In 1546, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500–1558) commissioned a series of twelve tapestries to commemorate his successful 1535 campaign against the Ottoman forces under the great admiral, Khair al-Din (‘Barbarossa’), in the North African trading city of Tunis. Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen, a court painter who had accompanied Charles V to Tunis, created the cartoons for the tapestries, many of them from sketches that Vermeyen made during his travels. The colossal tapestries were then woven in the workshop of Willem de Pannemaker, one of the preeminent tapestry weavers in Brussels. Mary of Hungary, the sister of Charles V, took charge of the contractual arrangements for the tapestries, specifying in her 1548 agreement with Willem de Pannemaker that the tapestries would be woven using silk from Granada and gold- and silver-wrapped threads, as directed by Charles V.

Charles V intended the tapestry cycle of the Conquest of Tunis to be a celebratory commemoration of his victory over the Ottoman forces of Sultan Suleiman I (1494–1566) and the re-installation of Charles V's vassal, King Mulay Hasan, in Tunis. As triumphal tapestries, the series joined the earlier 1531 Battle of Pavia tapestry series, commissioned to commemorate Charles V's 1525 victory over the French in Pavia in northern Italy. The defeat signaled the end of French ambitions in Italy and the tapestry series, completed just six years after the battle, constituted the first major tapestry depiction of a contemporary event.