History of Benghazi
Libya's second largest city, Benghazi, has a history that dates back to the Greek colony of Euesperides founded in the 6th century BCE.
An inscription found in modern Benghazi and dated around the middle of the 4th century BC, shows that the city had a similar constitution to that of Cyrene, with a board of chief magistrates (ephors) and a council of elders (gerontes).
Euesperides was saved by the chance arrival of Spartan general Gylippus and his fleet, who were blown to Libya by contrary winds on their way to Sicily.
to attract new settlers to Euesperides, where Arcesilaus hoped to create a safe refuge for himself against the resentment of his own people in Cyrene.
This proved totally ineffective, since when the King fled to Euesperides during the anticipated revolution (around 440 BC), he was assassinated, thus terminating the almost two hundred year rule of the Battiad dynasty.
Later in the 4th century BC, during the unsettling period which followed Alexander's death, the Euesperides backed the losing side in a revolt led by the Spartan adventurer Thibron; he was trying to create an empire for himself, but was defeated by the Cyreneans and their Libyan allies.
After the marriage of Ptolemy III to Berenice, daughter of the Cyrenean Governor Magas, around the middle of the 3rd century, many Cyrenaican cities were renamed to mark the occasion.
Its desertion was probably due to the silting up of the lagoons; Berenice, the place they moved to, lies underneath Benghazi's modern city centre.
Berenice prospered for most of its 600 years as a Roman city; it even superseded Cyrene and Barca as the chief center of Cyrenaica after the 3rd century AD.
There was a brief period of repair when the Eastern Roman Empire took control of Berenice in the 6th century and the city came under the rule of Justinian I.
Byzantine rule was deeply unpopular, not least because taxes were increased dramatically in order to pay for military upkeep, while Berenice and other cities were left to decay.
[11] In the year 642, the Treaty of Alexandria was concluded between 'Amr ibn al-'As and the Patriarch Cyrus, the last Byzantine governor of Egypt, ratifying the conquest of his territory by the Arabs.
Cyrenaica suffered ruthless oppression, particularly under the fascist dictator Mussolini; about 125,000 Libyans were forced into concentration camps, about two-thirds of whom perished.
Benghazi grew as an administrative and commercial centre, and by the start of World War II was home to about 22,000 Italians.
[13] Heavily bombed in World War II, Benghazi was later rebuilt with the country's newly found oil wealth as a gleaming showpiece of modern Libya.
President Ronald Reagan justified the attacks by claiming Libya was responsible for terrorism directed at the USA, including the bombing of La Belle discotheque in West Berlin ten days before.
In February 2011 Benghazi was the scene of protests again the Gaddafi-led government, which caused numerous killings by paramilitary internal security forces and commando teams, and the burning down of the houses of those suspected of anti-Gaddafi regime sympathies.
[citation needed] Beginning in late February 2011, Benghazi was no longer under control of the government in Tripoli, but was under the National Transitional Council of Libya.
The outbreak of the second Libyan Civil War in 2014 also saw heavy fighting in and around Benghazi between the Libyan National Army-aligned House of Representatives government, and the Islamist Shura Council of Benghazi Revolutionaries (which have become entrenched in the central coastal quarters of Suq Al-Hout and al-Sabri) and the ISIL-aligned Wilayat Barqa; Suq Al-Hout and al-Sabri would subsequently suffer intensified bombardment and war damage by the LNA during the closing months of the battle between late-2016 and mid-2017.
