Template:Wp-Tangier-History

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Ancient

Tangier was founded as a Phoenician colony, possibly as early as the 10th centuryBCE and almost certainly by the 8th centuryBCE. The majority of Berber tombs around Tangier had Punic jewelry by the 6th centuryBCE, speaking to abundant trade by that time. The Carthaginians developed it as an important port of their empire by the 5th centuryBCE.^[1] It was probably involved with the expeditions of Hanno the Navigator along the West African coast.^[2] The city long preserved its Phoenician traditions, issuing bronze coins under the Mauretanian kings with Punic script and others under the Romans bearing Augustus and Agrippa's heads and Latin script obverse but an image of the Canaanite god Baal reverse. Some editions of Procopius place his Punic stelae in Tingis rather than Tigisis; in either case, however, their existence is highly dubious.

The Greeks knew this town as Tingis and, with some modification, record the Berber legends of its founding. Supposedly Tinjis, daughter of Atlas and widow of Antaeus, slept with Hercules and bore him the son Syphax. After Tinjis' death, Syphax then founded the port and named it in her honour. The gigantic skeleton and tomb of Antaeus were tourist attractions for ancient visitors.^[3] The Caves of Hercules, where he supposedly rested on Cape Spartel during his labors, remain one today.

Tingis came under the control of the Roman ally Mauretania during the Punic Wars. Q. Sertorius, in his war against Sulla's regime in Rome, took and held Tingis for a number of years in the 70sBCE. It was subsequently returned to the Mauretanians but established as a republican free city during the reign of in 38BCE.

Tingis received certain municipal privileges under Augustus and became a Roman colony under Claudius, who made it the provincial capital of Mauretania Tingitana. Under Diocletian's 291 reforms, it became the seat of a count and Tingitana's governor. At the same time, the province itself shrank to little more than the ports along the coast and, owing to the Great Persecution, Tingis was also the scene of the martyrdoms by beheading of and Cassian in 298. Tingis remained the largest settlement in its province in the 4th century and was greatly developed.

Medieval

Probably invited by Count Boniface, who feared war with the empress dowager,^[4] tens of thousands of Vandals under Gaiseric crossed into North Africa in 429 CE and occupied Tingis and Mauretania as far east as Calama. When Boniface learned that he and the empress had been manipulated against each other by Aetius, he attempted to compel the Vandals to return to Spain but was instead defeated at Calama in 431. The Vandals lost control of Tingis and the rest of Mauretania in various Berber uprisings.

Tingis was reconquered by Belisarius, the general of the Byzantine emperor , in 533 as part of the Vandalic War.^[5] The new provincial administration was moved, however, to the more defensible base at Septem (present-day Ceuta). Byzantine control probably yielded to pressure from Visigoth Spain around 618.

Count Julian of Ceuta supposedly led the last defences of Tangier against the Muslim invasion of North Africa. Medieval romance made his betrayal of Christendom a personal vendetta against the Visigoth king Roderic over the honour of his daughter, but Tangier at least fell to a siege by the forces of the Arabian Musa bin Nusayr sometime between 707 and 711. While he moved south through central Morocco, he had his deputy at Tangier Tariq ibn Zayid (usually said to be Musa's Berber mawla launch the beginning of the Muslim invasion of Spain. (Uqba ibn Nafi was frequently but erroneously credited with Tangier's conquest by medieval historians, but only owing to Musa's later disgrace at the hands of a jealous caliph.)

Under the Umayyads, Tangier served as the capital of the Moroccan district (Maghreb al-Aqsa^[6] or al-Udwa) of the province of Africa (Ifriqiya). The conquest of the Maghreb and Spain had, however, been undertaken principally as raids for slaves and plunder and the caliphate's leadership continued to treat all Berbers as pagans or slaves for tax purposes, even after their wholesale conversion to Islam. In the area around Tangier, these hateful taxes were mostly paid in female slaves or in tender lambskins obtained by beating the ewes to induce premature birth.^[7] Governor Yazid was murdered by Berber guards whom he had tattooed as slaves in ,^[7] and in the 730s similar treatment from Governor Ubayd Allah and al-Muradi, his deputy at Tangier, provoked the Berber Revolt. Inspired by the egalitarian Kharijite heresy, Barghawata and others under Maysara al-Matghari seized Tangier in the summer of 740. In the Battle of the Nobles on the city's outskirts a few months later, Maysara's replacement Khalid ibn Hamid massacred the cream of Arab nobility in North Africa. An enraged Caliph Hisham ordered an attack from a second army "whose beginning is where they are and whose end is where I am" but this was defeated at Bagdoura the next year. The Barghawata were concentrated further south on the Atlantic coast, and area around Tangier fell into chaos until 785.

The Shia Arab refugee Idris arrived at Tangier before moving further south, marrying into local tribes around Moulay Idriss and assembling an army that, among its other conquests, took Tangier . During the division of the sultanate that occurred on the death of , Tangier fell to his son Qasim in 829. It was soon taken by Qasim's brother Umar, who ruled it until his death in 835. Umar's son Ali became sultan (r.874–883), as did Qasim's son Yahya after him (r.880–904), but they governed from Fez.

