Cyrenaica Cyrenaica Cyrenaica ( ; , , after the city of Cyrene; ) is the eastern coastal region of Libya. Also known as "Pentapolis" ("Five Cities") in antiquity, it formed part of the Roman province of Crete and Cyrenaica, later divided into "Libya Pentapolis" and "Libya Sicca". During the Islamic period, the area came to be known as "Barqa", after the city of Barca. Cyrenaica was the name of an administrative division of Italian Libya from 1927 until 1943, then under British military and civil administration from 1943 until 1951, and finally in the Kingdom of Libya from 1951 until 1963.
Byzantine Greeks by the Persians at the Battle of Antioch (613), and promises an eventual Byzantine ("Roman") victory. This traditional designation of the Byzantines as [Eastern] Romans in the Muslim world continued through the Middle Ages, leading to names such as the Sultanate of Rum ("Sultanate over the Romans") in conquered Anatolia and personal names such as Rumi, the mystical Persian poet who lived in formerly Byzantine Konya in the 1200s. Late medieval Arab geographers still saw the Byzantines as Rum (Romans) not as Greeks, for instance Ibn Battuta saw the, then collapsing, Rum as "pale continuators and successors of the ancient