#darnah

Darnah (درنة‎) is a port city in Eastern Libya, pop: 80,000. It was the seat of one of the wealthiest provinces in the Barbary States and has a unique environment among Libyan cities, as it lies between green mountains, the Mediterranean, and the desert. The city is home to people of mixed origins. Darnis and Darne were the Greek and Roman names for the city. In the Hellenistic period the ancient city was part of the Libyan Pentapolis. Under Rome, it became a civil and later the religious metropolis of Libya Secunda. It was a metropolitan titular archbishopric in the former Roman province of Libya, in the diocese of Egypt. The city was resettled by Islamic refugees from Spain (Al-Andalus) in 1493 on the site of the ancient settlement. Under Ottoman rule, it was under the governor at Tripoli, but shortly after 1711 it fell under the Karamanli Sultanate, until 1835 when it became a dependency of the autonomous sanjak of Benghazi, essentially Cyrenaica, which was governed directly from Constantinople (Turkey). The French admiral Gantheaume landed at Derna in 1800 in an attempt to reinforce Napoleon in Egypt by bringing troops overland, but was rebuffed by the local garrison. Derna was the location of the 1805 Battle of Derne, in which forces under U.S. General William Eaton - who had marched 800 km across the Libyan Desert from Alexandria - captured the city as part of the First Barbary War.