According to French consular reports from Sidon, the occupiers kept the Russian flag raised over Beirut, along with a large portrait of Catherine the Great over the town's main gate, to which travellers were forced to pay their respects. Jazzar and his Maghrebi mercenaries defected from Zahir's camp to the Ottomans shortly after surrendering Beirut. With the departure of the Russians in early 1774 and the signing of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca the same year, Zahir had to face the Porte's retribution by himself. The Russo-Turkish peace treaty allowed Russia to establish consulates wherever it wished in the Mediterranean, to open up trade routes with the Middle East, and to guarantee the safety of Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, but made no mention of Zahir or of Russia's wartime territorial gains in the region. Zahir was killed in August 1775 during a siege of Acre by Ottoman forces, who were initially led by Egypt's Abu al-Dhahab. Shihab was quickly pardoned by the Ottomans, as he was never in direct rebellion against them. But he was pressured into surrendering Beirut in 1776 due to heavy taxation by Jazzar, who had been recently appointed by the Ottoman government as the Pasha of Sidon. In addition to being the first time an Arab city came under Russian rule, the events also marked the first time that Beirut had not been under Ottoman control since the Ottoman conquest of the region over two and a half centuries earlier. "Place des Canons" ("Cannons Square") became the common name for today's Martyrs' Square in Beirut's Central District in 1773. This name remained in use, though unofficially, until the 1950s. It was a reference to the large artillery pieces that the Russians stationed in the plaza, which was then an empty area known as the Bourj, east of the walled town. The importance of this short-lived occupation remains a subject of debate among the relatively few historians and scholars who have analysed it. In his 1952 evaluation of the events, William Persen played down the occupation, describing it simply as a "new force of Western penetration in the Middle East." Soviet scholars like P. Perminov, on the other hand, described it as an early manifestation of modern Cold War era assistance by the Soviet Union to national liberation movements in Third World nations.