Tripolitania
Historical definitions of Tripolitania | |
| Capital | Tripoli |
Tripolitania /trɪpɒlɪˈteɪniə/ (Arabic: طرابلس), historically known as the Tripoli region, is a historic region and former province of Libya, located in the region that bordered Egypt to the east.
The region had been settled since antiquity, first coming to prominence as part of the Carthaginian empire. Following the defeat of Carthage in the Punic Wars, Ancient Rome organized the region (along with what is now modern day Tunisia and eastern Algeria), into a province known as Africa, and placed it under the administration of a proconsul. During the Diocletian reforms of the late 3rd century, all of North Africa was placed into the newly created Diocese of Africa, of which Tripolitania was a constituent province.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, Tripolitania changed hands between the Vandals and the Byzantine Empire, until it was taken during the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb in the 8th century. It was part of the region known to the Islamic world as Ifriqiya, whose boundaries roughly mirrored those of the old Roman province of Africa Proconsularis. Though nominally under the suzerainty of the Abbasid Caliphate, local dynasties such as the Aghlabids and later the Fatimid Caliphate were practically independent. The native Berbers, who had inhabited the area locally for centuries before the arrival of the Arabs, established their own native Hafsid dynasty over Ifriqiya in the 13th century, and would control the region until it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, who established Ottoman Tripolitania as a distinct province. Tripolitania became an Italian colony during the Italo-Turkish War in 1911.
After the 1934 formation of Libya, the Tripolitania province was designated as one of the three primary provinces of the country, alongside Cyrenaica province to the east and Fezzan province to the south.
Following the expulsion of Axis forces (German Afrika Korps and Italian Colonial Divisions) by the British and Allied forces in February 1943, Libya was placed under Allied military administration. Libya remained legally an Italian colony until the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, when Italy officially renounced all claims to its African colonies including Somalia. On Christmas Eve 1951, Libya declared its independence which became the first country to achieve independence through the United Nations after the territory was divided into two main zones of control between the British Military Administration (BMA) controlled Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and the French Military Territory of Fezzan-Ghadames.
Muammar Gaddafi was born to a Bedouin family of the Qadhadhfa tribe in 1942 near Sirte. Influenced by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, he led the Free Officers Movement to overthrow King Idris in a bloodless coup on 1 September 1969, declaring Libya an Arab Republic and establishing the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) until its dissolution in 1977, when Libya adopted a new, plain green flag with no design, emblem, or insignia, making it the only country in the world at that time to have a flag with no design. Following the publication of The Green Book (first volume 1975), which outlined his "Third International Theory" as an alternative to capitalism and communism, he instituted a "cultural revolution". On 2 March 1977, he restructured the government into the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya ("state of the masses"), Gaddafi officially stepped down from executive power, because he did not consider himself as "President" or the "Prime Minister", he retained absolute control which he used the title as the "Brotherly Leader". In 1986, he officially renamed the country the "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya".
Definition
Historically, the name Tripoli designated a region rather than a city, just as today in Arabic the same word Tarablus (طرابلس) is used for both the city and the region. The Arabic word used alone would be understood to mean only the city; in order to designate Tripolitania in Arabic, a qualifier such as "state", "province" or "sha'biyah" is required.
The region of Tripoli or Tripolitania derives from the Greek name Τρίπολις (Tripolis) "three cities", referring to Oea, Sabratha and Leptis Magna. Oea was the only one of the three cities to survive antiquity, and became known as Tripoli. Today Tripoli is the capital city of Libya and the northwestern portion of the country.
In addition to Tripoli, the following are among the largest and most important cities of Tripolitania: Misrata, Zawiya (near ancient Sabratha), Gharyan, Khoms (near ancient Leptis Magna), Tarhuna and Sirte.
History
Antiquity
The city of Oea, on the site of modern Tripoli, was founded by the Phoenicians in the 7th century BC. It was conquered for a short time by the Greek colonists of Cyrenaica, who were in turn displaced by the Punics of Carthage. The Roman Republic captured Tripolitania in 146 BC, and the area prospered during the Roman Empire period. The Latin name Regio Tripolitania dates to the 3rd century. The Vandals took over in 435, and were in turn supplanted by the counter offensive of the Byzantine Empire in the 530s, under the leadership of emperor Justinian the Great and his general Belisarius.
Middle Ages
In the 7th century, Tripolitania was conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate, and its successors, the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, inherited it.
