Almoravid Empire

From the Sahara

Drafted from Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (2016)formation

The Almoravids began among the Sanhaja Berber confederations of the western Sahara — veiled, camel-borne, and controlling the northern end of the gold routes out of the Sudan. A scholar named Abd Allah ibn Yasin was invited to teach them Maliki law in the 1040s and built a disciplined religious-military movement out of the result. The name is usually derived from ribat, the frontier fortress-monastery, though the etymology is disputed.

Under Yusuf ibn Tashfin they took Morocco, founded Marrakesh, and were then invited across the strait. The Cordoban caliphate had collapsed in 1031 into the taifa kingdoms — a few dozen small states, several of them paying tribute to Christian rulers to be left alone — and after Alfonso VI took Toledo in 1085 the taifa kings asked for help.

Yusuf beat Alfonso at Sagrajas in 1086, went home, came back, and then deposed the taifa kings one after another on the grounds that rulers who paid tribute to Christians and taxed Muslims illegally had forfeited their authority. He had a legal opinion from the jurists of Cordoba and one from Baghdad to that effect. Al-Andalus was governed from Marrakesh for the next sixty years.

He who shall live will see

Drafted from al-Makkari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain (1843)expansion

In 1086 the king of Seville sent across the strait for an army, and the army came. Al-Maqqari, compiling in the seventeenth century from Andalusi historians whose own books are lost, preserves a long account of what followed, and almost every detail in it is about a man taking the measure of another man.

Yusuf ibn Tashfin landed at Algeciras and marched to Seville in order, army after army, general after general, tribe after tribe. Al-Mu'tamid rode out with a hundred horsemen to meet him; a short way from the camp he put his horse to a gallop, the camp saw it and came out, and the two of them dismounted and embraced. Every king in al-Andalus either came to Seville himself or sent somebody to stand in for him. The Africans, says the account, saw enough of the splendour of royalty in that city to make them glad.

The camels

Ibn Khallikan, quoted in the same compilation, says Yusuf had camels shipped over in such numbers that the country was filled with them and their cries reached the sky. Nobody in al-Andalus had seen a camel. The horses would not stand it: the sight of one of the animals, or the sound of it, was enough to make a horse rear and throw its rider. Yusuf trained them to war and ringed his camp with them, and in the battle they broke up the Christian cavalry.

That is a Saharan army solving an Iberian problem with the one asset a Saharan army has, and it is a fair summary of why the crossing worked at all.

The letter

Alfonso VI wrote to Yusuf first — a letter composed for him, al-Maqqari says, by a Muslim traitor, full of abuse and of inflated figures for the forces and stores at his disposal. Yusuf gave it to his secretary Abu Bakr ibn al-Qusayra, a learned and elegant writer, who withdrew and came back with a long epistle full of rhetorical beauties. Yusuf had it read to him and said: that answer is too long, bring me Alfonso's letter. On the back of the letter he wrote six words.

He who shall live will see.

Before the battle he wrote once more, formally offering the three conditions the law prescribes — Islam, tribute, or the sword — and adding that Alfonso had once wished to come over to Africa and had regretted having no ships, and that his wish was now granted, since here they were.

Sagrajas

The armies met near Badajoz — al-Maqqari, his translator notes, neglects to give the date. Alfonso proposed, through al-Mu'tamid, that since Friday was the Muslim holy day and Sunday the Christian one, the battle should be fought on the Saturday between; al-Mu'tamid told Yusuf it was a lie and that the attack would come on Friday, and it did.

It came at the Andalusians, and by design. Al-Mu'tamid's scouts had crept close enough to the Christian camp to hear Alfonso explain his plan to his men: the king of Seville understands Andalusian warfare and the Africans do not, so the Africans are being guided by him, so break him first. They very nearly did. Al-Mu'tamid was surrounded, took a sabre cut through his helmet into his skull, another across his right hand and a spear in the thigh, had three horses killed under him, and in the middle of it thought of a sick child he had left behind in Seville and composed a verse about him. His own son gave way. He kept looking towards the African camp and no troops came.

