Tunis

Where was Tunis, and how did ships reach it?

Tunis stands at the inner end of the Lake of Tunis, a wide lagoon off the Gulf of Tunis. The lake was so shallow that seagoing ships could not cross it. A Spanish writer of the early 1600s said only small boats could cross it to the city. Big ships stopped instead at La Goulette, about 10 km away, where a narrow channel joins the lake to the sea. Its Arabic name, Ḥalq al-Wādī, means “throat of the river”.

A fort guarded the channel. Emperor Charles V, who was also king of Spain, built it in 1535, and the Ottomans took it in 1574, when Tunis became part of their empire for good. Inside the city walls lay the medina, the old town of mosques, markets and courtyard houses. UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site in 1979.

Who ruled Tunis in 1715?

Tunis was a regency, a province of the Ottoman Empire that governed itself, like Algiers and Tripoli. At first the sultan sent a governor, a pasha. By the late 1500s an army officer called the dey held real power, and in the 1600s power passed to officials called beys, most of them from one family, the Muradids.

In 1705 an army from Algiers defeated and captured the ruler of Tunis, Ibrahim Sharif. An Ottoman officer named Husayn ibn Ali was proclaimed bey that July. He was born at Le Kef in 1675, the son of an Ottoman soldier and a Tunisian mother. A law of 1710 made the title pass within his family. In 1715 an Ottoman fleet arrived with a new governor, but the city’s leaders backed Husayn and the Ottomans gave way. The sultan recognised him as governor, while Husayn kept a dey with much smaller powers.

Husayn made his own treaties with France (1710), Britain (1716), Spain (1720), Austria (1725) and the Dutch (1728). His rule ended badly: his nephew Ali rebelled, defeated him with help from Algiers in 1735, and Husayn was killed in 1740. Yet Husayn’s family, the Husaynids, reigned until Tunisia became a republic on 25 July 1957.

Were the corsairs of Tunis still raiding?

A corsair was a sea raider licensed by his own government, a little like a privateer. The corsairs of Tunis were supposed to attack only ships of nations the regency was at war with, and the state took a share of what they captured. They were not outlaws like the Caribbean pirates of the same years.

By 1715 raiding mattered less than it once had. Historians find that corsairing around Tunis declined after about 1660, as farming and trade paid better. The main corsair base was Porto Farina, north of the city, where an arsenal was built in 1707. Treaties now protected many nations’ ships. British captains carried Mediterranean passes, documents that proved a ship was British so that corsairs from a regency at peace with Britain would let her go. European navies also kept up pressure: in July 1728 a French squadron appeared off La Goulette, and the bey quickly accepted France’s terms.

What did Tunis trade?

Tunis was above all a market. In the late 1600s Jewish merchants with links to Livorno, the free port in Tuscany, built a busy trade between the two cities. They shipped out beeswax, olive oil, hides, wool and coral, and brought back spices, silks, paper, silver and gold. Husayn encouraged olive planting. North African wheat was also traded, partly through Tabarka, a small island off the coast held by a Genoese family.

The city’s most famous product was the chechia, a soft red felt cap. Refugees from Spain, known in Tunisia as Andalusians, settled there in large numbers in the early 1600s and gave the craft a big push. Many were Moriscos: people of Muslim descent driven out of Spain, many of them forced to become Christians. Many cap makers were of Andalusian descent, and a covered market for them, still called the Souk ech-Chaouachia, was built in 1691 to 1692. Later in the 1700s Tunis caps, made from European wool bought at Livorno, were in demand right across the Ottoman Empire.

Who lived in Tunis?

Tunis mixed many peoples. Turkish officers and soldiers, Tunisians from the city and the countryside, and the Andalusian families lived side by side. Most Jews lived in their own quarter, the Hara. A separate group, Jews whose families had come from Portugal by way of Livorno, were important in overseas trade; about 300 of them lived in Tunis in 1686.

Europeans lived in the Frankish quarter, near the sea gate called Bab el-Bhar. Consuls, officials who looked after their country’s merchants and sailors, lived there too. France had a consul in Tunis from 1577, and in 1660 the regency gave the French consul a fondouk, a building around a courtyard with rooms for merchants, warehouses and ovens. It was used until 1860. Over time Britain, the Dutch Republic, Venice, Genoa, Spain and others had consular houses in the same streets.

What happened to captives in Tunis?

Corsairs brought captured sailors and passengers to Tunis to be ransomed or put to work. Many of their stories survive in the records of the people who came to help them.

In 1720 three French friars of the Trinitarian order, which collected money to free captives, sailed to Algiers and Tunis to ransom prisoners, and published an account of the voyage. That same year a Spanish Trinitarian, Francisco Ximénez, arrived in Tunis and opened a hospital for sick Christian captives under the bey’s protection (one study dates it to 1722). He ran it until 1735 and kept a detailed diary of life in the city. The beys protected the hospital because free care for captives made ransoms easier. It stayed open until about 1818.

Enslavement ran both ways. Spain, the Italian states and the Knights of Malta also seized and enslaved many thousands of Muslims, who were rarely ransomed.