The Master Was Away

The first thing the Karamanli Family did after returning to Tripoli with the thousands of Egyptian craftsmen Franz had given them was announce that they were severing all ties with the United States.

Under their finest leader, Yusuf Karamanli, the Karamanli Family had once subdued the Tuareg tribes to the west, defeated the Bedouin people to the east, and brought the southern desert tribes under their sway. Their domain had already grown to encompass nearly all of what was now Libya.

Yusuf Karamanli had built schools and workshops, learned advanced techniques from the West, and taken advantage of Europe's great wars to make a fortune reselling supplies. He had also actively developed commerce and established a fleet of merchant ships.

Just as the Kingdom of Tripoli was flourishing, the Americans discovered that war profiteering really was a lucrative business.

The Americans had easily doubled their territory during the Napoleonic Wars. I won't get into the specifics, or this will turn into a history lesson.

In short, Tripoli just happened to catch the Americans' eye.

Washington promptly appointed William Eaton, the US consul in Tunis, commander of its naval fleet and decided to offer the Berbers of Africa a little help.

Like overthrowing the Tripoli government and establishing a pro-American regime, for example.

They soon found a scapegoat: Pasha Yusuf's brother. When the US Army occupied Port of Derna, the Tripolitan Civil War officially began.

But the US Army of that era was truly awful. Fighting the native Africans, they found that they were the ones taking heavier losses, and that it took one and a half American soldiers to kill a single Tripolitan native.

In the end, amid a chorus of condemnation back home, Washington had no choice but to pay reparations and withdraw its troops. But the civil war