Who ruled Tripoli?

Tripoli stands on the Mediterranean coast of north-western Libya, where a low rocky headland shelters a natural harbour and a belt of oases supplies water and food. It has been a port for well over two and a half thousand years. Much of its history is the story of outsiders who wanted that harbour, from Phoenician merchants and Roman governors to Arab armies, Spanish knights, Ottoman pashas, corsairs and Italian colonists. Since 1951 it has been the capital of an independent Libya.

The city began as Oea, a trading post set up by Phoenicians, probably in the 7th century BCE. It later came within the orbit of Carthage, together with the nearby towns of Sabratha and Leptis Magna, and the Greek name for the trio, Tripolis or "three cities", eventually attached itself to Oea alone. After Carthage was crushed in the Punic Wars, the coast passed to the Numidian kings, and in 46 BCE Rome annexed it. Oea grew rich on olive oil and on goods carried up from the Sahara. An arch honouring Marcus Aurelius and his co-emperor Lucius Verus, raised in the 160s CE, still stands near the harbour.

The Vandals overran the coast in the 5th century CE, and Byzantine forces recovered it in 533. Arab armies under Amr ibn al-As took the city in the early 640s, and from then on it was a Muslim and increasingly Arabic-speaking town. It was governed from distant capitals by the Umayyads, the Aghlabids of Kairouan, the Fatimids and their Zirid deputies. Normans from Sicily held Tripoli from 1146 until they were expelled about 1160, after which it passed to the Almohads and then to the Hafsid rulers of Tunis, whose grip was often loose. The map's brief Mamluk phase does not reflect real control from Cairo.

A Spanish fleet stormed the city in 1510, and in 1530 Charles V entrusted it to the Knights of St John. In 1551 an Ottoman force, with the corsair Turgut Reis among its commanders, drove the knights out, and Tripoli became the seat of an Ottoman province.

In 1711 a cavalry officer, Ahmad Karamanli, seized power and founded a dynasty that ran Tripoli almost as an independent state until 1835, while still acknowledging the sultan. Much of its income came from privateering and from payments extracted from foreign shipping. A quarrel over those payments led to war with the United States between 1801 and 1805, during which the captured American frigate Philadelphia was burned in Tripoli harbour in 1804. In 1835 the Ottoman Empire reimposed direct rule.

Italy invaded in October 1911, and the Ottomans gave up Libya the following year. Italian rule added a new quarter of boulevards, arcades and villas outside the walled medina, together with a large settler population. British troops entered the city on 23 January 1943, and a British military administration ran Tripolitania until Libya became an independent kingdom under Idris I on 24 December 1951.

Muammar Gaddafi seized power on 1 September 1969 and ruled from Tripoli for 42 years. Oil revenue drove rapid growth, and most of the remaining Italian community was expelled in 1970. Rebel forces captured the city in August 2011, during the civil war that ended his rule. Since then Tripoli has been contested by rival governments and armed groups, and an offensive by eastern-based forces in 2019 and 2020 failed to take it. In 2024 it was the seat of the internationally recognised Government of National Unity. Home to more than a million people, it is Libya's largest city and its main port.