Annaba

Annaba is a seaport in the north-eastern corner of Algeria, close to Tunisia and beside the small Seybouse River. It grew up beside the Roman city of Hippo Regius, where Augustine was bishop from 396 until his death in 430, and its later names Bona and Bône both come from that Hippo. The Arabs called it the place of the jujubes, after the fruit that grows in the fertile country around it. In the eleventh century a geographer described a fortified town of mosques, markets and a public bath, and the settlement was later moved to its present site after floods and raids.

Hafsid rule began here in 1250 and was interrupted by short Marinid occupations. The Ottomans took Bône in 1533 and the Spanish held it from 1535 to 1540; from the sixteenth century it was also one of the Barbary corsairs' ports. French merchants traded for wheat and coral at the Bastion de France, a trading post nearby, and in 1832 the French occupied the town.