History

At the beginning of recorded history, Tunisia was inhabited by Berber tribes. Its coast was settled by Phoenicians starting as early as the 10th century BC. The city of Carthage was founded in the 8th Century BC by settlers from Tyre, now in modern day Lebanon. Legend says that Queen Dido founded the city, as retold in the Roman Epic Aeneid. The settlers of Carthage brought their culture and religion from the Phoenicians and Canaanites

700 BC - 534 AD: The Greeks and Romans

From 700 to 409 BC there were repeated conflicts between Carthage and Greece over spheres of influence and trade routes. Under the Magonid dynasty, Carthage rose to power and eventually became the dominant civilisation in the Mediterranean. The people of Carthage worshiped a pantheon of Middle Eastern gods including Baal and Tanit. Tanit's symbol, a simple female figure with extended arms and long dress, is a popular icon found in ancient sites.

Skirmishes between Greeks and Carthaginians in Sicily spilled over to mainland Tunisia in 311 BC when the Greeks invaded Cap Bon. Carthage became a major rival to the Roman Republic for the domination of the western Mediterranean in the 4th century BC, leading to the First Punic War. From 218 to 202 BC the Second Punic War ravaged the region, with Hannibal marching a Carthaginian army, which included war elephants, over the Alps to attack Rome. Carthage was eventually destroyed during the Third Punic War, and Tunisia was made part of the Roman Empire and its citizens sold into slavery.

In 44 BC, Julius Caesar landed in Tunisia in pursuit of Pompey and Cato the Younger, who had gained the support of the Numidian king Juma I. After Caesar's defeat of the rebels at the battle of Thapsus, much of Numidia was annexed. During the 1st and 2nd century AD Carthage was rebuilt under the supervision of Augustus, and several new towns were founded, often on the remains of old Punic settlements. This process of development was accelerated after Septimus Severus became the first African emperor of the Roman Empire in 193 AD. Early in 238, local landowners ignited a full-scale revolt in the province. The landowners armed their clients and their agricultural workers and entered Thysdrus (modern El Djem), where they murdered the offending official and his bodyguards and proclaimed the aged governor of the province, Gordian I, and his son, Gordian II, as co-emperors. The senate in Rome switched allegiance, but when the African revolt collapsed under an assault by forces loyal to emperor Maximinus Thrax (who succeeded the Severus dynasty), the senators elected two of their number, Pupienus and Balbinus, as co-emperors.

In the 429, Tunisia was captured by the Vandals and became the centre of their short-lived kingdom until they were ousted by the Byzantines in 534.

670-1574: Arab Rule

An Arab Muslim army entered Tunisia in 670 under the command of Uqba ibn Nafi and founded the city of Kairouan, using it as a base to subdue individual pockets of Christian and Berber resistance. Tunisia was considered a natural centre for an Arab-Islamic regime and society in North Africa. It was the only region that had the urban, agricultural and commercial infrastructures essential for a centralised state.

Aghlabid Dynasty

After several generations, a local Arab aristocracy emerged, which was resentful of the distant caliphate's interference in local matters. A minor rebellion in Tunis in 797 took on a more ominous nature when it spread to Kairouan. The caliph's governor was unable to restore order, but Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab, a provincial leader, had a well-disciplined army, and was granted Ifriqiya as a hereditary fief for doing so. Ibrahim bin al-Aghlab and his descendants, known as the Aghlabids, ruled Tunisia, Tripolitania, and eastern Algeria on behalf of the caliph from 800 to 909. The Aghlabid military elites were drawn from the descendants of Arab invaders, Islamized and Arabized Berbers, and black slave soldiers. The administrative staffs comprised dependent client Arab and Persian immigrants, bilingual natives, and some Christians and Jews.

