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  Tunisia was a kingdom within the French Union from 1881 until 1956, when it was granted independence and conceded power to the nationalist leader Habib Bourguiba. 

  Modern Tunisia is situated at a key point in the Western Mediterranean stretching outwards to Sicily and derives its sense of nationhood from an awareness of its great past; its unique culture and traditions dominated by Islam for the past fourteen centuries and from a common language - Arabic, which makes it a part of the Arab world that stretches from the shores of Atlantic Ocean in the West to the Arabian Gulf in the East. 

  You can sense the wonder of old Tunisia everywhere and feel that its history, its monuments and its culture combine to make a very special modern nation.   The site of ancient Carthage has been inherited by that modern nation but today it stands sadly shorn of the greatness that once made it the most important and prosperous city in the Phoenician Empire. 

Ancient History

  In 814 BCE  the city of Carthage was founded in present-day Tunisia by Queen Elissar, a former princess of Tyre.  Her brother, King Pygmalion of Tyre, murdered her husband the high priest.  Elissar escaped the tyranny of her own country and founded Carthage and subsequently its later dominions.  At its peak her metropolis came to be called a "shining city," ruling 300 other cities around the western Mediterranean and leading the Phoenician Punic world.

  It was at Carthage where Elissar first met Aeneas, the great Greek hero, who had fled the burning city of Troy and was shipwrecked and stranded on the shores of Carthage.  Queen Elissar (known also as Dido from a Phoenician word meaning ‘wanderer’) found him irresistible as a man with his regal bearing and manners and she fell passionately in love with him.  In Virgil's Aeneid, Dido is first introduced as an extremely well respected character.  In just seven years, since their exodus from Tyre, the Carthaginians had built a successful kingdom under her rule.  Her subjects adored her and presented her with a festival of praise.  Her character is perceived as even more noble when she offers asylum to Aeneas and his men, who have recently escaped from Troy.  However, when Aeneas is reminded by Jupiter’s messenger, Mercury, that his mission is not to stay in Carthage with his new-found love, Dido, but to travel to Italy to found Rome, Dido’s character takes a turn for the worse.  When Aeneas deserts her, she becomes vengeful and orders a pyre to be built so that she may burn the possessions he left behind.  It is on this pyre that Dido has a vision of the future Carthaginian general, Hannibal, avenging her.  With her final breath she stabs herself. 

  From 700 to 409 BCE there were repeated conflicts between Carthage and Greece over spheres of influence and trade routes.  Under the Magonid dynasty, the Carthaginians dominated the Western Mediterranean but the Greeks regained the upper hand at the Battle of Imera in 480 BCE.  Skirmishes between Greeks and Carthaginians in Sicily spilled over to mainland Tunisia in 311 BCE 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 BCE, leading to the First Punic War.  From 218 to 202 BCE the Second Punic War ravaged the region, with Hannibal crossing the Alps to attack Rome.  Carthage was eventually destroyed – razed to the ground by vengeful Romans -during the Third Punic War, and Tunisia was made part of the Roman Empire and its citizens sold into slavery. 

  The Carthaginian general Hannibal (247-182 BCE), perhaps the best know son of Carthage, was one of the greatest military leaders in history.  His most famous campaign took place during the Second Punic War (218-202 BCE), when he caught the Romans off-guard by crossing the Alps. 

  When Hannibal was born in 247 BCE, his birthplace, Carthage, was a humiliated city: it had been the Mediterranean's most prosperous seaport and had possessed wealthy provinces but it had recently been defeated by the Romans, who had stripped Carthage of most of its overseas territories - Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. 

  Hannibal was the oldest son of the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca, who took him to Spain in 237BCE, where he was trying to conquer Andalusia, compensating for the loss of the Carthaginian provinces to Rome.  When Hamilcar died in 229 BCE, Hannibal's brother-in-law Hasdrubal took over command.  The new governor secured the Carthaginian position by diplomatic means, among which was intermarriage between Carthaginians and Iberians.  Hannibal married a native princess. 

