The history of Tunisia

Tunisia, the smallest country of the Maghreb, has been at the centre of Mediterranean history for three thousand years. Phoenicians from Tyre founded Carthage on its coast, and the city built an empire that fought Rome for supremacy before it was destroyed in 146 BCE. The province of Africa then became one of the richest parts of the Roman world, and after Vandal and Byzantine rule the Arabs made it the heart of Ifriqiya, where the Aghlabids, Fatimids, Zirids and Hafsids ruled from Kairouan, Mahdia and Tunis. After three centuries as an Ottoman province governed by its own beys, it became a French protectorate in 1881 and won independence in 1956 under Habib Bourguiba. In 2011 its revolution began the Arab Spring, and it was for a decade the only Arab country to make the transition to democracy, before President Kais Saied concentrated power in his own hands.

Stone tools from around 200,000 years ago have been found near Kelibia on Cap Bon, and at El Guettar, near Gafsa, a Middle Stone Age spring site holds a mound of stones and bones that may be one of the oldest religious structures known. Between about 10,000 and 6,000 BCE the Capsian culture, named after Gafsa's ancient name, Capsa, flourished in the interior: its people hunted, gathered land snails in enormous quantities and made fine stone blades and decorated ostrich eggshells. Later Neolithic peoples farmed wheat and barley and herded animals, and they are generally regarded as ancestors of the Berbers, or Amazigh, the indigenous people of North Africa. By the time the Phoenicians arrived, Berber farmers and herders lived throughout the region, and in the centuries that followed they formed kingdoms of their own, above all Numidia to the west.

Phoenician sailors from the cities of the Levant began trading along the North African coast late in the second millennium BCE, and Utica may have been their earliest settlement. According to tradition, Carthage was founded in 814 BCE by colonists from Tyre led by Princess Elissa, known to the Romans as Dido. Its harbour on the Gulf of Tunis, controlling the narrows between Sicily and Africa, made it the leading city of the western Phoenician world. By the sixth century BCE it was independent of Tyre and had built a maritime empire stretching across the coast of North Africa, western Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic Islands and southern Spain.

Carthage was a republic governed by two annually elected magistrates, the suffetes, a senate and a popular assembly, a constitution that Aristotle praised. Its wealth came from trade, including in tin, silver and slaves, from its fleet, and from the fertile lands of the hinterland, where Carthaginians developed intensive agriculture; a farming manual by a Carthaginian named Mago was later translated into Latin by order of the Roman senate. Its gods included Baal Hammon and Tanit, and the tophet, a sacred precinct where the burned remains of infants and animals were buried, has led to a long debate about whether Carthaginians practised child sacrifice. For centuries Carthage fought the Greek cities of Sicily, and the city of Kerkouane on Cap Bon preserves the best-surviving example of a Punic town.

Rivalry with the Roman Republic led to three wars. In the First Punic War, from 264 to 241 BCE, Rome built its first great navy and drove Carthage out of Sicily. After it, Carthage faced a brutal revolt by its own unpaid mercenaries and then rebuilt its power in Spain under the Barcid family. In 218 BCE Hannibal led an army with elephants across the Alps into Italy, starting the Second Punic War, and destroyed Roman armies at Lake Trasimene and at Cannae in 216 BCE. Rome refused to give in, carried the war to Spain and then to Africa, and in 202 BCE Scipio Africanus, allied with the Numidian king Masinissa, defeated Hannibal at Zama.

Carthage recovered its prosperity as a trading city, which alarmed Romans such as Cato the Elder, who ended his speeches by saying that Carthage must be destroyed. Rome used a quarrel between Carthage and Masinissa as a pretext, and in the Third Punic War the city was besieged for three years. In 146 BCE it was stormed, burned and razed, and its surviving inhabitants were sold into slavery. The Punic Wars left Rome the master of the western Mediterranean.

Rome made the territory of Carthage the province of Africa, which gave its name to the whole continent. After the defeat of the Numidian king Jugurtha and, later, of the Numidian allies of Pompey, more land was added. Julius Caesar planned a new colony on the site of Carthage, and under Augustus it was refounded and soon became one of the largest cities of the western Roman Empire, the capital of the proconsular province. Africa became one of the empire's granaries, shipping wheat and olive oil to Rome, and its towns were among the most prosperous anywhere. The amphitheatre of El Djem, built in the third century and one of the largest in the Roman world, and the ruins of Dougga, Bulla Regia and Sbeitla show the wealth of this period, as do the mosaics now in the Bardo Museum in Tunis.

Christianity spread early. Tertullian, writing in Carthage around 200, was the first major Christian author in Latin, Bishop Cyprian of Carthage was martyred in 258, and Perpetua and Felicity were executed in the city's amphitheatre in 203. In the fourth century the African church split bitterly between Catholics and Donatists, and Augustine of Hippo, who studied and taught in Carthage, led the struggle against the Donatists in the decades around 400.