They came at the end, and not to him. Yusuf had told a general to wait until al-Mu'tamid was fully engaged and then fall on Alfonso's camp and burn it. That is what won the day.

Five years later Yusuf deposed him.

The secretary in the middle

Drafted from Khallikan, Biographical Dictionary (1842)expansion

Yusuf ibn Tashufin conquered Morocco, founded Marrakesh, crossed into Spain at the invitation of its kings and took their kingdoms away from them, and he did not know Arabic.

Ibn Khallikan, writing two centuries later, went looking for the fullest account he could find and settled on a book whose author he could not name — only that the man began it in 1183 and finished it at Mosul in the same year. What he extracted from it is a story about translation.

How he got the job

The Almoravids came north out of the country next to the land of the Blacks against the Zanata Berbers, who could not resist them, and took everything from the gates of Tlemcen to the Atlantic. Their leader was Abu Bakr ibn Umar — a man, Ibn Khallikan's source says, accustomed to a simple life, virtuous in conduct, preferring his own country to the Maghreb and having no inclination for the luxuries of life.

Then somebody told him about an old woman.

He was informed that an old woman in his own country had a female camel stolen from her in a foray and begun to weep, exclaiming: "Abu Bakr ibn Umar has ruined us by entering into the land of Maghreb!"

He went back south, and left as his lieutenant in the Maghreb a man called Yusuf ibn Tashufin — brave, just and enterprising. Yusuf founded Marrakesh on a spot where robbers used to lie in ambush, which belonged to an old Masmuda woman.

The empire that took al-Andalus was handed over by a man who went home because a woman in the desert had lost a camel.

The letter

When the taifa kings learned that Yusuf meant to cross, they were frightened, and Ibn Khallikan's source is exact about the shape of the fear. They had been using his name for years to hold off the Christians — letting it be understood that they might ally with him whenever the Franks pressed too hard — while dreading that he might come and, on seeing their kingdoms, want them. They had heard what his men did in battle: that the best of them would cut a horseman in two with a single stroke and run several through with one lance.

So they wrote to him, and a Spanish secretary drafted it for them. It is a small masterpiece of the chancery art:

If you let us alone, your conduct will be attributed, not to weakness but to generosity, and if we obey your orders, our conduct will be attributed, not to helplessness but to prudence. We therefore prefer the attribution which is the more honourable for ourselves, hoping that you will prefer the attribution which is the more honourable for you. The place which you hold is one in which you should not let yourself be surpassed in noble acts.

What he was told it said

Yusuf did not know Arabic. His secretary, who had both languages, read it to him in Berber, and what he said was not what the letter said.

He told him it came from the kings of al-Andalus, that they offered profound respect, declared themselves partisans of his cause, and acknowledged his authority. Then he supplied, in the kings' voice, a speech they had not made: We are Muslims, come of a noble race; let us not therefore incur your displeasure. It is for us a sufficient misfortune to have close behind us a people of infidels. Our country is much straitened and cannot support numerous armies. Spare us therefore, as you have spared the people of Maghreb who acknowledged your authority.

The elaborate courtesy about attributions is gone. What is left is a frank statement of weakness, an admission of overlordship, and a plea — which is the version most likely to produce the answer the secretary wanted.

Yusuf asked him what he made of it, and got a lecture on kingship:

Every time that he bestows an ample gift, he increases his influence; increase of influence consolidates his dominion, and when his dominion is consolidated, people think it an honour to obey him; when obedience is felt to be an honour, the people come unto him, and he is not obliged to encounter fatigues for the purpose of reaching them, and he thus inherits the kingdom without ruining his happiness in the next life. Know that it was said by a great king: "He who bestows may command; he who commands may lead, and he who leads an army becomes master of the land."

