Makki

The Banu Makki were a leading Muslim family of Gabes in Ifriqiya who turned a Hafsid governorship into a dynastic lordship lasting from 1282 to 1394.

As Hafsid power weakened, they secured the appointment of their own kinsmen as governors and built a domain stretching from Gabes to Tripoli and the Jabal Nafusa.

In 1355 they bought Tripoli from the Genoese, who had just seized it from the Banu Thabit, and by the middle of the fourteenth century they also held Sfax, ruling an effectively independent state along the Gulf of Gabes. Their autonomy ended under the Hafsid sultan Abu al-Abbas Ahmad II, who progressively reimposed direct Tunisian rule over the coast; the Banu Makki lost Gabes and disappeared from history when their lands were reabsorbed in 1394.