Under the empire, it served as a place of banishment for prominent persons and members of the imperial family. The town enjoyed municipal rights. In AD700, Arabs conquered the island. In 1123, Roger II of Sicily took the island, and in 1311 an Aragonese fleet under the command of Lluís de Requesens won a considerable victory here. Requesens's family became princes of Pantelleria until 1553, when the Turks captured the island. A naval battle took place near the island in July 1586 when an armed English merchant fleet of five ships managed to repel an attack by eleven Spanish and Maltese galleys. A Siculo-Arabic dialect similar to Maltese was the vernacular of the island until the late 18th century, when the Romance Sicilian superseded it. The modern Sicilian language in Pantelleria contains many Arabic loanwords, and most of the island's place names are of Semitic origin. During the Napoleonic Wars, the British considered the possibility of taking over Pantelleria (together with Lampedusa and Linosa) so as to be able to supply Malta, but a Royal Commission stated in an 1812 report that there would be considerable difficulties in this venture. Pantelleria's capture was regarded as crucial to Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943 as planes based on Pantelleria could readily reach Sicily. In Operation Corkscrew the Allies bombarded Pantelleria heavily from air and sea in the days before the invasion. The garrison surrendered as the landing troops approached. Pantelleria then became a vital base for Allied aircraft during the assault on Sicily. Archaeological sites A Middle Bronze Age village was on the west coast, southeast of the harbour, with a rampart of small blocks of lava, about high, wide at the base and at the top, upon the undefended eastern side. Remains of huts were found there, with pottery, tools of obsidian, and other artifacts. These objects are in the museum at Syracuse. To the southeast, in the district known as the Cunelie, are many tombs, known as sesi. They are similar in character to the nuraghe of Sardinia, though of smaller size, and consist of round or elliptical towers with sepulchral chambers in them, built of rough blocks of lava. Fifty-seven of them can still be traced. The largest is an ellipse of about , but most of the sesi have a diameter of only . The identical character of the pottery found in the sesi