Yusuf, hearing this in his own language, understood its import and felt its truth, and told him to draft the answer and read it back. The reply is four sentences of warm and entirely non-committal goodwill — as long as you hold to your engagements towards us, we shall hold to ours towards you — and it went off with a present of Lamtuna shields, which Ibn Khallikan pauses to explain are made only in one small town twenty days south of Sijilmasa and cannot be had anywhere else.

The kings of al-Andalus, on receiving it, were filled with love for Yusuf and extolled him highly, rejoiced at his friendship and at his having the Maghreb, and resolved among themselves that if the king of the Franks did anything to disquiet them, they would send for him.

What the arrangement was

Ibn Khallikan's source states it without embarrassment: It was thus that Yusuf, by the good management of his secretary, obtained that which he wished for, namely, the good-will of the people of al-Andalus; all that he wanted was an opportunity of making war in their defence.

The opportunity came. Alfonso overran the country, the taifa kings feared for their states, and al-Mu'tamid of Seville — who understood perfectly well what calling in the Berbers would cost, and said so — wrote the letter that brought the army across.

None of the correspondence that arranged it was read by the man it was addressed to. He heard it, in a different language, from an employee who knew what he wanted to hear.

The veil, and the city they had to build

Drafted from Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (2016)peak

A movement came out of the western Sahara with a social order the settled world found genuinely strange, and within thirty years was required to govern the two most urbane provinces in the western Islamic world.

The strangeness was literal and contemporaries fixed on it. The Sanhaja of the western Sahara were al-mulaththamun, the veiled ones: the men wore a face veil and the women did not, which is the inverse of the practice in the cities they came to rule and which Andalusi writers never stopped remarking on. Sanhaja women moved and spoke freely, held property, and appear in the sources as political figures — Zaynab al-Nafzawiyya, who married Yusuf ibn Tashfin, is credited by the chroniclers with a substantial hand in the movement's early politics and with the wealth that financed part of it.

The dynasty had no city, so it made one. Marrakesh was founded in the 1070s on the plain below the High Atlas, at the point where the routes from the Sahara reach the settled country — a garrison and a market rather than an inherited capital, in the way Baghdad and Cairo had been built to order before it. It has been a capital, on and off, ever since.

Then came al-Andalus, and the friction is the interesting part. The Almoravids deposed the taifa kings on a legal argument — that rulers who paid tribute to Christians and levied taxes the law did not permit had forfeited authority — and they governed with the Maliki jurists of Cordoba and Fez at their shoulder. That bought them legitimacy and cost them everything else. Andalusi poets and courtiers, whose taifa patrons had been generous and cultivated, found their new masters provincial; the jurists they deferred to were suspicious of speculative theology and had al-Ghazali's Ihya burned in Cordoba and Marrakesh.

Within two generations the desert movement had become an urban dynasty with a palace, an Andalusi chancery and a taste for the poetry it had arrived disapproving of — and had lost the discipline that had made a few thousand camel-borne Sanhaja able to take Morocco. That is the argument Ibn Tumart would make against them from the Atlas, and he was not wrong about the facts.

The gold road

Drafted from Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (2016)peak

The Almoravids began as a Saharan movement sitting on the northern end of the trans-Saharan gold routes, and the gold is why they could pay for the rest.

West African gold from Bambuk and Bure moved north by camel to Sijilmasa and Awdaghust and from there into the Mediterranean economy. Almoravid control of both termini — they took Awdaghust in 1054 and Sijilmasa in 1055, before they took Morocco — gave them a bullion supply that funded an army and produced a gold dinar of such reliability that it circulated in Christian Spain and was imitated there.

The southern end of the same system was the Sudanic empires — Ghana while the Almoravids were rising, Mali afterwards — and Mansa Musa's pilgrimage two and a half centuries later is the same gold moving up the same routes. The fiscal history of the Maghreb and the political history of the western Sudan are one subject, and nothing in either of them can be weighed without the other.

The dynasty's relationship with the scholars is worth a line. The Almoravids enforced Maliki law strictly, deferred to its jurists, and were denounced by the Almohads for exactly that — Ibn Tumart's charge was that a rigid attachment to legal texts, at the expense of theology, had produced rulers who described God in bodily terms. That is the doctrinal argument that ended them, and dynasties do not often fall to an objection of that kind.

