Tunis

Under the Hafsids Tunis was one of the richest cities of the Islamic world, with some 100,000 inhabitants, and Christians had their place in it. The sultans' mercenaries lived in a gated quarter beside the palace, where their church of Saint Francis was even allowed to ring its bell, a privilege denied to the Genoese and Venetian merchants in their own quarters. When Jean Adorno visited in 1470, he found these soldiers so much at home that they still sang the Mass in Latin but spoke the language of the city.

The 16th century made Tunis a prize between two empires. Hayreddin Barbarossa seized it for the Ottomans in 1534, and the next year Charles V sailed there in person to restore the Hafsid sultan Mulai Hassan as his vassal. The city changed hands twice more before the Ottomans took it for good in August 1574. Their beys soon ruled almost independently, Moorish exiles from Spain swelled the population, and corsairs and merchants alike filled the port, so that under the Husainid beys of the 18th century Tunis prospered as a centre of Mediterranean trade.