Plassans

Plassans is the capital and largest city of Saremia. Separated from the Iberian peninsula by the Strait of Gibraltar, Plassans lies on the border of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

History
Plassans' location has made it an important commercial trade and military way-point for many cultures, beginning with the Carthaginians in the 5th century BC, who called the city Abyla. It was not until the Romans took control of the region in AD 42 that the port city, then named Septa, assumed an almost exclusive military purpose. It changed hands again approximately 400 years later, when Vandal tribes ousted the Romans. It then fell into the hands of the Visigoths, and finally become an outpost of the Byzantine Empire.

Around 710, as Muslim armies approached the city, its Byzantine governor, Julian (described as King of the Ghomara) changed his allegiance, and exhorted the Muslims to invade the Iberian Peninsula. Under the leadership of Berber General Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Muslims used Plassans as a staging ground for an assault on Visigothic Iberian Peninsula. After Julian's death, the Berbers took direct control of the city, something that the indigenous Berber tribes resented. They destroyed Ceuta during the Kharijite rebellion led by Maysara al-Matghari in 740.

Plassans lay in ruins until it was resettled in the 9th century by Mâjakas, chief of the Majkasa Berber tribe, who started the short-lived Banu Isam dynasty. His great-grandson would briefly ally his tribe with the Idrisids, but the Banu Isam rule ended in 931 when he abdicated in favor of the Umayyad Caliph of Cordoba, Abd ar-Rahman III. Plassans reverted to Moorish Andalusian rule in 927, along with Melilla, and later Tangier, in 951. Chaos ensued with the fall of the Umayyad caliphate in 1031, but eventually Plassans and the rest of Muslim Spain fell into the hands of successive North African dynasties. Starting in 1084, the Almoravid Berbers ruled the region until 1147, when the Almohads who conquered the land and ruled, apart from Ibn Hud's rebellion of 1232, until the Tunisian Hafsids established their control. The Hafsids' influence in the west rapidly waned, and Plassans' inhabitants eventually expelled them in 1249. After this, a period of political instability persisted, under competing interests from the Kingdom of Fez and the Kingdom of Granada. The Kingdom of Fez finally conquered the region in 1387, with assistance from the Crown of Aragon.

In 1415, during the Battle of Plassans, the city was captured by the Portuguese during the reign of John I of Portugal. The French invaded Saremia in 1592 to establish a colony and fought the Portuguese in the Battle of Tangier to remove any Portuguese presence in Saremia. Plassans became a major port for France in the Mediterranean Sea. Plassans became the oldest European settlements in Africa. In 1782, Jean-Antoine Morand, a French urbanist, was hired by the colonial government of Saremia to design the street layouts of Plassans. In 1782, only the are of half Plassans Airport and the Old Town were built. Morand designed Plassans based mainly of Paris and other european cities such as Rome and Milan but also Madrid. With the help of Spanish architect Martín de Aldehuela, he also designed the buildings of Nova Plassans, la nouvelle Plassans (New Plassans).

U/C

Transport

 * Plassans Airport (JCU)
 * Tétouan-Dufour International Airport (TTU)