On the western coast of Africa, opposite Sicily, is a peninsula, described by Strabo, whose circumference is three hundred and forty stadii, or forty-two miles. This peninsula advances into the sea between two gulfs, one of which, on the west, offers a commodious port; the other, on the south-east, communicates, by means of a canal, with a lake which extends three leagues into the land, and which modern geographers term the Gullet. It was upon this spot was built the great rival of Rome, whose site extended over the two shores of the sea. Neither the conquests of the Romans, nor the ravages of the Vandals, had been able to entirely destroy this once flourishing city; but in the seventh century, after being invaded and laid waste by the Saracens, it became nothing but a mass of ruins; a moderate-sized village upon the port, called Marsa, a tower on the point of the cape, a pretty strong castle on the hill of Byrsa,—these were all the remains of that city whose power so long dominated over the Mediterranean and the coasts of Africa and Asia. At five leagues’ distance, towards the south-east, a little beyond the gulf and the lake of the Gullet, arose a city, called in ancient times Tynis or Tunissa,[30] of which Scipio made himself master before he attacked Carthage. Tunis had thriven by the fall of other cities, and in the thirteenth century she vied in wealth and population with the most flourishing cities of Africa. It contained ten thousand houses, and had three extensive suburbs; the spoils of nations and the produce of an immense commerce had enriched it; and all that the art of fortification could invent had been employed to defend the access to it. The coast on which Tunis stood was the theatre of many revolutions, of which ancient history has transmitted accounts to us; but modern history has not, in the same manner, consecrated the revolutions of the Saracens. We can scarcely follow the march of the barbarians who planted the standard of Islamism upon so many ruins. All that we positively know is, that Tunis, for a long time united to the kingdom of Morocco, was separated from it under a warlike prince, whose third successor was reigning in the time of St. Louis.