The eighteenth century opened with a war between the Regencies of Tunis and Algiers, which was only put an end to by the Porte sending written orders to the belligerents to cease hostilities. The position of Dey had now fallen so low that the occupant of the post in 1701 had been formerly a coffee-house keeper. In the following May the Bey Mourad with his sons were massacred at the instigation of one of his officers while travelling to Beja. By a strange coincidence this tragedy occurred at Oued Zergua, destined nearly two centuries later to become the scene of the horrors of the 30th September 1881. In 1705 the last of the Deys was deposed by the Turkish soldiers, and they elected in his stead their most popular captain, Heussein Ben Ali, who assumed the title of Bey, and founded the dynasty which has ever since remained in possession of the Tunisian throne. CHAPTER VIII. THE BEYS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. The advent to power of Heussein Ben Ali and his dynasty wrought little or no change for the better in the condition of the country. The piracy of the Deys became the privateering of the Beys, and civil discord continued as rife as ever, with the sole difference that it was more or less confined to one family. Heussein Ben Ali himself was a renegade Greek from Candia, and although he is often styled El Turki, his descendants have very little Turkish or Arab blood in their veins. In 1708 the depredations of Tunisian corsairs caused a temporary suspension of political intercourse with France, which was only resumed after the execution of a favourable treaty two years later. M. Rousseau[24] says that about this time the relations between the French Consul-General and his English colleague became so strained that the former officially ordered the French laundress to refrain from washing Mr. Richard Lawrence’s[25] linen, and the French baker was forbidden to supply him with bread. A fresh treaty with England was negotiated in 1716, and in 1725 an envoy from the Porte obtained a convention for Austria.