The Fatimid caliph Abdullah al-Madhi began interfering in Morocco in the early 10th century, prompting the Umayyad emir of Cordova to proclaim himself caliph and to begin supporting proxies against his rivals. He helped the Maghrawa Berbers overrun Melilla in 927, Ceuta in 931, and Tangier in 949. Tangier's governor was subsequently named chief over Cordova's Moroccan possessions and allies. Ali ibn Hammud, named Cordova's governor for Ceuta in 1013, took advantage of the realm's civil wars to conquer Tangier and Málaga before overrunning Cordova itself and proclaiming himself caliph in 1016. His Barghawata ally Rizḳ Allāh was then permitted to rule from Tangier with general autonomy.

Yusuf ibn Tashfin captured Tangier for the Almoravids in 1077. It fell to Abd al-Mumin's Almohads in the 1147 and then flourished under his dynasty, with its port highly active.

Like Ceuta, Tangier did not initially acknowledge the Marinids after the fall of the Almohads. Instead, the local chief Yusuf ibn Muhammad pledged himself to the Hafsids in Tunisia and then to the Abbasids in the east before being killed in 665 (late 1266 or early 1267). Abu Yusuf Yaqub compelled Tangier's allegiance with a three months' siege in 1274.

The next century was an obscure time of rebellions and difficulties for the city. During this time, the great Berber traveler Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier in 1304, leaving home at 20 for the hajj. Piracy from Tangier and Salé began to harass shipping in the strait and North Atlantic in the late 14thcentury.^[5] A partial plan of the late medieval kasbah was found in a Portuguese document now held by the Military Archives of Sweden in Stockholm.

Modern

When the Portuguese started their colonial expansion by taking Ceuta in retribution for its piracy^[5] in 1415, Tangier was always a major goal. They failed to capture it in 1437, 1458, and 1464, but occupied it unopposed on 28 August 1471 after its garrison fled upon learning of the conquest of Asilah. As in Ceuta, they converted its chief mosque into the town's cathedral church; it was further embellished by several restorations during the town's occupation. In addition to the cathedral, the Portuguese raised European-style houses and Franciscan and Dominican chapels and monasteries.^[5] The Wattasids assaulted Tangier in 1508, 1511, and 1515 but without success. In the 17th century, it passed with the rest of Portugal's domains into Spanish control as part of the personal union of the crowns but maintained its Portuguese garrison and administration.

Iberian rule lasted until 1661,^[5] when it was given to England's as part of the dowry of the Portuguese infanta Catherine of Braganza. A squadron under the admiral and ambassador Edward Montagu arrived in November. English Tangier, fully occupied in January 1662, was praised by Charles as "a jewell of immense value in the royal diadem"^[5] despite the departing Portuguese taking away everything they could, evenaccording to the official report"the very fflowers, the Windowes and the Dores". Tangier received a garrison and a charter which made it equal to other English towns, but the religious orders were expropriated, the Portuguese residents nearly entirely left, and the town's Jews were driven out owing to fears concerning their loyalty. Meanwhile, the Tangier Regiment were almost constantly under attack by locals who considered themselves mujahideen fighting a holy war. Their principal leader was Khadir Ghaïlan (known to the English as "Gayland" or "Guyland") of the Banu Gurfat, whom the Earl of Peterborough attempted to buy off. Ultimately, the truce lasted only for part of 1663 and 1664; on May 4 of the latter year, the Earl of Teviot and around 470 members of the garrison were killed in an ambush beside Jew's Hill. Lord Belasyse happened to secure a longer-lasting treaty in 1666: Khadir Ghaïlan hoped to support a pretender against the new Alawid sultan Al-Rashid and things subsequently went so badly for him that he was obliged to abide by its terms until his death in 1673.

The English took advantage of the respite to improve greatly the Portuguese defences. They also planned to improve the harbour by building a mole, which would have allowed it to play the same role that Gibraltar later played in British naval strategy. Incompetence, waste and outright fraud and embezzlement caused costs to swell; among those enriched was Samuel Pepys. The mole cost £340,000 and reached long before its destruction. Although funding was found for the fortifications, the garrison's pay was delayed until in December 1677 it was 2 years in arrears; Governor Fairborne dealt with the ensuing mutiny by seizing one of the soldier's muskets and killing him with it on the spot.

An attempt by Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco to seize the town in 1679 was unsuccessful; but longstanding exasperation with the colony's finances^[8] and a crippling blockade by Jaysh al-Rifi pushed Parliament to write off the effort in 1680. At the time, Tangier's population consisted of only about 700 apart from the thousand-man garrison; Governor Kirke estimated 400 of them had suffered gonorrhea from the same "mighty pretty" whore.^[8] Forces under Lord Dartmouth (including Samuel Pepys) methodically destroyed the town and its port facilities for five months prior to Morocco's occupation of the city on 7 February 1684.

Ali ibn Abdallah and his son Ahmed ibn Ali served in turn as the town's governors until 1743, repopulating it with Berbers from the surrounding countryside. They were powerful enough to oppose Sultan Abdallah through his various reigns, giving support and asylum to his various rivals within and without the royal family.