The Fatimid Caliphate, founded by Isma'ili Muslims in 909 in Raqqada, Tunisia, ruled the area from Tunisia to Syria. In the 1140s, the Italo-Normans invaded Tripoli and created the brief Kingdom of Africa, which the Almohad Caliphate destroyed in 1156. Abu Zakariya Yahya, a vassal of the Almohads, established an independent state in Tunisia in 1229 and took control of Tripolitania shortly after. He founded the Hafsid dynasty, which controlled the region until the 16th century. During that century, wars between the Ottomans and the states ruled by the House of Habsburg repeatedly led to the region changing alliances, although the Hafsids continued to rule. Hafsid rule ended when the Ottoman Empire brought Abu Abdallah Muhammad VI ibn al-Hasan to Constantinople in 1574 and executed him.
Modern history
Ottoman Tripolitania (Ottoman Turkish: ایالت طرابلس غرب) extended beyond the region of Tripolitania proper, also including Cyrenaica. Tripolitania became effectively independent under the rulers of the Karamanli dynasty in 1711 until Ottoman control was re-imposed by Mahmud II in 1835. Ottoman rule persisted until the region was captured by Italy in the 1911–1912Italo-Turkish War. Italy officially granted autonomy after the war but gradually occupied the region.
After World War I, an Arab republic, Al-Jumhuriya al-Trabulsiya, or "Tripolitanian Republic", declared the independence of Tripolitania from Italian Libya. Its proclamation in autumn 1918 was followed by a formal declaration of independence at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which drafted the Treaty of Versailles. It was the first formally declared republican form of government in the Arab world, but it gained little support from international powers and had disintegrated by 1923. Italy, under the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, had managed to re-establish full control over Libya by 1930.
Originally administered as part of a single colony, Italian Tripolitania was a separate colony from 26 June 1927 to 3 December 1934, when it was merged into Libya. The Italian fascists constructed the Marble Arch as a form of an imperial triumphal arch at the border between Tripolitani and Cyrenaica near the coast.
Tripolitania experienced a huge development in the late 1930s, when the Italian Fourth Shore was created with the Province of Tripoli, with Tripoli as a modern "westernized" city. The Tripoli Province ("Provincia di Tripoli" in Italian) was established in 1937, with the official name being Commissariato Generale Provinciale di Tripoli. It was considered a province of the Kingdom of Italy and lasted until 1943.
During World War II, several back-and-forth campaigns with mobile armour vehicles ebbed and flowed across the North African coastal deserts between first Fascist Italians and the British, with the Italians joined by the Nazi Germans in 1941. Libya was finally occupied by the western Allies, with the British moving west from Egypt after their victory at El Alamein in October 1942 against German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps and the Americans and British from the west after landings in Operation Torch in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942. From 1942 and past the end of the war in 1945 to 1951, when Libya gained independence, Tripolitania and the region of Cyrenaica were administered by the British Military Administration. Italy formally renounced its claim upon the territory in 1947.
Tripolitania retained its status as a province in the Kingdom of Libya from 1951 to 1963, when it was replaced by a new system of governorates, which divided Tripolitania into the governorates of Khoms, Zawiya, Jabal al Gharbi, Misrata, and Tarabulus.
The Modern Latin missionary jurisdiction was called the Apostolic Vicariate of Tripolitana but was later renamed after its episcopal see, Benghazi. On 1 September 1969, a 27-year-old Muammar Gaddafi led a bloodless military coup as the "Libyan Revolution of 1969" that overthrew King Idris, abolishing the monarchy by declaring Libya a republic. Gaddafi's rise to power and his subsequent radical restructuring of Libya were centered on his unique political philosophy, which he detailed in The Green Book and implemented through a system known as the "Jamahiriya" ("state of the masses") as he rejects both capitalism and communism in favour of his "Third International Theory". The Jamahiriya was presented as a direct democracy governed through local popular councils and "people's congresses," though in practice, Gaddafi maintained absolute control over Libyan society. On 2 March 1977, Gaddafi officially proclaimed the "Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" or the "Libyan Arab Jamahiriya". In November that same year, Libya adopted a plain green flag with no designs, emblems, or other details. It was the only national flag in the world at that time to consist of just one colour. The green reflected Gaddafi’s political philosophy and the Islamic traditions. In 1986, Gaddafi renamed the country from the "Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" to the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.