The doctors, and the mountain

Drafted from Khaldun, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l'Afrique septentrionale (1852)contraction

Ibn Khaldun sets the beginning of the end at a hearing. Ali ibn Yusuf, the third Almoravid ruler, had governed fourteen years in unbroken good fortune when a preacher out of the Anti-Atlas became a nuisance — a man who had studied in the east, served for nothing as a legal consultant, and worked with extraordinary zeal at the reform of morals. It had not gone well for him: he had been roughly handled, Ibn Khaldun says, at Bougie, at Tlemcen and at Meknes.

Ali summoned him to Marrakesh and put him in a room with the Almoravid doctors of law. He argued with them, in Ibn Khaldun's phrase, and reduced them to silence. Then he left for his own tribe, the Hargha.

Ali changed his mind about him afterwards and sent men after him. The Hargha were told to hand their kinsman over and saw Almoravid troops behind the demand; instead they made an alliance with the Hintata and the people of Tinmallal, and all of them undertook to protect the Mahdi, to hold the true religion and to spread it.

That is a state losing an argument in its own capital and then losing three mountain confederations for the price of asking politely.

What the state was doing while that happened

Governing, competently, in the other direction. In the same years Ali crossed the strait himself and besieged Toledo, saw the Aragonese take Tudela, and lost Mallorca to a Christian fleet — Genoese, in Ibn Khaldun's account — and had it recovered for him by an Almoravid general, appointed his son Tashfin to the western half of al-Andalus with Cordoba and Seville for residences, gave the eastern half to a governor at Valencia whose minister was the philosopher Ibn Bajja, and handed Denia and the Balearic islands to a Massufa chief called Ibn Ghaniya.

None of it was foolish. All of it was the wrong problem. Two years after the Mahdi died his chief disciple Abd al-Mu'min took command under the terms of his will, the Masmuda tribes attacked Marrakesh again and again, and while the Lamtuna were being worn down in Spain the Almohad cause was being carried through the Maghreb to the other Berber peoples.

Oran

Ali died in the 1140s and his son Tashfin succeeded him with both shores hurrying to acknowledge him, at the moment when the Almohads had become formidable and were bent on his destruction. When Abd al-Mu'min took his army into the mountains, Tashfin followed on the flat below and reached Tlemcen. The Almohads camped in the gorge that opens between the Two Rocks of the mountain above the town and besieged him in it. A relief column sent by the lord of Bougie charged them out of enthusiasm, was cut to pieces, and lost its commander.

Tashfin got out to Oran, where he had arranged to meet his admiral and the fleet. The Almohads followed and stormed the town. He was killed there — or, Ibn Khaldun adds, by another account he disappeared and was not seen again. The Rawd al-Qirtas gives a third version: that he came out at night with his column to surprise the besiegers, was overwhelmed by their cavalry and infantry, turned to flee across what he took for level ground in the dark, and rode off a cliff above the sea by the ribat of Oran. His body was found on the shore the next morning and his head was cut off and sent to Tinmallal.

Three accounts, one man, one night. Marrakesh fell within the year.

Marrakesh, 1147

Drafted from Khaldun, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l'Afrique septentrionale (1852)end

The Almoravid state was destroyed by an argument about the nature of God, and the argument took about twenty-five years to arrive at the gate of the city that had been built to house it.

Ibn Tumart's charge was not that the Almoravids ruled badly. It was that their attachment to the letter of Maliki law and their suspicion of speculative theology had led them to read the anthropomorphic language of scripture literally, and so to describe God as having a body — which made them not lax Muslims but unbelievers, against whom war was lawful. Dynasties end by conquest, by fragmentation, by revolt and by the failure of a line. This one ended because somebody won a disputation about the divine attributes and then raised the mountains on the strength of it.

