Béjaïa is a Mediterranean port city on the Gulf of Bougie, at the mouth of the Soummam valley in the Lesser Kabylia of eastern Algeria. The Roman foundation Saldae preceded the medieval Berber city, and the modern Tamazight name Bgayet preserves a continuity of place that survives the colonial Bougie.
The city was the capital of the Sanhaja Hammadid dynasty from 1090, when al-Nasir ibn al-Mansur transferred the seat from the Qal'a of the Beni Hammad in the interior, until the Almohad takeover of 1152. Under the Hammadids, Béjaïa was a major commercial hub of the central Mediterranean, exporting wax, hides, and grain to Italy and Catalonia and importing the Andalusi silver that gave the European medieval coinage its name (the bougie candle, the Italian baiocco coin).
The young Pisan merchant Leonardo Fibonacci learned Arabic numerals at Béjaïa in the 1180s, and his Liber Abaci of 1202 is conventionally said to have introduced the decimal positional system to Europe. The medieval Hafsids of Tunis succeeded the Almohads here from 1230 to the Spanish capture of 1510 and the Ottoman recapture of 1555.
Béjaïa is the regional capital of Lesser Kabylia. The Soummam valley to its south was the meeting place in 1956 of the Soummam Congress of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, the first systematic codification of independence-war strategy.