In 429 the Vandals, a Germanic people, crossed from Spain into Africa under their king Genseric, and in 439 they took Carthage, making it the capital of their kingdom. Its loss deprived the Western Empire of its richest province and its grain supply, and in 455 Vandal fleets sailed from Carthage to sack Rome itself, part of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Vandal kings, who followed Arian Christianity, persecuted the Catholic clergy at times, while Berber chiefs in the interior grew increasingly independent.

In 533 the emperor Justinian I sent Belisarius with a small army, and the Vandal kingdom collapsed within months. Africa returned to Roman rule as part of the Byzantine Empire, and new fortresses and churches were built, but the Byzantines spent much of the next century fighting Berber tribes, and by the seventh century their control was confined to the towns and the coast.

Arab armies from Egypt raided the province from 647, defeating the Byzantine governor Gregory at Sufetula, modern Sbeitla. In 670 Uqba ibn Nafi founded Kairouan in the interior as a military base, and its Great Mosque became one of the most important in the Islamic world. The conquest met fierce resistance from the Berbers, led first by Kusaila and then by a woman known as al-Kahina, a Berber queen of the Aurès mountains. The Umayyad Caliphate's general Hassan ibn al-Nu'man took Carthage in 698 and defeated al-Kahina a few years later, and the old city was abandoned in favour of the nearby town of Tunis. The Arabs called the province Ifriqiya, from the Latin Africa.

Over the next centuries most Berbers converted to Islam, though many joined the Kharijite revolts of the 740s against Arab rule. After the Abbasid Caliphate replaced the Umayyads, it struggled to control the province, and in 800 the caliph Harun al-Rashid recognised the governor Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab as hereditary ruler in return for tribute.

The Aghlabid emirs, who ruled until 909, were largely independent. They rebuilt the Great Mosque of Kairouan in its present form, built the ribats, fortified monasteries, of Sousse and Monastir, and constructed great water basins to supply Kairouan. From 827 they conquered Sicily from the Byzantines, taking Palermo in 831, and their fleets raided Italy. Kairouan became a centre of learning, where the jurist Sahnun helped make the Maliki school of Islamic law dominant across North Africa.

In 909 the Aghlabids were overthrown by the Kutama Berbers, won over by a missionary of the Ismaili Shia movement, who brought their leader Abdallah al-Mahdi to power as caliph. The Fatimid Caliphate built a new fortified capital at Mahdia on the coast and survived a great Kharijite revolt led by Abu Yazid in the 940s. In 969 Fatimid armies conquered Egypt, and in 973 the caliph moved to the new city of Cairo, leaving Ifriqiya to a Berber vassal family, the Zirids.

Under the Zirids Ifriqiya was prosperous, but in the 1040s they broke with the Fatimids and recognised the Abbasids instead. In revenge, the Fatimids are said to have encouraged the Arab Bedouin tribes of the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym to migrate west. The Banu Hilal defeated the Zirids in 1052, and Kairouan was sacked in 1057. Historians long blamed them for ruining the countryside, an interpretation that began with Ibn Khaldun and is now debated, but their arrival did spread Arabic among the rural population. The Zirids held on at Mahdia, and from 1148 the Normans of Sicily occupied Mahdia and much of the coast.

In 1159 and 1160 the Almohad Caliphate, a Berber reform movement from Morocco, drove out the Normans and united the whole of North Africa under one ruler. The Almohads left Ifriqiya to governors from the Hafsid family, and in 1229 Abu Zakariya declared his independence, founding the Hafsid dynasty, which ruled from Tunis until the 16th century. His son al-Mustansir took the title of caliph. In 1270 the French king Louis IX led the Eighth Crusade against Tunis and died of disease outside the city, one of the last of the Crusades.

Under the Hafsids Tunis became one of the great cities of the Mediterranean, with the Zaytuna Mosque at its centre as a seat of learning, souks, madrasas and a trade with Genoa, Venice, Pisa and Aragon in grain, wool, leather and coral. Refugees from Muslim Spain, the Andalusians, brought skills in crafts and agriculture. Ibn Khaldun, the historian and pioneer of social theory, was born in Tunis in 1332 and served at the Hafsid court. In the 16th century the dynasty weakened and became a pawn between the Ottomans and Spain: the corsair Hayreddin Barbarossa seized Tunis for the Ottomans in 1534, the emperor Charles V took it back in 1535 and restored the Hafsids as Spanish vassals, and the city changed hands again before the Ottoman Empire finally took Tunis in 1574.

Tunisia became an Ottoman province governed at first by a pasha and an army of Janissaries, whose officers soon elected their own leader, the dey. Real power passed in the 17th century to the beys, originally the officials who collected taxes from the countryside: the Muradid dynasty from 1613 and then, from 1705, the Husaynids, founded by Husayn ibn Ali, who would reign until 1957. Like the Regency of Algiers next door, Tunis was largely self-governing while recognising the sultan's religious and nominal authority. Corsairs operating from Tunis and other ports raided Christian shipping and coasts and held captives for ransom, while Morisco refugees expelled from Spain in the early 17th century founded towns in the north. A large Jewish community, with roots on the island of Djerba going back to antiquity, played a major part in trade.

