Ancient Suakin was likely
Ptolemy's Port of Good Hope, Limen Evangelis, which is similarly described as lying on a circular island at the end of a long inlet. Despite the town's formal submission to the
Mamluks in 1317,
O. G. S. Crawford believed that the city remained a center of
Christianity into the 13th century. Muslim immigrants such as the
Banu Kanz gradually transformed this:
Ibn Battuta records that in 1332, there was a Muslim "sultan" of Suakin, al-Sharif Zaid ibn-Abi Numayy ibn-'Ajlan, who was the son of a Meccan
sharif. Following the region's inheritance laws, he had inherited the local leadership from his Bejan maternal uncles. In the fifteenth century, Suakin was briefly part of the
Adal Sultanate. Suakin was sieged by the Portuguese in 1513 and
captured briefly in 1541.
Ottoman Following the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, the
Ottoman Empire became the major power in the
Red Sea. After a brief period of Ottoman-Portuguese struggles in the Red Sea,
Özdemir Pasha occupied Suakin in the early 1550s. Though it was only loosely controlled, until the Ottoman province of
Habesh was established in 1555 with the residence of its
pasha in Suakin. As the
Portuguese explorers discovered and perfected the sea route around Africa and the Ottomans were unable to stop this trade, the local merchants began to abandon the town. Some trade was kept up with the
Sultanate of Sennar, but by the early 19th century, the Swiss traveler
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt found two-thirds of the homes in ruins. After the defeat of the
Mahdist State, the British preferred to develop the new
Port Sudan, rather than engage in the extensive rebuilding and expansion that would have been necessary to make Suakin comparable. By 1922, the last of the British had left. On 17 January 2018, as part of a rapprochement with Sudan,
Turkey was granted a
99-year lease over Suakin island. Turkey plans to restore the ruined Ottoman port city on the island. On 12 June 2022, some 15,000 sheep drowned in the sinking of the
Badr 1 in the port of Suakin. ==Buildings of Suakin==