Who ruled Algiers?

Algiers climbs the hills above a wide bay on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, the capital of Algeria. A string of small islands just offshore gave early sailors shelter and gave the city its Arabic name, al-Jaza'ir, "the islands". For three centuries it was the capital of a corsair state that both traded with and preyed on Mediterranean shipping, and in the twentieth century it was the main stage of one of the hardest-fought wars of decolonisation.

Phoenician traders used the site in the first millennium BCE, and a small Punic town called Ikosim grew up within the orbit of Carthage. Under Numidian and then Mauretanian kings, and later as Icosium in the Roman Empire, it remained a modest coastal town. Vandals took it in the fifth century and Byzantine forces in 534, after which it faded from the record. The city in its present form was refounded in about 972 CE by the Berber prince Buluggin ibn Ziri, who governed North Africa for the Fatimid Caliphate. Over the next five centuries it passed among Zirid, Hammadid, Almoravid, Almohad and Zayyanid rulers, an important but secondary port.

Everything changed in the early sixteenth century. Muslims expelled from Spain settled in Algiers, and Spain seized one of the offshore islets in 1510 and fortified it to control the harbour. In 1516 the town's leaders called in the corsair brothers Oruç and Hayreddin Barbarossa. Oruç made himself master of the city, and Hayreddin, after his brother's death, placed it under the sultan in Istanbul, took the Spanish fort in 1529 and joined the islets to the mainland with a mole, creating the harbour. In 1541 a great fleet led by the emperor Charles V was wrecked by a storm off the city and the invasion failed.

As the capital of the Regency of Algiers, nominally part of the Ottoman Empire but increasingly self-governing under its deys, the city grew rich on privateering and on ransoming thousands of captive European sailors and coastal villagers. The white-walled Kasbah, the citadel and old town packed onto the hillside, dates largely from this era. European navies bombarded Algiers repeatedly, by the French in 1682 and 1683 and by an Anglo-Dutch fleet in 1816, which forced the release of Christian captives.

A diplomatic quarrel, in which the dey struck the French consul with a fly-whisk in 1827, gave France its pretext for invasion. French troops landed in June 1830 and Algiers surrendered on 5 July. It became the capital of French Algeria, and a European city of boulevards and apartment blocks grew below the Kasbah, home to a large settler population. During the Second World War Allied forces landed in November 1942, and Algiers served as the seat of the Free French leadership under Charles de Gaulle in 1943 and 1944.

The war of independence began in 1954. In 1957 French paratroopers broke the nationalist network in the Kasbah in the Battle of Algiers, using widespread torture, and a revolt by settlers and army officers in Algiers in May 1958 brought down the French Fourth Republic. Algeria became independent on 5 July 1962, and most of the European population left within months. Algiers was hit hard by the civil conflict of the 1990s and in 2019 saw weekly mass protests that ended the presidency of Abdelaziz Bouteflika. The Kasbah has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992. Algiers is today the country's political and economic centre, with a metropolitan population of several million.