The last two

After Tashfin's death at Oran his son Ibrahim was proclaimed at Marrakesh. Ibn Khaldun disposes of him in a sentence: the weakness and incapacity of this prince brought about his deposition. In his place they put his uncle Ishaq, son of Ali and grandson of Yusuf ibn Tashfin — a boy, raised to a throne with an Almohad army finishing the last of the Maghreb outside.

When the army arrived, Ishaq came out to present himself before Abd al-Mu'min with his household and his favourites around him. The Almohads killed all of them in front of the conqueror.

Abd al-Mu'min crossed into Spain, and death closed on the Lamtuna from every side, and their commanders went down with them. It is the end of a family and of the tribal confederation that had carried it, in a city the family had founded seventy years earlier on empty ground because it had nowhere else to be.

The one that got away

A band of fugitives got out to the eastern islands — Mallorca, Menorca and Ibiza. They did not stay there quietly. Ibn Khaldun, writing two centuries later, still counts what they built afterwards in Ifriqiya as the Almoravid monarchy, which means the dynasty outlived its own destruction by eighty years.

The empire founded at Gabès

Drafted from Khaldun, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l'Afrique septentrionale (1852)afterlife

Ibn Khaldun gives the Almoravid remnant its own heading, and the heading is the argument: History of the empire founded at Gabès and Tripoli by Ibn Ghaniya, last representative of the Almoravid monarchy. A dynasty that lost its capital in 1147 is still being written up as a going concern in Ifriqiya two generations later.

Named after a woman

The family begins with a quarrel. Ali ibn Yusuf al-Massufi was one of the bravest and most influential chiefs of his tribe and stood high at the court of Yusuf ibn Tashfin, until he killed a Lamtuna chief in a dispute and had to run for the desert, leaving a war between the Massufa and the Lamtuna behind him. Some years later Yusuf paid the blood price out of his own treasury, which freed the man to come home, and then married him to a kinswoman of his own called Ghaniya, discharging a promise he had made to her father.

Their sons were brought up in the palace. Ali ibn Yusuf, the next ruler, gave one of them western al-Andalus at Cordoba and the other the Balearic islands. Shortly after that the empire fell down. The Banu Ghaniya still had the islands, and were known then and afterwards by the name of the woman the marriage had been made with rather than by the name of any of the men.

Thirty-two ships

Three of them ruled Mallorca in turn, and Ibn Khaldun records without deciding between them two accounts of how the third got it: that his brother died, or that he had his father and his brother both assassinated. When he died in the 1180s he left eight sons, and the eldest at once submitted to the Almohad caliph. His brothers thought otherwise. When the caliph's agent arrived at Mallorca to test how sincere the submission was, they deposed their eldest brother, installed the next one, stopped the agent leaving, and — on hearing that the Almohad caliph had been killed in battle and his son Ya'qub had succeeded him — threw him into the bottom of a prison.

Then Ali ibn Ishaq fitted out thirty-two ships, took three of his brothers, and sailed for Africa. They walked into Bougie in May 1185 without a fight, because nobody there had imagined they were coming. The Almohad prince commanding the city was away on an excursion. They arrested another Almohad prince who happened to be passing through on his way from Ifriqiya, and emptied the houses of the governing family.

What followed was twenty years of the most destructive campaigning in the Maghreb: Algiers, Miliana, the Qal'a of the Banu Hammad stormed in three days, Constantine besieged, and the whole thing financed by distributing the plunder to whatever Arab tribes would ride with them, who arrived, Ibn Khaldun says, with their tents, their flocks and their families. He is not neutral about them. He was a Hafsid official and the Hafsids inherited the wreckage.

What it means to end

The Almohads eventually put them down. But the dynasty that had been finished at Marrakesh in 1147 went on taking cities until the 1230s, from a base of three islands, under a name inherited through a marriage arranged to settle a homicide — and it was still being fought when the empire that destroyed it had itself begun to come apart.

An ending is a date somebody chose. It is worth asking, each time, what it is the date of.