The Almohade Empire soon began to decay, and in 1336 Abil Zakariya, prince of Tunis, was able to proclaim himself inde pendent and found a dynasty, which subsisted till the advent of the Turks. The Hafsites (so called from Abu Hafs, the ancestor of Abu Zakariya, a Berber chieftain who had been one of the intimate disciples of the Almohade mandi) assumed the title of Prince of the Faithful, a dignity which was acknowledged even at Mecca, when in the days of Mostansir, the second Hafsite, the fall of Bagdad left Islam without a titular head. In its best days the empire of the Haf sites extended from Tlemcen to Trip oli, and they received homage from the Merinids of Fez ; they held their own against repeated Frankish invasions, of which the most notable were that which cost St. Louis of France his life (1270), and that of the duke of Bourbon (1390), when Eng lish troops took part in the unsuccessful siege of Mandia. They adorned Tunis with mosques, schools and other institutions, favoured letters, and in general appear to have risen above the usual level of Muslim sovereigns. But their rule was troubled by continual wars and insurrections; the support of the Beduin Arabs was imperfectly secured by pensions which formed a heavy burden on the finances of the state; and in later times the dynasty was weakened by family dissensions. Leo Africanus, writing early in the 16th century, gives a favourable picture of the "great city" of Tunis, which had a flourishing manufacture of fine cloth, a prosperous colony of Christian traders, and, in cluding the suburbs, nine or ten thousand hearths.
The conquest of Algiers by the Turks gave a dangerous neighbour to Tunisia, and after the death of Mohammed the Hafsite in 1525 a disputed succession supplied Khairad-Din Barbarossa with a pretext for occupying the city in the name of the sultan of Constantinople. Al-Hasan, the son of Mohammed, sought help from the emperor, and was restored in 1535 as a Spanish vassal, by a force which Charles V. commanded in person, while Andrea Doria was admiral of the fleet. But the conquest was far from complete, and was never consolidated. The Spaniards remained at Goletta and made it a strong fortress, they also occupied the island of Jerba and some points on the south-east coast ; but the interior was a prey to anarchy and civil war, until in 1570 'Ali-Pasha of Algiers utterly defeated Harnid, the son and successor of Al-Hasan and occupied Tunis. In 1573 the Turks again retreated on the approach of Don Juan, who had dreams of making himself king of Tunis; but this success was not followed up, and in the next year Sultan Selim II. sent a strong expedition which drove the Spaniards from Tunis and Goletta, and reduced the country to a Turkish province. Nevertheless the Spanish occupation left a deep impression on the coast of Tunis, and not a few Spanish words passed into Tunisian Arabic.
After the Turkish conquest, the civil administration was placed under a pasha ; but in a few years a military revolution trans ferred the supreme power to a Dey elected by the janissaries, who formed the army of occupation. The government of the Deys lasted till 1705, but was soon narrowed or overshadowed by the authority of the Beys, whose proper function was to manage the tribes and collect tribute. From 1631 to 1702 the
office of Bey was hereditary in the descendants of Murad, a Cor sican renegade, and their rivalry with the Deys and internal dis sensions kept the country in constant disorder. Ibrahim, the last of the Deys (1702-05), destroyed the house of Mufad, and ab sorbed the beyship in his own office; but, when he fell in battle with the Algerians, Hussein b. 'Ali, the son of a Cretan renegade, was proclaimed sovereign by the troops under the title of "Bey," and, being a prince of energy and ability, was able to establish the hereditary sovereignty, which has lasted without change of dynasty to the present time.
Frequent wars with Algiers form the chief incidents in the internal history of Tunisia under the Beys. Under Deys and Beys alike Tunisia was essentially a pirate state. Oc casionally acts of chastisement, of which the bombardment of Porto Farina by Blake in 1655 was the most notable, and re peated treaties, extorted by European powers, checked from time to time, but did not put an end to, the habitual piracies, on which indeed the public revenue of Tunis was mainly dependent. The powers were generally less concerned for the captives than for the acquisition of trading privileges, and the Beys took advan tage of the commercial rivalry of England and France to play off the one power against the other. The release of all Christian slaves was not effected till after the bombardment of Algiers ; and the definite abandonment of piracy may be dated from the pre sentation to the Bey in 1819 of a collective note of the powers as sembled at Aix-la-Chapelle. The government had not elasticity enough to adapt itself to so profound a change in its ancient tra ditions ; the finances became more and more hopelessly embar rassed, in spite of ruinous taxation; and attempts at European in novations in the court and army made matters only worse, so long as no attempt was made to improve the internal condition of the country. In the third quarter of the 19th century not more than a tenth part of the fertile land was under cultivation, and the yearly charge on the public debt exceeded the whole annual revenue. In these circumstances only the rivalry of the European powers that had interests in Tunisia protracted from year to year the inevi table revolution. The French began to regard the dominions of the Bey as a natural adjunct to Algeria, but after the Crimean War Turkish rights over the regency of Tunis were revived. After the Franco-German War the embarrassed Bey turned towards Great Britain for advice, and a British protectorate—suggested by the proximity of Malta—was not an impossibility under the remarkable influence of the celebrated Sir Richard Wood, Brit ish diplomatic agent at the court of Tunis from 1855 to 1879. The railways, lighthouses, gas and waterworks and other conces sions and industries were placed in British hands. But in 1878, at the Congress of Berlin, Lord Salisbury agreed to allow France a "free hand" in Tunisia in return for French acquiescence in the British lease of Cyprus.