If the anti-crusading (and Sunnifying) hero, Nur al-Din Zengi (d.1174), re-built Damascus, it was the scholar, Ibn Asakir (d.1175), who “made the city” in his voluminous History of Damascus. By giving the city its first topography and proffering the biographies of anyone of note who lived in or passed through the city, Ibn Asakir not only enshrined the city in text, but also literally populated it. Expectedly, this history quickly became the canonical text about Damascus, to which every later narrator of the city was almost uncomfortably bound. The proposed paper attempts to locate and identify an uninterrupted tradition of topographies of Damascus dating back to Ibn Asakir’s 12-century foundational text and ending with the 18th-century topography of the Levant by Ibn Kannan al-Salihi (d.1741). It also aims to show how later authors, while acknowledging their debt to Ibn `Asakir, had to struggle with his overwhelming authority. How did Ibn `Asakir’s city of God and the Great Mosque become Ibn Kannan’s verdant city of pleasure parks? In addition to changes in the cityscape over the centuries, it is the gradual liberation of Ibn `Asakir’s children from his yoke that allowed these narrators of city a measure of individual authorship and civic ownership.