Marseille is the second-largest city in France, located in the coastal Provence region along the Mediterranean Sea. Marseille was founded in 600 BC by Greek sailors from Phocaea, and it was known to the Ancient Greeks as Massalia and to the Romans as Massilia; the Roman Republic conquered Massalia in 49 BC after the Greek colonists sided with Pompey during Caesar's Civil War. Massilia remained a premier maritime trading hub even after its fall to the Visigoths in the 5th century AD, but it was sacked by Charles Martel's Frankish forces in 739 AD and went into decline. It enjoyed renewed prosperity as part of the County of Provence during the Middle Ages, but it was again sacked by the Aragonese in 1423. The city was rebuilt and refortified during the mid-15th century, and it hosted the combined Franco-Ottoman fleet during the Italian Wars of the 16th century. The city lost a significant portion of its population during a major plague outbreak in 1720, but its population recovered by 1750, and, in 1792, Parisian volunteers in the French Revolutionary Army Marseille sang a patriotic song (albeit one which was written in Strasbourg) which became known as La Marseillaise, now the national anthem of France. Marseille further expanded during the Industrial Revolution and the Second French Empire, but it was occupied by the German Wehrmacht in November 1942 and severely damaged during World War II. The city went on to become a center of immigration from France's former colonies, such as Algeria, and Marseille became a popular tourist destination. Marseille is known for its cultural diversity, not suffering from the same cultural segregation as other major French cities such as Paris, and thus being spared the violence of France's 2005 race riots. Greeks and Italians started arriving at the end of the 19th century (with Italians making up 40% of the population by the first half of the 20th century), followed by Russians in 1917, Armenians in 1915 and 1923, Vietnamese from the 1920s to 1970s, Corsicans during the 1920s and 1930s, Spaniards after 1936, North Africans during the Interwar period, sub-Saharan Africans after 1945, Maghrebi Jews from the 1950s to 1960s, French settlers from Algeria in 1962, Comorians (45,000 by 2006), and Romanians and Poles after 2013. In 2019, Marseille had a population of 870,731 people.
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