In the 19th century the beys tried to modernise in order to keep the Europeans out. Ahmad Bey, who reigned from 1837 to 1855, built a modern army and a military school, abolished the slave trade in 1841 and slavery in 1846, before France or the United States. In 1857 the Fundamental Pact guaranteed equal rights to all subjects, and in 1861 Tunisia adopted the first written constitution in the Arab world. But the costs of reform and the borrowing that paid for them led to bankruptcy in 1869, when an international commission of France, Britain and Italy took over the finances. The reforming minister Khayr al-Din tried in the 1870s to restore order, but European rivalry over the country was growing.

After Britain had agreed at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 not to oppose French ambitions, France used raids by Tunisian tribesmen across the border into Algeria as a pretext, and in 1881 French troops invaded. On 12 May Muhammad III al-Sadiq Bey signed the Treaty of Bardo, and the La Marsa Convention of 1883 confirmed the protectorate. The bey remained on the throne, but a French resident-general held real power. French and Italian settlers arrived in large numbers; by 1945 there were about 144,000 French colonists, who held around a fifth of the cultivated land, and the Italian community was for a long time even larger. Railways, ports and phosphate mines were developed.

Opposition grew from the Young Tunisians before 1914, and in 1911 a clash over the Jellaz cemetery in Tunis led to deadly riots and martial law. The Destour, or Constitution, Party was founded in 1920, and in 1934 a young lawyer, Habib Bourguiba, broke away to form the Neo-Destour, which built a mass organisation with the trade unions. Bourguiba spent much of the next twenty years in prison or exile. In the Second World War, Tunisia was the scene of the last battles of the North African campaign: German and Italian forces held it from late 1942 until they surrendered to the Allies in May 1943.

After the war the Neo-Destour and the General Union of Tunisian Workers led the independence struggle, and in 1952 the union leader Farhat Hached was assassinated by a French settler terrorist group. Armed resistance began in 1954, and the French prime minister Pierre Mendès France granted internal autonomy that year. Independence followed on 20 March 1956, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa. In 1957 the monarchy was abolished and Bourguiba became president. He crushed the rival faction of Salah Ben Youssef, who looked to Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arabism and was later assassinated in Germany.

Bourguiba's Tunisia was a secular, modernising one-party state. The Code of Personal Status of 1956 abolished polygamy, required consent to marriage and gave women the right to divorce, the most far-reaching reform of family law in the Arab world, and the state invested heavily in schools and family planning. In 1961 a confrontation over the French naval base at Bizerte left hundreds of Tunisians dead, and France withdrew in 1963. An experiment with collective farms in the 1960s was abandoned at the end of the decade, and the economy grew in the 1970s on tourism, oil and phosphates. But Bourguiba became president for life in 1975 and grew ever more erratic, a general strike in 1978 and the bread riots of 1984 were put down with many deaths, and the Islamist movement led by Rached Ghannouchi was repressed. From 1982 to 1994 the Palestine Liberation Organization had its headquarters in Tunis.

On 7 November 1987 the prime minister, General Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, had doctors declare the 84-year-old Bourguiba unfit and took power. After a brief opening he banned the Islamist Ennahda party, jailing thousands of its members, and ran a police state that won elections with around 90 percent of the vote, while the economy grew and the West valued him as a partner against Islamism. Corruption centred on the family of his wife, Leila Trabelsi, became notorious.

On 17 December 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire after officials confiscated his goods. Protests spread across the country and were met with lethal force, but on 14 January 2011 Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia. The revolution, known in Tunisia as the Revolution of Dignity, inspired uprisings across the Arab world. Elections in October 2011 brought Ennahda to power in a coalition, but the assassinations of two left-wing politicians in 2013 set off a deep crisis, which was resolved through talks brokered by four civil society groups, the National Dialogue Quartet, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015. A new democratic constitution was adopted in 2014. Jihadist attacks on the Bardo Museum and a beach resort near Sousse in 2015 killed dozens of foreign tourists and damaged the economy.

Kais Saied, a law professor with no party, was elected president in 2019 in a landslide on an anti-corruption platform. On 25 July 2021, amid economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, he dismissed the prime minister, suspended and later dissolved parliament, and began ruling by decree, moves his opponents called a coup. A new constitution giving the president sweeping powers was approved in a referendum in July 2022 on a low turnout, and opposition leaders, journalists and judges were arrested in the following years. Saied was re-elected in October 2024 with over 90 percent of the vote, after most serious challengers had been excluded or imprisoned, on a turnout of under 30 percent. Tunisia has also become a main departure point for migrants trying to reach Europe, and in 2025 the authorities dismantled makeshift camps housing thousands of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.