The Spanish attacked the city in 1790 but the city grew until, by 1810, its population reached 5,000.

From the 18th century, Tangier served as Morocco's diplomatic headquarters. The United States dedicated its first consulate in Tangier during the George Washington administration. In 1821, the Legation Building in Tangier became the first piece of property acquired abroad by the U.S. government—a gift to the U.S. from Sultan Moulay Suliman.

In 1828, Great Britain blockaded the port in retaliation for piracy. As part of its ongoing conquest of neighboring Algeria, France declared war over Moroccan tolerance of Abd el-Kader; Tangier was bombarded by a French fleet under the Prince of Joinville on 6 August 1844. What little of its fortifications were damaged were later repaired by English engineers, but French victory at Isly near the disputed border ended the conflict on French terms.

Italian revolutionary hero Giuseppe Garibaldi lived in exile at Tangier in late 1849 and the first half of 1850, following the fall of the revolutionary Roman Republic.

Tangier's geographic location made it a cockpit of European diplomatic and commercial rivalry in Morocco in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the 1870s, it was the site of every foreign embassy and consul in Morocco but only held about 400 foreign residents out of a total population of around 20,000. The city increasingly came under French influence, and it was here in 1905 that triggered an international crisis that almost led to war between his country and France by pronouncing himself in favour of Morocco's continued independence, with an eye to its future acquisition by the German Empire. The Algeciras Conference which ended the standoff left Tangier's police training and customs collections in international hands but Britain's strong support of its "Entente Cordiale" with France ended German hopes concerning Morocco.

Improved harbour facilities were completed in 1907, with an inner and outer mole. In 1905 the first Moroccan newspaper, Lisan al-Maghrib ("The Voice of Morocco"), was established in Tangiers on the order of Sultan Abdelaziz, partly with the aim of counteracting the views expressed by al-Sa'adah, an Arabic newspaper established in 1904 or 1905 by the French embassy in the city.^[9][10] The newspaper was founded and managed on behalf of the government by two Lebanese journalists, Faraj and Artur Numur. It later became more notorious for publishing reformist ideas and views critical of the sultan.^[9] In the years leading up to the First World War, Tangier had a population of about 40,000, about half Muslim, a quarter Jewish, and a quarter European Christians. Of the Europeans, about three-quarters were Spanish artisans and labourers. In 1912, Morocco was effectively partitioned between France and Spain; Spanish Morocco covered the country's far north and far south while the French protectorate covered the central remainder. The last Sultan of independent Morocco, Moulay Hafid, was exiled to the Sultanate Palace in the Tangier kasbah after his forced abdication in favour of his brother Moulay Yusef.

Tangier was made an international zone in 1923 under the joint administration of France, Spain and Britain under an international convention signed in Paris on 18 December 1923. Ratifications were exchanged in Paris on 14 May 1924. The convention was registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on 13 September 1924. The convention was amended in 1928. The governments of Italy, Portugal and Belgium adhered to the convention in 1928, and the government of the Netherlands in 1929. The standard-gauge Franco-Spanish Tangier–Fez Railway was constructed from 1919 to 1927.

The European powers' creation of the statute of Tangier promoted the formation of a cosmopolitan society where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together with reciprocal respect and tolerance. A town where men and women, with many different political and ideological tendencies, found refuge, including Spaniards from the right or from the left, Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and Moroccan dissidents. With very liberal economic and fiscal laws, Tangier became - in an international environment full of restrictions, prohibitions and monopolies - a tax haven with absolute freedom of trade.^[11] The International Zone of Tangier had a area and, by the World War II, a population of about 50,000 inhabitants: 30,000 Muslims; 12,000 Jews; and 8,000-odd Europeans, with a decreasing proportion of working-class Spaniards. However, Spanish troops occupied Tangier on 14 June 1940, the same day Paris fell to the Germans. Despite calls by Spanish nationalists to annex "", the Franco regime publicly considered the occupation a temporary wartime measure. A diplomatic dispute between Britain and Spain over the latter's abolition of the city's international institutions in November 1940 led to a further guarantee of British rights and a Spanish promise not to fortify the area. The territory was restored to its pre-war status on October 11, 1945.

In July 1952 the protecting powers met at Rabat to discuss the Zone's future, agreeing to abolish it. Tangier joined with the rest of Morocco following the restoration of full sovereignty in 1956. At the time of the handover, Tangier had a population of around 40,000 Muslims; 31,000 Christians; and 15,000 Jews.

Still basking in the Zone's countercultural glow and close by the kif-producing Rif Mountains, Tangier formed part of the hippie trail of the 1960s and '70s. It became less popular and tourist attractions became run-down as cheap flights made central Moroccan cities like Marrakesh more accessible to European tourists; crime rose and a somewhat dangerous reputation drove more tourists away.^[12] Since 2010, however, has made a point of restoring the city's shipping and tourist facilities and improving its industrial base. Among other improvements, the beach was cleaned and lined with new cafes and clubs; the new commercial port means cruise ships no longer unload beside cargo containers.^[12]