By the 12th century, Tongans and the Tongan monarch, the Tuʻi Tonga, had acquired a reputation across the central Pacific—from Niue, Samoa, Rotuma, Wallis & Futuna, New Caledonia to Tikopia—leading some historians to speak of there having been a Tuʻi Tonga Empire during that period. There are also known to have been civil wars in Tonga in the 15th and 17th centuries.