Arabs take and destroy Carthage

After winning the Second Fitna, Abd al-Malik sent Hassan ibn al-Nu'man, a general of the Ghassanid tribe, to Ifriqiya with an army that the sources put at 40,000 — an unprecedented force for North Africa. Hassan made straight for Carthage. The city had long lost its ancient wealth but still had a Byzantine garrison; many of its inhabitants fled to Sicily and Spain, and he entered it without a siege in the mid-690s, then defeated the Byzantines and Berbers at Bizerte. In 697 Emperor Leontios sent a fleet under John the Patrician, which broke through the chain closing the harbour, overwhelmed the Arab garrison and recovered Carthage and the towns around it.

Hassan, who had been campaigning against the Berbers, returned with fresh troops sent by the caliph, and an Umayyad fleet was sent against the Byzantine one. John abandoned Carthage and withdrew by sea, and in 698 Hassan took the city and had it destroyed — its walls pulled down, its water supply cut and its harbours made unusable — so that the Byzantine navy could never again use it as a base. The retreating fleet mutinied in Crete and raised to the throne the officer Apsimar, who as Tiberius III replaced Leontios.

With Carthage fell the last great city of Roman Africa, for nearly a thousand years the capital of Punic, Roman, Vandal and Byzantine rulers, and the only provincial capital in the whole caliphate that the conquerors abandoned. Hassan founded the new city of Tunis nearby, with an arsenal where Coptic craftsmen from Egypt built warships; the ruins of Carthage served as a quarry, and centuries later its columns were still taken as far as Córdoba. After the defeat of the Berber queen al-Kahina, the Arabs completed the conquest of the Maghreb by 709.