Constantine was Cirta before a Roman rebuild renamed it
Constantine, in northeastern Algeria, perches on a plateau 640 metres up, ringed by a deep ravine and stitched together by bridges. Home to about 450,000 people, or 938,475 counting its suburbs, it was ancient Cirta, rebuilt in 313 AD and renamed for Constantine the Great.
Cirta served as the seat of Numidia, a Berber realm. From 112 BC Jugurtha ruled from it after defeating his half-brother Adherbal, and Roman generals Metellus and Marius later used it as a base against him. Julius Caesar granted its citizens special rights around 46 BC. The city was wrecked in 311 during the war between Emperor Maxentius and the usurper Domitius Alexander, then rebuilt two years later. It exported wheat and was the only town on both paved Roman roads in what is now Algeria. Vandals took it in 432, Byzantium in 534, and after the Arab conquest in the eighth century it became Qacentina.
Under the Almohads and Hafsids it traded with Pisa, Genoa and Venice. The Ottomans took it in 1529, and Salah Bey, governor from 1770 to 1792, built much of the Islamic architecture still standing. The last bey, Ahmed, resisted the French until they captured the city on 13 October 1837. In 1880 Alphonse Laveran, working at the military hospital, spotted malaria parasites in a dead soldier's blood, the first proof that protozoa cause disease, and won the 1907 Nobel Prize. A 1934 pogrom killed 23 Jews and 3 Muslims, and Allied forces used the city as a base in 1942 and 1943.
Guy de Maupassant wrote that six of the eight bridges over the ravine lay in ruins. Today's include the Sidi M'Cid suspension bridge of 1912, Paul Séjourné's 27-arch Sidi Rached viaduct and the cable-stayed Salah Bey bridge of 2014, which is why Constantine is nicknamed the City of Bridges.
The Mentouri university campus was designed by Oscar Niemeyer. Algeria's third-largest city after Algiers and Oran, it was named Arab Capital of Culture in 2015.
Source: Constantine, Algeria
