Henry III assumed the throne in the middle of the Punic War.
 Carthage had grown to be the largest and most powerful of these city-states by the 5th century BCE and gained increasingly close control over Punic Sicily and Sardinia in the 4th century BCE, but communities in Iberia remained outside their control until the second half of the 3rd century BCE
 Their language, Punic, was a dialect of Phoenician, one of the Northwest Semitic languages originating in the Levant

