Ceuta's location has made it an important commercial trade and military way-point for many cultures, beginning with the Carthaginiansin the 5th century BC, who called the city Abyla. It was not until the Romans took control of the region in AD 42 that the port city, then named Septa, assumed an almost exclusive military purpose. It changed hands again approximately 400 years later, when Vandaltribes ousted the Romans. It then fell into the hands of the Visigoths, and finally become anoutpost of the Byzantine Empire.
Around 710, as Muslim armies approached the city, its Byzantine governor, Julian (described as King of the Ghomara) changed his allegiance, and exhorted the Muslims to invade the Iberian Peninsula. Under the leadership ofBerber General Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Muslims used Ceuta as a staging ground for an assault on Visigothic Iberian Peninsula. After Julian's death, the Berbers took direct control of the city, something that the indigenous Berber tribes resented. They destroyed Ceuta during the Kharijite rebellion led by Maysara al-Matghari in 740.
Ceuta lay in ruins until it was resettled in the 9th century by Mâjakas, chief of the Majkasa Berber tribe, who started the short-lived Banu Isam dynasty. His great-grandson would briefly ally his tribe with the Idrisids, but the Banu Isam rule ended in 931 when he abdicated in favor of the Umayyad Caliph of Cordoba, Abd ar-Rahman III. Ceuta reverted to Moorish Andalusian rule in 927, along with Melilla, and later Tangier, in 951.
Chaos ensued with the fall of the Umayyad caliphate in 1031, but eventually Ceuta and the rest of Muslim Spain fell into the hands of successive North African dynasties. Starting in 1084, the Almoravid Berbers ruled the region until 1147, when the Almohads who conquered the land and ruled, apart from Ibn Hud's rebellion of 1232, until the
