Carthage
(page 2; click here for page 1)
By the 300's BC, the North African port of Carthage was actively engaged in policing the whole Mediterranean. Carthage made treaties, for instance, with the Etruscans in Italy, to protect the Etruscans from piracy from the Greeks in southern Italy. Carthage fought constant wars with the Greeks in Sicily over who would control which parts of Sicily.
But by the 200's BC, Carthage got into a war with the growing Roman Empire. In the first of the Punic Wars, the Romans succeeded in taking all of Sicily away from Carthage. In the second Punic War, which ended in 202 BC, the Romans got control of Spain as well, and really reduced Carthage to a very weak country. In the third Punic War, in 146 BC, the Romans destroyed Carthage altogether, and took over control of North Africa.
Roman amphitheater at El Djem, Tunisia
For a hundred years, Carthage was very weak. But under Julius Caesar about 50 BC, and then under later Roman Emperors, Carthage was refounded as a Roman city, and North Africa became an important part of the Roman Empire, exporting wheat and olive oil and pottery all over the western half of the Roman Empire. This trade continued even through the 400's AD, when the Vandals conquered North Africa and set up their own kingdom there.
The Vandal kingdom was ended by an Eastern Roman reconquest of North Africa in the 530's AD, but trade declined until the Islamic invasions of North Africa in the 600's AD and the establishment of the Umayyad, and then the Fatimid dynasties. Under Islamic rule, North Africa became part of a large trading network again. Carthage was abandoned in favor of the new Islamic cities of Tunis and Mahdia. At the same time, improvements in camel caravans made it possible to maintain trade routes across the Sahara to Ghana and Mali, which became important for the gold, salt, and slave trades.
Islamic fort at Monastir, Tunisia
By the 1100's, North Africa was independent again under the Almohad dynasty, and then about 1200 AD it broke up into even smaller kingdoms, corresponding roughly to the modern countries, under the Hafsids in the east (modern Libya and Tunisia), the 'Abd al-Wadids in the middle (modern Algeria), and the Marinids in the west (modern Morocco). All of these countries traded a lot with Italian cities like Genoa and Pisa and Venice. By the 1500's, however, the growing Ottoman Empire conquered these kingdoms, and pretty much all of North Africa was part of the Ottoman Empire.
To find out more about North Africa, buy some of these books from Amazon.com, or find them at your library:
Umm
El Madayan: An Islamic City Through the Ages
by Abderrahman Ayoub, Jamila Binous, Abderrazak Gragueb (1994)
Hannibal (First Book) by Robert Green (1997)
The Young Carthaginian by G. A. Henty (1860's, reprinted 2001) This is a good adventure story that can introduce kids to the wars between Rome and Carthage, but because it was written more than 100 years ago, it has some racist and unfair assumptions about the Romans being better people than the Carthaginians - watch out!
The Late Roman West and the Vandals by Frank M. Clover (not a kids' book) (1993)
