and sacked by Qarmatians, a millenarian Ismaili Muslim sect led by Abū-Tāhir Al-Jannābī and centered in eastern Arabia. The Black Death pandemic hit Mecca in 1349. In 1517, the Sharif, Barakat bin Muhammed, acknowledged the supremacy of the Ottoman Caliph but retained a great degree of local autonomy. In 1803 the city was captured by the First Saudi State, which held Mecca until 1813. This was a massive blow to the prestige of the (Turkish) Ottoman Empire, which had exercised sovereignty over the holy city since 1517. The Ottomans
Siege of Mecca (683) August 683 and proceeded to sack Medina—one of the impious acts for which the Umayyads are denounced in later Muslim tradition. After taking Medina, Muslim set out for Mecca, but on the way he fell ill and died at Mushallal, and command passed to his lieutenant Husayn ibn Numayr al-Sakuni. For his sack of Medina, subsequent tradition remembers Muslim ibn 'Uqba as the "heathen incarnate" (J. Wellhausen). Husayn's army arrived before Mecca in September. Ibn al-Zubayr and his supporters refused to surrender, and after they were defeated in a first engagement, a siege of the city began, in which the