lying areas in the nearby coastal plain. Benghazi later became a Roman city and prospered for 600 years. The city superseded Cyrene and Barca as the chief center of Cyrenaica after the 3rd century AD and during the Persianattacks; in 642-643, it had dwindled to an insignificant village among magnificent ruins.
Ottoman province
In the 13th century, the small settlement became an important player in the trade growing up between Genoese merchants and the tribes of the hinterland. In 16th century maps, the name of Marsa ibn Ghazi appears.
Benghazi had a strategic port location, one that was too useful to be ignored by the Ottomans. In 1578, the Turks invaded Benghazi and it was ruled from Tripoli by the Karamanlis from 1711 to 1835; it then passed under direct Ottoman rule until 1911. Under Ottoman rule, Benghazi was the most impoverished of the Ottoman provinces. It had neither a paved road nor telegraph service, and the harbor was too silted to permit the access of shipping. Greek and Italian sponge fishermen worked its coastal waters. In 1858, and again in 1874, Benghazi was devastated by bubonic plague.
Italian colonial rule
In 1911, Benghazi was invaded by the Italians. Nearly half the local population of Cyrenaica under the leadership of Omar Mukhtar resisted the Italian occupation. Cyrenaica suffered oppression, particularly under the fascist dictator Mussolini. About 125,000 Libyans were forced into concentration camps, about one-third of whom perished (mainly because of epidemics).
In the early 1930s, the revolt was over and the Italians�under governor Italo Balbo�started to assimilate the local population with friendly policies: many new villages for Cyrenaicans were created with health services and schools.
Additionally Cyrenaica was populated by more than 20,000 Italian colonists in the late 1930s, mainly around the coast of Benghazi. Benghazi population was made by more than 35 per cent of
