The city was captured by Alexander Jannaeus, Cleopatra VII of Egypt and Tigranes II of Armenia. Here Herod built a gymnasium, and here the Jews met Petronius, sent to set up statues of the emperor in the Temple, and persuaded him to turn back. St Paul spent a day in Ptolemais (Acts 21:7). A Roman colonia was established at the city, Colonia Claudii Cæsaris.After the permanent division of the Roman Empire in 395 AD, Akko was administered by the Eastern (later Byzantine) Empire.
Arab and Crusader periods
Following the defeat of the Byzantine army of Heraclius by the Muslim army of Khalid ibn al-Walid in the Battle of Yarmouk, and the capitulation of the Christian city of Jerusalem to the Caliph Umar, Acre came under the rule of the Rashidun Caliphate beginning in 638. The Arab conquest brought a revival to the town of Acre, and it served as the main port of Palestine through the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates that followed, and through Crusader rule into the 13th century.
During the 10th-century, the city was a part of Jund al-Urdunn ("Military District of Jordan"). Local Arab geographer al-Muqaddasi visited Acre during the Abbasid era in 985, describing it as a fortified coastal city with a large mosque. Fortifications had been built just previously by Ibn Tulun of Egypt, who annexed the city in the 870s, and provided relative safety for merchant ships arriving at the city's port. When Persian traveler Nasir Khusraw visited Acre in 1047, he noted that the large Friday mosque was built of marble, located in the center of the city and just south of it lay the "tomb of the Prophet Salih."
It was captured by King Baldwin I of Jerusalem in 1104 in the First Crusade and the Crusaders also made the town their chief port in Palestine. Around 1170 it became the main port of the eastern Mediterranean, and the kingdom of Jerusalem was regarded in the west as enormously wealthy above all because of Acre. According to an English
