History
The name's origin is attributed to the Carthaginian general Mago Barca, brother to Hannibal, who is thought to have taken refuge there in 205 BC. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it was part of the Byzantine Empire; it suffered raids from Viking and Arabs, until the Islamic Caliphate of Córdoba conquered it in 903.
Mahon was captured in 1287 from the Moors by Alfonso III of Aragon and incorporated into the Kingdom of Majorca, a vassal kingdom of the Kingdom of Aragon. Its harbour, one of the most strategically important in the western Mediterranean, was re-fortified.
In 1535, the Ottomans under Hayreddin Barbarossa attacked Mahon and took 6,000 captives as slaves back to Algiers, in the Sack of Mahon.
Read more about this topic: Port Mahon
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.”
—Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)