Who ruled Tunis?

Tunis lies at the inner end of a shallow lagoon, the Lake of Tunis, on the Gulf of Tunis in the north of Tunisia. The narrow strait between Sicily and Africa is close by, which made this corner of the coast one of the hinges of the Mediterranean. For its first thousand years Tunis lived in the shadow of its famous neighbour Carthage, a few kilometres across the lagoon. It became a great city only after Carthage was gone, and for the last eight centuries it has been the political centre of the land that took its name.

A Berber town called Tunes existed here in antiquity and is mentioned by Greek writers, but the dominant power was Carthage, founded by Phoenicians from Tyre, traditionally in 814 BCE. Tunis was drawn into Carthage's wars and was briefly held by its enemies more than once. When Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE at the end of the Punic Wars, Tunis suffered too. Roman Carthage was later rebuilt as the capital of the province of Africa, and Tunis remained a minor town under the Roman Empire, the Vandals (from 439 CE) and the Byzantines (from 533).

The Arab conquest reversed the roles. After Carthage fell for the last time in 698, the conquerors chose Tunis, with its sheltered lagoon, as their naval base on this coast. The Zitouna Mosque, whose origins go back to the decades after the conquest and which was rebuilt in the 9th century under the Aghlabids, became one of the leading centres of Islamic learning in North Africa. For several centuries the capitals of Ifriqiya were elsewhere, at Kairouan and Mahdia, but under the Almohads in the 12th century Tunis became the seat of the regional governor.

In the 1220s and 1230s the Almohad governors, the Hafsids, made themselves independent, and Tunis became the capital of the Hafsid state for more than three centuries. It was a wealthy city of mosques, madrasas and souks, with resident Italian and Catalan merchants. Louis IX of France died of disease while besieging it during the Eighth Crusade in 1270, and the historian Ibn Khaldun was born here in 1332.

In the 16th century Tunis became a prize in the struggle between Spain and the Ottoman Empire. The corsair Hayreddin Barbarossa seized it in 1534; Charles V retook it in 1535 and restored a Hafsid client; control changed hands again before an Ottoman expedition settled the matter in 1574. Tunis then became the capital of an Ottoman province whose real rulers were local: first the deys, then the beys. The Husainid dynasty, founded in 1705, ruled until 1957, and by the 18th century the beylik behaved largely as an independent state, which is what the map shows.

Debt and European rivalry ended that autonomy. France imposed a protectorate with the Treaty of Bardo in 1881, though the map still shows Ottoman colours into the 1890s. A European quarter of straight avenues grew up between the medina and the lagoon. Axis forces occupied Tunis from November 1942 until the Allies took it in May 1943. Tunisia became independent on 20 March 1956 under Habib Bourguiba, who abolished the monarchy the next year.

From 1979 to 1990 Tunis hosted the headquarters of the Arab League, and from 1982 the Palestine Liberation Organization was based here. The protests that forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee on 14 January 2011 began elsewhere in Tunisia but reached their climax in the capital's streets, setting off the wider Arab Spring. The medina, listed by UNESCO in 1979, is now the core of a metropolitan area of more than two million people that dominates the country's government, business and education.