Libya's Tripoli began as Phoenician Oyat by the sea
Libya's capital and largest city held about 3.246 million people in 2021 on the northwestern Mediterranean edge. Phoenicians founded it in the seventh century BC as Oyat before Greek Cyrenaica and later empires. Arabic speakers say Tripoli-of-the-West to spare confusion with Lebanon's Tripoli.
Phoenician colonists were probably drawn by a natural harbour guarded by a small peninsula that was easy to defend, and the Berber-style name Oyat hints that a native town already stood there. Greek rulers of Cyrenaica called it Oea, and Carthage later took it back. Rome annexed the coast in the 2nd century BC, and by around AD 200 the district was the Regio Tripolitana, the region of three cities: Oea, Sabratha and Leptis Magna. Only Oea survived antiquity as a living city. Because people never stopped living there, most Roman buildings were quarried or buried, leaving the 2nd-century Arch of Marcus Aurelius as the one clearly visible monument.
Arab armies under Amr ibn al-As took the city in 642–643; one account says seven soldiers found an unwalled stretch of beach, slipped inside and shouted until the Byzantine garrison fled to its ships. Spain seized Tripoli in 1510 and in 1530 handed it, along with Malta, to the Knights of St John, who built the core of the Red Castle. The Ottoman admiral Turgut Reis captured it in 1551 and is buried in the mosque he founded near the Bab Al-Bahr gate.
In 1711 the Janissary officer Ahmed Karamanli killed the Ottoman governor and founded a dynasty that ruled almost independently, living off piracy and tribute. When the pasha demanded more money from the United States in 1801, Thomas Jefferson sent warships, starting the First Barbary War. Tripolitan forces captured the frigate Philadelphia in 1803, and Stephen Decatur's night raid burned it the following year; peace in 1805 came with a $60,000 ransom for the crew.
Italy declared war on the Ottomans on 29 September 1911 and took the city, and by 1938 Tripoli had 108,240 inhabitants, 39,096 of them Italian. Today it is Libya's largest commercial and manufacturing centre and the home of the University of Tripoli. Arabic speakers fondly call it the bride of the sea, for its turquoise water and white buildings.
Source: Tripoli, Libya
