Libyan

The Libyans are the Arabic-speaking people of the North African coast between Egypt and Tunisia, in Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. Their vernacular, Libyan or Sulaimitian Arabic, was shaped by the Banu Sulaym and Banu Hilal, Bedouin tribes who left famine-stricken Egypt for the Maghreb in the mid-eleventh century.

Tripoli fell to Spanish conquerors in 1510 and was assigned to the Knights of St John in 1530. The Ottoman commander Turgut Reis took it in the siege of 1551, after which it became a Barbary corsair stronghold.

In 1711 the Janissary officer Ahmed Karamanli killed the Ottoman governor and founded a hereditary dynasty; his pashas grew rich on corsair tribute. Yusuf Karamanli's demands on American shipping brought the First Barbary War of 1801 to 1805. In 1835 an Ottoman army restored direct rule amid a dynastic civil war.