Tunisia flourished under Aghlabid rule. Extensive irrigation works were installed to supply towns with water, irrigate royal gardens and promote olive production. In the Qayrawan region, hundreds of basins were constructed to store water to support horse raising. Important trade routes linked Tunisia with the Sahara, the Sudan and the Mediterranean. The Aghlabids captured Sicily in 835. A flourishing economy permitted a refined and luxurious court life and the construction of the new palace cities of al-'Abbasiya (809) and Raqqada (877). Despite the grandiose construction projects and economic expansion, many from the Arab officer class and ulema of Kairouan became increasingly critical of the regime. The hostility in religious circles arose primarily from the contemptuous treatment of Berbers who had embraced Islam. The Islamic doctrine of equality regardless of race was a cornerstone of the Sunnite movement and the Maliki school of Islamic law which had developed in Kairouan, and was the basis of opposition to Arab-caliphal rule in North Africa.

Growing political instability was further exacerbated by the Fatimids in Egypt, who stirred a rebellion that forced the last of the Aghlabids, Ziyadat Allah III, to evacuate the palace at Raqadda in 909. The Fatimids went on to conquer much of North Africa and Egypt. After moving their capital to Cairo, the Fatimids abandoned North Africa to local Zirid (972 - 1148) and Hammadid (1015 - 1152) vassals. The region became embroiled by their various quarrels, resulting in political instability that was connected to the decline of Tunisian trade and agriculture. The final blow was dealt by nomadic migrations from Arabia and Egypt, when the Banu Hilali Bedouins defeated the Zirid and Hammadid states and sacked Kairouan in 1057. As the invaders took control of the plains, the local sedentary peoples were forced to take refuge in the mountains, and in central and northern Tunisia farming gave way to pastoralism. The immigrants also assisted in the process of Arabization, with the Berber language virtually disappearing.

Almohad and Hafsid Dynasties

Anarchy made Tunisia a target for the Norman kingdom in Sicily, who between 1134 and 1148 seized Mahdia, Gabes, Sfax, and the island of Jerba. The only credible Muslim rulers in the Maghreb at the time were the Almohads (ruled 1130 - 1269) in Morocco, who responded with a counter-attack that forced the Normans to retreat to Sicily.

The Almohad caliph Abd al-Mu'min (1130 - 1163) conquered Morocco, intervened in Spain, and invaded Algeria and Tunisia. However, the Almohad empire, like its predecessors, soon dissolved in Tunisia. In 1230 they were succeeded by the Hafsids (ruled 1230 - 1574), who were recognised by Mecca, which furthermore acknowledged the ruler Al-Mustansir as caliph.

In 1270, an attempted invasion by Louis IX of France was repulsed. Tunisia prospered through increasing European and Sudanese trade under Al-Mustansir, who used the money to transform Tunis, his capital, with a palace and the Abu Fihr park. The estate he created near Bizerte was said to be without equal in the world.

In 1492, Muslim and Jewish migration from Spain culminated in the fall of Muslim Granada. The newcomers brought much-needed skills in agriculture and crafts. From 1534 to 1581 Tunisia become a pawn in power struggles between Spain and Turkey, and in 1574 it was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire.

1574-1869: The Ottoman Empire

The Tunisian state was rebuilt by the imposition of Ottoman rule in the late 16th century. The Ottomans made Tunisia a province of their empire in 1574, and garrisoned Tunis with 4,000 Janissaries (the sultan's household troops) recruited from Anatolia, reinforced by Christian converts to Islam from Italy, Spain and Provence. In 1591, the local Janissary officers replaced the Sultan's appointee with one of their own men, called the Dey. While the Dey dominated Tunis, a Corsican-born Tunisian tax collector (Bey) named Murad (d. 1640), and his descendants, dominated the rest of the country. The struggle for power made allies of the Dey, the Janissaries, and Bedouin tribes against the Beys, the towns, and the fertile region of the countryside.

The Muradid Beys eventually triumphed, and ruled until 1705, when Hussein ibn Ali came to power. The period from 1705 to 1957 witnessed the reign of the Husseinite Beys, including the highly effective Hammouda Pasha (1781 - 1813). The country became mostly autonomous, although officially still an Ottoman province.

In the mid-1800s, Tunisia's government under the rule of the Bey severely compromised its legitimacy by making several controversial financial decisions that led to its downfall. France began plans to take control of Tunisia when the Bey first borrowed large sums of money in an attempt to Westernize. In 1869, Tunisia declared itself bankrupt, and an international financial commission with representatives from France, United Kingdom and Italy took control over the economy.

