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From 1835, until the events narrated in this chapter, Turkey held an internationally recognised suzerain power over that portion of the North African Coast line and interior roughly designated as Tripoli which at various periods in the world's history has been claimed by the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Spaniards, Arabs, and the Knights of St. John. It was wrested from the latter by the Turks in the middle of the 16th century.

Tripoli is inhabited by a population of agriculturists and herdsmen, mostly nomadic in character owing to the scarcity of water. The bulk of it is Berber, Arabs coming second in number. There is, too, a large sprinkling of Negroes from West Central Africa, whose presence is due, in part to the old trans-desert Slave trade, and in part to the still existing but now much reduced trans-desert trade, with Northern Nigeria particularly, in ostrich feathers, gold and skins. Many thousands of Berbers and Arabs from Algeria fled into Tripoli to escape French rule. The phenomenon was repeated when the French occupied Tunis in 1881. Amongst these immigrants was the Algerian Sheikh, Senussi-el-Mejahiri, who founded the famous religious fraternity which bears his name, and which gradually spread all over the country, uniting Berber and Arab in a common spiritual bond. The Senussi were most numerous and influential in the province of Barca (Cyrenaica), the eastern promontory of the Tripolitan territory, whose seaport is Benghasi, near the supposed site of the Garden of the Hesperides. Although the founder himself successively moved his headquarters into regions more and more remote from contact with Europeans, the influence of the Order was paramount in Cyrenaica. The Turkish Governors of the Province recognised it themselves, and at Benghasi the dispensation of civic justice, which in all Mohammedan communities is based upon the Koran, was entrusted not