Tunis

The great Hafsid capital of medieval North Africa, where Ibn Khaldun was born into a family of scholars and statesmen in 1332, the plague that killed his parents and teachers here would send him searching for patterns beneath history's chaos.

Tunis was the Hafsid capital, and Ibn Khaldun was born there in 1332 into a family that had come from Seville generations earlier and served every regime since. The Black Death reached the city in 1348 and killed his mother, his father, and most of his teachers within months. He spent the next forty years serving and falling out with North African courts, was imprisoned more than once, and finally shut himself in a castle to write the introduction to a universal history that outgrew the history entirely.