page_title: History of Málaga
hierarchical_section_title: History of Málaga
caption_attribution_description: English: 'Malaga, Augt 14th 1857' [Spain].
context_page_description: The history of Málaga, shaped by the city's location in southern Spain on the western shore of the Mediterranean Sea, spans about 2,800 years, making it one of the oldest cities in the world. The first inhabitants to settle the site may have been the Bastetani, an ancient Iberian tribe. The Phoenicians founded their colony of Malaka about 770 BC. From the 6th century BC, it was under the hegemony of Carthage in present-day Tunisia. From 218 BC, Malaca was ruled by the Roman Republic; it was federated with the Roman Empire at the end of the 1st century during the reign of Domitian. Thereafter it was governed under its own municipal code, the Lex Flavia Malacitana, which granted free-born persons the privileges of Roman citizenship.
  The decline of the Roman imperial power in the 5th century led to invasions of Hispania Baetica by Germanic peoples, who were opposed by the Byzantine Empire. In Visigothic Spain, the Byzantines took Malaca and other cities on the southeastern coast and founded the new province of Spania in 552.
context_section_description: The history of Málaga, shaped by the city's location in southern Spain on the western shore of the Mediterranean Sea, spans about 2,800 years, making it one of the oldest cities in the world. The first inhabitants to settle the site may have been the Bastetani, an ancient Iberian tribe. The Phoenicians founded their colony of Malaka (Punic: 𐤌𐤋𐤊𐤀 MLKʾ) (Greek: Μάλακα, Málaka) about 770 BC. From the 6th century BC, it was under the hegemony of Carthage in present-day Tunisia. From 218 BC, Malaca was ruled by the Roman Republic; it was federated with the Roman Empire at the end of the 1st century during the reign of Domitian. Thereafter it was governed under its own municipal code, the Lex Flavia Malacitana, which granted free-born persons the privileges of Roman citizenship.
  The decline of the Roman imperial power in the 5th century led to invasions of Hispania Baetica by Germanic peoples, who were opposed by the Byzantine Empire. In Visigothic Spain, the Byzantines took Malaca and other cities on the southeastern coast and founded the new province of Spania in 552. Malaca became one of the principal cities of the short-lived Byzantine Provincia Spaniae, which lasted until 624, when the Byzantines were expelled from the Iberian peninsula. After the Muslim conquest of Spain (711–718), the city, then known as Mālaqah (Arabic: مالقة‎), was encircled by walls, next to which Genoese and Jewish merchants settled in their own quarters. In 1026 it became the capital of the Taifa of Málaga, an independent Muslim kingdom ruled by the Hammudid dynasty in the Caliphate of Córdoba, which existed for four distinct time-periods: from 1026 to 1057, from 1073 to 1090, from 1145 to 1153 and from 1229 to 1239, when it was finally conquered by the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada.
  The siege of Mālaqa by Isabella and Ferdinand in 1487 was one of the longest of the Reconquista. The Muslim population was punished for its resistance by enslavement or death. Under Castillian domination, churches and convents were built outside the walls to unite the Christians and encourage the formation of new neighbourhoods. In the 16th century, the city entered a period of slow decline, exacerbated by epidemics of disease, several successive poor food crops, floods, and earthquakes.
  With the advent of the 18th century the city began to recover some of its former prosperity. For much of the 19th century, Málaga was one of the most rebellious cities of the country, contributing decisively to the triumph of Spanish liberalism. Although this was a time of general political, economic and social crisis in Málaga, the city was a pioneer of the Industrial Revolution on the Iberian peninsula, becoming the first industrialised city in Spain. This began the ascendancy of powerful Málagan bourgeois families, some of them gaining influence in national politics. In the last third of the century, during the short regime of the First Spanish Republic, the social upheavals of the Cantonal Revolution of 1873 culminated in the proclamation of the Canton of Málaga on 22 July 1873. Málaga political life then was characterised by a radical and extremist tone. The federal republican (republicanismo federal) movement gained strong support among the working classes and encouraged insurrection, producing great alarm among the affluent.
  A new decline of the city began in 1880. The economic crisis of 1893 forced the closing of the La Constancia iron foundry and was accompanied by the collapse of the sugar industry and the spread of the phylloxera blight, which devastated the vineyards surrounding Málaga. The early 20th century was a period of economic readjustment that produced a progressive industrial dismantling and fluctuating development of commerce. Economic depression, social unrest and political repression made it possible for petite bourgeois republicanism and the labor movement to consolidate their positions.
  In 1933, during the Second Spanish Republic, Málaga elected the first deputy of the Communist Party of Spain, or Partido Comunista de España (PCE). In February 1937 the nationalist
caption: Málaga, by Edward Gennys Fanshawe, 1857
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