Ancient 's 1st African map, showing Roman
Mauretania Tingitana Tangier was founded as a
Phoenician
colony, possibly as early as the 10th centuryBCE and almost certainly by the 8th centuryBCE. The majority of
Berber tombs around Tangier had
Punic jewelry by the 6th centuryBCE, speaking to abundant trade by that time. The
Carthaginians developed it as an important port of
their empire by the 5th centuryBCE. The gigantic skeleton and tomb of Antaeus were tourist attractions for ancient visitors. and Mauretania as far east as
Calama. When Boniface learned that he and the empress had been manipulated against each other by
Aetius, he attempted to compel the Vandals to return to Spain but was instead defeated at Calama in 431. The Vandals lost control of Tingis and the rest of Mauretania in various Berber uprisings. Tingis was reconquered by
Belisarius, the general of the
Byzantine emperor
JustinianI, in 533 as part of the
Vandalic War.
Count Julian of
Ceuta supposedly led the last defences of Tangier against the
Muslim invasion of North Africa.
Medieval romance made his betrayal of
Christendom a personal vendetta against the
Visigoth king
Roderic over the honour of his daughter, but Tangier at last fell to a siege by the forces of
Musa bin Nusayr sometime between 707 and 711. While he moved south through central Morocco, he had his deputy at Tangier
Tariq ibn Zayid, Musa's
mawla launch the beginning of the
Muslim invasion of Spain.
Uqba ibn Nafi was frequently but erroneously credited with Tangier's conquest by medieval historians, but only owing to Musa's later commission at the hands of
Al-Walid I. Under the
Umayyads, Tangier served as the capital of the Moroccan district (
Maghreb al-Aqsa In the area around Tangier, these hateful taxes were mostly paid in female slaves or in tender
lambskins obtained by beating the ewes to induce
premature birth. In the
Battle of the Nobles on the city's outskirts a few months later, Maysara's replacement
Khalid ibn Hamid massacred the cream of Arab nobility in North Africa. An enraged
Caliph Hisham ordered an attack from a second army "whose beginning is where they are and whose end is where I am," but this army was
defeated at Bagdoura the next year. The Barghawata were concentrated further south on the Atlantic coast, and area around Tangier fell into chaos until 785. The
Shia Arab refugee
Idris arrived at Tangier before moving further south, marrying into local tribes around
Moulay Idriss and assembling an army that, among
its other conquests, took Tangier . During the division of the sultanate that occurred on the death of
IdrisII, Tangier fell to his son
Qasim in 829. It was soon taken by Qasim's brother
Umar, who ruled it until his death in 835. Umar's son
Ali became sultan (r.874–883), as did Qasim's son
Yahya after him (r.880–904), but they governed from
Fez. The
Fatimid caliph
Abdullah al-Madhi began interfering in Morocco in the early 10th century, prompting
the Umayyad emir of Cordova to proclaim himself caliph and to begin supporting proxies against his rivals. He helped the
Maghrawa Berbers overrun
Melilla in 927,
Ceuta in 931, and Tangier in 949. Tangier's governor was subsequently named chief over Cordova's Moroccan possessions and allies.
Ali ibn Hammud, named Cordova's governor for Ceuta in 1013, took advantage of the realm's civil wars to conquer Tangier and
Málaga before overrunning Cordova itself and proclaiming himself caliph in 1016. His Barghawata ally Rizḳ Allāh was then permitted to rule from Tangier with general autonomy.
Yusuf ibn Tashfin captured Tangier for the
Almoravids in 1077. It fell to
Abd al-Mumin's
Almohads in the 1147, and then flourished under his dynasty, with its port highly active. Like Ceuta, Tangier did not initially acknowledge the
Marinids after the fall of the Almohads. Instead, the local chief
Yusuf ibn Muhammad pledged himself to the
Hafsids in Tunisia and then to the
Abbasids in the east before being killed in 665 (late 1266 or early 1267).
Abu Yusuf Yaqub compelled Tangier's allegiance with a three months' siege in 1274. The next century was an obscure time of rebellions and difficulties for the city. During this time, the traveler
Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier in 1304, leaving home at 20 for the
hajj.
Piracy from Tangier and
Salé began to harass shipping in the
strait and
North Atlantic in the late 14thcentury. Tangier was always a major goal. They
failed to capture it in 1437, 1458, and 1464, but occupied it unopposed on 28 August 1471 after its garrison fled upon learning of the
conquest of Asilah. As in Ceuta, they converted its chief mosque into the town's cathedral church; it was further embellished by several restorations during the town's occupation. In addition to the cathedral, the Portuguese raised European-style houses and
Franciscan and
Dominican chapels and monasteries. A squadron under the admiral and ambassador
Edward Montagu arrived in November.
