Tlemcen

Tlemcen was the capital of the Zayyanid kingdom (1236–1554), which ruled the central Maghreb from a citadel called the Mechouar. In the first half of the fourteenth century it was a city of perhaps 40,000 people with several famous madrasas, among them the Tashfiniya founded by the Zayyanid sultan Abu Tashfin I. In the souk around the Great Mosque merchants sold woollens and carpets from the East, slaves and gold from across the Sahara, and goods that corsairs sent in from the Mediterranean, and Tlemcen merchant houses kept offices in Mali and the Sudan.

The Marinid sultan Abu al-Hasan held the city after 1337, and his son Abu Inan held it again in 1352, but neither could hold the region against local resistance, and these episodes marked the beginning of the end. For two centuries the Zayyanids were vassals in turn of the Hafsids, the Marinids and Aragon. After the Spanish took Oran in 1509, pressure from the Berbers led Spain to campaign against Tlemcen in 1543, which ended with a vassal king on the throne.

In 1551 Tlemcen came under Ottoman rule and was no longer a seat of government. In 1833 the emir Abdelkader, leader of the resistance to the French, entered Tlemcen and had his authority recognised by most of its people; in 1836 a French army under Marshal Clausel entered the city.