  In 221 BCE, Hasdrubal was murdered and Hannibal was elected commander by the Carthaginian army in Spain.  He returned to his father's military politics and attacked the natives again: in 220 BCE he took Salamanca.  The next year, he besieged Saguntum, a Roman ally.  Since Rome’s attention was occupied with the Second Illyrian War and was consequently unable to support the town, Saguntum fell after a blockade of eight months. 

  In 219 BCE in his most daringly brilliant military manoeuvre, Hannibal launched an attack on the city of Rome itself by marching with his army, made up of elephants, horses and soldiers, across the Alps and inflicting crushing defeat on the Roman armies who stood in his way.  He managed to engage the Roman army for sixteen years on hostile territory before they got the upper.  He committed suicide by poisoning himself in 182 BCE, embracing death and denying the attempts of Romans to make him their prisoner.  His famous last words were 'Let us put an end to the anxiety of the Romans who have grown weary of waiting for the death of a hated old man'. 

  After defeating the Carthaginians the Romans, in 146 BCE, made their capital in Utica, further along the coast. 

Middle Ages

  An Arab Muslim army entered Tunisia in 670 CE under the command of Uqba ibn Nafa with the intention of staying permanently.  Arriving by land the Arabs passed the Byzantine strongholds along the coast.  They founded the city of Kairouan, using it as a base from which 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 centralized state. 

  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 CE 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 could.  He proposed to the Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, that he be granted Ifriqiya as a hereditary fief and he agreed.  Ibrahim bin al-Aghlab and his decendants, known as the Aghlabids, ruled Tunisia, Tripolitania, and eastern Algeria on behalf of the Caliph from 800 to 909 CE.  The Aghlabid military elites were drawn from the descendants of Arab invaders, Islamised and Arabised Berbers and black slave soldiers.  The administrative staffs comprised dependent client Arab and Persian immigrants, bi-lingual 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 Kairouan 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 And in 835 CE the Aghlabid armies captured Sicily.

  Later on, anarchy made Tunisia a target for the Norman kingdom that had been established in Sicily, who between 1134 and 1148 seized Mahdia, Gabes, Sfax, and the island of Djerba.  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 which 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. 

  The Almohad empire, like its predecessors, soon dissolved in Tunisia.  In 1230 they were succeeded by the Hafsids who ruled between 1230 and 1574 and 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 immigration from Spain, as a result of their expulsion, 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 finally incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. 

Ottoman Empire in Tunisia

  The Tunisian state was rebuilt with the imposition of Ottoman rule in the late 16th century.  In 1574,the Ottomans made Tunisia a province of their empire and garrisoned Tunis with 4,000 Janissaries 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).  In theory, Tunisia continued to be a vassal of the Ottoman Empire - the Friday prayer was pronounced in the name of the Ottoman Sultan, money was coined in his honour and an annual ambassador brought gifts to Istanbul - but the Ottomans never again exacted obeisance. 

Modern history

  In the 19th century, the country became mostly autonomous, although officially still an Ottoman province.  In 1861, Tunisia enacted the first constitution in the Arab world, but a move toward a republic was hampered by the poor economy and political unrest.  In 1869, Tunisia declared itself bankrupt and an international financial commission with representatives from France, United Kingdom, and Italy took control over the economy. 

  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 which ruled France after its capitulation to Germany in 1940.  After losing a string of battles to General Montgomery in 1942 and then hearing of the landings during Operation Torch, Erwin Rommel retreated to Tunisia to set up strong defensive positions in the mountains to the South.  Overwhelming British superiority eventually broke these lines, although he did have some success against the green American troops advancing from the West.  The fighting ended in early 1943 and Tunisia became a base of operations for the invasion of Sicily later that year.  It was very important in World War II.  Violent resistance to French rule boiled up in 1954. 

Tunisia since 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.  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, supressing 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 re-distibutive 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-military, 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 by its French acronym).  In 1988 Ben Ali tried a new tack with reference to the government and Islam, 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.  In recent years, Tunisia has taken a moderate, non-aligned stance in its foreign relations. 

  Today Tunisia is a country of contrasts:  modern & ancient; Carthage, Rome and Vandals; Arab, Berber and above all Muslim.  It has ancient ruins, archaeological sites and is a modern Mediterranean North African country.  But above all it has History in abundance. Go and visit – the payback is enormous.