16th–19th Centuries: (The Ottoman Maghreb and Morocco — Spain and the Ottomans Competing for the Western Mediterranean, the Rise of Independent Morocco Under…

16th–19th Centuries: (The Ottoman Maghreb and Morocco — Spain and the Ottomans Competing for the Western Mediterranean, the Rise of Independent Morocco Under Ahmad al-Mansur, Autonomous Military Government in Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers, and the Nineteenth-Century Dismantling of Ottoman North Africa by European Conquest): One of the key sixteenth-century themes was the competition for control of the western Mediterranean between Christian Spain and the Ottoman empire. By the end of the fifteenth century Spain had expelled the last Muslims from the mainland and seized key North African ports, but these changed hands repeatedly as Ottoman forces attacked Christian shipping. Despite naval defeats at Lepanto in the 1570s, the Ottomans ultimately recaptured Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers, ensuring the Maghreb remained within the Islamic world until the age of European expansion. Yet Istanbul had little effective control — military government, benefiting from the lucrative trans-Saharan trade, developed autonomously in coastal towns. The western Maghreb witnessed the rise of independent Morocco in the first half of the sixteenth century, which halted Ottoman expansion into northwest Africa and expelled the Portuguese from their Atlantic ports. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman empire remained the most powerful Islamic state, yet the nineteenth century saw a gradual dismantling — Algeria fell to French settlement from 1830, Tunisia to France in 1881, Egypt to Britain in 1882, Libya to Italy in 1911, and Morocco to France and Spain in 1912. Ottoman rulers attempted reforms reducing Islam’s role in public life, undermining the ulama’s monopoly in education and justice, and introducing Western-style constitutions — producing a new intelligentsia championing Western values alongside growing hostility between Muslim traditionalists and secularizers.