The French subsequently founded Djibouti in 1888, in a previously uninhabited stretch of coast.  According to one account, this was due to "its superiority to Obok both in respect to harbour accommodation and in nearness to Harrar." Ambouli was a small village before the French arrived it was about  south of Ras Djiboutil, Ambouli is identifies the city with Canbala by O.G.S. Crawford. Canbala appears in Muhammad al-Idrisi's map of 1192 on the coast of the Horn of Africa, southeast of the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, and with Cambaleh, a town where the Venetian traveler Bragadino, a thirteenth-century European visitor to Ethiopia, resided for eight years. In 1896, the settlement was made the capital of French Somaliland.