1881-1956: French Imperialism

In 1878, a secret deal was made between the United Kingdom and France that decided the fate of the African country. Provided that the French accepted British control of Cyprus, recently given to the United Kingdom, the British would in turn accept French control of Tunisia.

In the spring of 1881, France invaded Tunisia, claiming that Tunisian troops had crossed the border to Algeria, France's main colony in Northern Africa. Italy, also interested in Tunisia, protested, but did not risk a war with France. On May 12 of that year, Tunisia was officially made a French protectorate. The French progressively assumed the most responsible administrative positions, and by 1884 they supervised all Tunisian government bureaus dealing with finance, post, education, telegraph, public works and agriculture. They abolished the international finance commission and guaranteed the Tunisian debt, establishing a new judicial system for Europeans while keeping the sharia courts available for cases involving Tunisians, and developed roads, ports, railroads and mines. In rural areas they strengthened the local officials (qa'ids) and weakened independent tribes. They actively encouraged French settlements in the country - the number of French colonists grew from 34,000 in 1906 to 144,000 in 1945, and the French occupied approximately one-fifth of the cultivable land.

Nationalist sentiment increased after World War I. The nationalist Destour Party was set up in 1920. Its successor the Neo-Destour Party, established in 1934 and led by Habib Bourguiba, was banned by the French.

During World War II, the French authorities in Tunisia supported the Vichy government that ruled France after its capitulation to Germany in 1940. After losing a string of battles to British Field Marshal Montgomery in 1942, and then hearing of the US and other allied landings in Algeria and Morocco (Operation Torch), General Rommel (commander of the Axis forces in North Africa) retreated to Tunisia and set up strong defensive positions in the mountains to the south. Overwhelming British superiority eventually broke these lines, although Rommel did have some success against the American troops advancing from the west. The fighting ended in early 1943, and Tunisia became a base for operations for the invasion of Sicily later that year.

1956: Independence

Independence from France was achieved on March 20, 1956, as a constitutional monarchy with the Bey of Tunis, Muhammad VIII al-Amin Bey, as the king of Tunisia. However, Prime Minister Habib Bourguiba abolished the monarchy in 1957 and established a strict state under the Neo-Destour (New Constitution) party. He dominated the country for 31 years, repressing Islamic fundamentalism and establishing rights for women unmatched by any other Arab nation.

Bourguiba envisioned a Tunisian republic (he ended the old quasi-monarchical institution of the dey), which was secular, populist, and imbued with a kind of French rationalist vision of the state that was Napoleonic in spirit. Socialism was not initially part of the project, but redistributive policies certainly were. In 1964, however, Tunisia entered a short lived socialist era. The Neo-Destour party became the Socialist Destour, and the new minister of planning, Ahmed Ben Salah, formulated a state-led plan for the formation of agricultural cooperatives and public-sector industrialisation. The socialist experiment raised considerable opposition within Bourguiba's old coalition, and it was eventually ended in the early 1970s.

"Bourguibism" was also resolutely non-militarist, arguing that Tunisia could never be a credible military power and that the building of a large military establishment would only consume scarce investment and perhaps thrust Tunisia into the cycles of military intervention in politics that had plagued the rest of the Middle East.

President Bourguiba was overthrown and replaced by Prime Minister Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on November 7, 1987. President Ben Ali changed little in the Bourguibist system except to rename the party the Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD). In 1988, Ben Ali tried a new tack with reference to the government and Islam, by attempting to reaffirm the country's Islamic identity by releasing several Islamists activists from prison. He also forged a national pact with the Tunisian party Harakat al-Ittijah al-Islami (Islamic Tendency Movement, founded in 1981), which changed its name to an-Nahda (the Renaissance Party). An-Nahda ran strongly in the 1989 elections, and Ben Ali quickly banned Islamist political parties and jailed as many as 8,000 activists. To the present, the government continues its refusal to recognise Muslim opposition parties, and governs the country by military and police repression.

In recent years, Tunisia has taken a moderate, non-aligned stance in its foreign relations.