Carthage
The Phoenicians founded Carthage on the bay of Tunis around 814 BCE, and it grew into the great maritime and trading power of the western Mediterranean. Its quarrel with Rome produced the Punic Wars and Hannibal, who crossed the Alps with elephants and spent fifteen years loose in Italy without ever taking Rome. Rome won in the end, razed Carthage in 146 BCE, and then rebuilt it as the capital of Roman Africa — the breadbasket that fed the empire. The amphitheatre at El Djem, which seated thousands, is what that wealth left behind.
Kairouan and the Muslim centuries
The Arab conquest reached here in the seventh century, and in 670 the general Uqba ibn Nafi founded Kairouan — the first great Muslim city in the Maghreb and, for a time, the base from which Islam spread west across North Africa. Its Great Mosque is one of the oldest in the world, and Kairouan became a holy city in its own right.
A succession of dynasties followed — Aghlabids, Fatimids, Zirids, Hafsids — before the Ottomans took the coast in the sixteenth century and ruled it through local beys. By the nineteenth century the beys had borrowed Tunisia into bankruptcy, and in 1881 France moved in and made it a protectorate.
Bourguiba's republic
Independence came in 1956 under Habib Bourguiba, and few post-colonial leaders remade a country as deliberately. Within months he pushed through the Code of Personal Status, which banned polygamy, gave women the right to divorce, and set a floor on the age of marriage — the most far-reaching reform of women's legal status in the Arab world, and still the thing Tunisians point to when they distinguish themselves from their neighbours.
Bourguiba was also autocratic, secularising by decree, and eventually senile in office. In 1987 his prime minister Zine El Abidine Ben Ali removed him in a bloodless coup declared on medical grounds. Ben Ali then ran a police state for twenty-three years, prosperous on the surface and rotten underneath.
The spark
On 17 December 2010, in the interior town of Sidi Bouzid, a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight after police confiscated his cart. The protests that followed spread nationwide within weeks; on 14 January 2011 Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia. Tunisia had started the Arab Spring, and unlike the uprisings it inspired elsewhere it produced an actual transition — a new constitution in 2014 and a Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 for the civil-society quartet that brokered it.
The democracy struggled to deliver jobs, and in 2021 President Kais Saied, elected two years earlier, suspended parliament and assumed sweeping powers, remaking the constitution in 2022 to concentrate authority in the presidency. Whether the one success story of the Arab Spring has survived is now an open question, and a bitter one.