Cyrenese Revolution (Napoleon's World)

The Cyrenese Revolution was a popular and violent revolution in the summer of 1907 in the Duchy of Bengasi, which caused the ruling class of Italian and German-speaking Hapsburgs to flee the country in droves and resulted in an estimated 500,000 deaths, making it one of the most bloody uprisings in history. The revolution, which began as a series of riots in major European strongholds such as Bengasi, Misrata, Tripoli and Saba, soon erupted into a full-scale civil war, with the sheer numbers of Arab rebels eventually overpowering the European-descendant but African-born Bengasiens.

Europeans remaining in the country following the seizure of Bengasi and the torching of much of the city by rebel forces in late September were summarily executed in what has been deemed by forty-seven world governments retroactively as a war crime and as genocide. The bulk of the aristocratic ruling regime fled to Italy, while thousands of Bengasiens remained to die or flee to Egypt and Algeria.

The revolution, after three violent years of fighting between different tribes, brought the Emirate of Cyrene to power. The title of Emir would switch hands, almost always with violence, nineteen times until the formation of the unstable Republic of Cyrene in 1968, which itself would undergo various coups and civil conflicts.