Algiers

Algiers rose from the old settlement of Jazair Bani Mazghanna on the bay of the same name, refounded in 972 by Buluggin ibn Ziri. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was a modest port in the kingdom of Tlemcen, and the Thaaliba emirs held the Mitidja plain behind it. After the Moors were expelled from Spain many sought refuge here, and in 1510 the Spaniards under Pedro Navarro fortified the Peñón, a rocky islet off the harbour, and made the emir swear obedience to Ferdinand of Aragon.

In 1516 the emir Selim b. Teumi invited the corsair brothers Oruç Reis and Hayreddin Barbarossa to drive the Spaniards out. Oruç killed the emir and seized the town, and Hayreddin, who lost it in 1524 and took the Peñón in 1529, offered Algiers to Suleiman the Magnificent. From then on it was the chief seat of the Barbary corsairs, and when Charles V attacked with some 30,000 men in October 1541 a storm wrecked his fleet and the pasha Hassan defeated the army. In 1556 a citadel was built at the highest point of the city wall.

By the seventeenth century as much as 40 percent of its 100,000 inhabitants were enslaved Europeans, and the writer Miguel de Cervantes was held here for almost five years. The upper city, al-Gabal, was a maze of Andalusian, Jewish, Moorish and Kabyle quarters, and the lower city held the Ottoman dignitaries and the markets. A British squadron under Lord Exmouth bombarded the harbour on 27 August 1816, and in 1830 a French fleet and army ended the rule of the dey.