English Tangier, fully occupied in January 1662, was praised by Charles as "a jewell of immense value in the royal
diadem" Khadir Ghaïlan hoped to support a pretender against the new
Alawid sultan
Al-Rashid and things subsequently went so badly for him that he was obliged to abide by its terms until his death in 1673. The English took advantage of the respite to improve greatly the Portuguese defences. They also planned to improve the harbour by building a
mole, which would have allowed it to play the same role that Gibraltar later played in British naval strategy. Incompetence, waste and outright fraud and embezzlement caused costs to swell; among those enriched was
Samuel Pepys. The mole cost
£340,000 and reached long before its destruction. Although funding was found for the fortifications, the garrison's pay was delayed until in December 1677 it was 2 years in arrears;
Governor Fairborne dealt with the ensuing
mutiny by seizing one of the soldier's
muskets and killing him with it on the spot. A
determined siege by
Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco between 1678 and 1680 was unsuccessful, but longstanding exasperation with the colony's finances pushed Parliament to write off the effort in 1680. At the time, Tangier's population consisted of only about 700 apart from the thousand-man garrison;
Governor Kirke estimated 400 of them had suffered
gonorrhea from the same "mighty pretty" sex worker. In 1821,
Slimane of Morocco gifted an urban mansion to the
United States, now the
Tangier American Legation Museum, which thus became the first piece of foreign property owned by the US government. In 1828,
Great Britain blockaded the port in retaliation for
piracy. As part of
its ongoing conquest of neighbouring
Algeria,
France declared the
Franco-Moroccan War over Moroccan tolerance of
Emir Abdelkader. Tangier was bombarded by the French under the
Prince of Joinville on 6 August 1844. The Tangier fortifications sustained little damaged and were later repaired by English engineers. The French victory in the
Battle of Isly near the
disputed border ended the conflict on French terms. The Italian revolutionary
Giuseppe Garibaldi lived in Tangier during his
exile starting in 1849, following the fall of the revolutionary
Roman Republic. Tangier's geographic location made it a centre of
European diplomatic and commercial rivalry in Morocco in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the 1870s, it was the site of every foreign embassy and consul in Morocco but only held about 400 foreign residents out of a total population of around 20,000. The city increasingly came under French influence, and it was here in 1905 that
Kaiser Wilhelm II triggered
an international crisis that almost led to war between his country and France by pronouncing himself in favour of Morocco's continued independence, with an eye to its future acquisition by the
German Empire. The
Algeciras Conference which ended the standoff left Tangier's
police training and
customs collections in international hands but Britain's strong support of its "
Entente Cordiale" with France ended German hopes concerning Morocco. Improved harbour facilities were completed in 1907, with an inner and outer
mole. In 1905 the first Moroccan newspaper,
Lisan al-Maghrib ("The Voice of Morocco"), was established in Tangier on the order of Sultan
Abdelaziz, partly with the aim of counteracting the views expressed by ''al-Sa'adah'', an Arabic newspaper established in 1904 or 1905 by the French embassy in the city. It later became more notorious for publishing reformist ideas and views critical of the sultan. In the years leading up to the
First World War, Tangier had a population of about 40,000, about half Muslim, a quarter
Jewish, and a quarter European Christians. Of the Europeans, about three-quarters were artisans and labourers from
Spain. In 1912, the
Treaty of Fes established the
French protectorate over most of Morocco and
Spanish rule in the country's far south and north, but left Tangier's status for further determination.
Hubert Lyautey persuaded the last Sultan of independent Morocco,
Abdelhafid, to abdicate in exchange for the receipt of a massive pension. Abdelhafid planned to live in Tangier where he used part of his pension to build an opulent mansion west of the old city, the
Abdelhafid Palace, completed in 1914. The complex was later purchased by Italian interests and is now also known as the "Palace of Italian Institutions" (). The
standard-gauge Franco-Spanish
Tangier–Fez Railway () was constructed from 1919 to 1927. The
Tangier International Zone was created under the joint administration of France, Spain and the
United Kingdom by an international convention signed in Paris on 18 December 1923. Ratifications were exchanged in Paris on 14 May 1924, and the convention was registered in
League of Nations Treaty Series on 13 September 1924. It was amended by a protocol of July 1928 to elevate the status of Italy, an idea put forth by
Sir Austen Chamberlain of Great Britain. The European powers' creation of the statute of Tangier promoted the formation of a cosmopolitan society where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together with reciprocal respect and tolerance. A town where men and women, with many different political and ideological tendencies, found refuge, including Spaniards from the right or from the left, Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and Moroccan dissidents. With very liberal economic and fiscal laws, Tangier became – in an international environment full of restrictions, prohibitions and monopolies – a tax haven with absolute freedom of trade. The International Zone of Tangier had a area and, by the mid-1930s, a population of about 50,000 inhabitants: 30,000 Muslims; 12,000 Jews; and 8,000-odd Europeans, with a decreasing proportion of working-class Spaniards. At its peak in the 1940s, there were 22,000 Jews in Tangier. Spanish troops occupied Tangier on 14 June 1940, the same day
Paris fell to the Germans. Despite calls by Spanish nationalists to annex "''''", the
Franco regime publicly considered the occupation a temporary
wartime measure. A diplomatic dispute between Britain and Spain over the latter's abolition of the city's international institutions in November 1940 led to a further guarantee of British rights and a Spanish promise not to fortify the area. The territory was restored to its pre-war status on October 11, 1945.
Moroccan independence The Tangier International Zone played an important role in the campaign for Moroccan independence. Because of its legal status as an international zone, activists were able to meet in Tangier, relatively protected from the French and Spanish authorities. In July 1952 the protecting powers met at
Rabat to discuss the International Zone's future, agreeing to abolish it. Tangier joined with the rest of Morocco following the restoration of full sovereignty in 1956. At the time of the handover, Tangier had a population of around 40,000 Muslims; 31,000 Christians; and 15,000 Jews. File:Planta de Tanger, Leonardo de Ferrari, 1655.jpg|Leonardo de Ferrari's plan of the
Portuguese fortifications at Tangier, c.1655. File:The land of the Moors; a comprehensive description (1901) (14780828702).jpg|
Hollar's landscape of Tanger at the beginning of
its English occupation File:Baedeker's Spain and Portugal- Tangier (1901).jpg|Tangier c.1901 File:Editorial cartoon about the Perdicaris Incident.jpg|A 1904
editorial cartoon illustrating the
gunboat diplomacy involved in resolving the
Perdicaris Incident. File:ETH-BIB-Sicht_auf_Tanger-Nordafrikaflug_1932-LBS_MH02-13-0452.tif|Aerial view of Tangier in 1932 File:Tangier Zone txu-oclc-6949452-ni30-1.jpg|Tangier and
its mid-20th-century international zone ==Geography==