Marinid Sultanate

A dynasty without a doctrine

Drafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)formation

The two dynasties before this one in the Maghreb had programmes. The Almoravids came out of the Sahara enforcing Maliki law and deposed rulers by legal opinion; the Almohads came out of the Atlas behind a mahdi and declared their opponents unbelievers. Each of them ruled on a claim about God.

The Marinids had nothing of the kind, and that is the first thing to say about them.

They were Zenata Berbers, pastoralists from the country near Biskra who moved west into Morocco in the early thirteenth century under pressure from Arab bedouin migration. They began as a nomad confederation raiding a collapsing Almohad state, took Fez in 1248 and Marrakesh in 1269, and at no point produced a religious claim of their own. There was no mahdi, no new reading of the law, no charge of unbelief against their predecessors. They simply took the country because it was available.

That left them with a problem the previous two dynasties did not have, and the next chapter is their answer to it. What a ruler in the thirteenth-century Maghreb needed was a reason for the scholars and the towns to accept him, and the Marinids could not claim to be more Islamic than anybody. So they argued instead that they were a correct government: Maliki, orthodox, deferential to the jurists, and — this is the part that shows — willing to spend enormous sums on institutions of learning.

So the honest answer to what entitled a Marinid to rule Morocco is: he held it. Very few medieval dynasties anywhere were willing to rest on that, and almost none of them lasted. What the Marinids had was the country, and what they did was govern it in a way the religious establishment could endorse without having to believe anything unusual.

Bought, and ridden for

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

The Marinids took Morocco over about twenty-five years, and Ibn Khaldun's account of the two decisive acquisitions is a study in method. One was bought. The other was reached in a day.

Sijilmasa, 1253

Sijilmasa was the northern terminus of the western gold road and the reason anyone in the Maghreb was rich. The Almohads still held it, with an officer of their own in command.

Abu Yahya went south in 1253 intending to take Sijilmasa, the Draa and the country round them. He succeeded in corrupting a man inside, was handed the Almohad commander, and got possession of the town. He subdued the Draa with the rest of the southern region and gave his son the government of it. When the Almohad caliph sent an army the following year to take it back, the general got as far as hearing that Abu Yahya and his son were coming to meet him, and hurried back to Marrakesh.

Four years later Yaghmurasan of Tlemcen listened to some people inside Sijilmasa who wanted a change and marched on the town hoping to seize it. Abu Yahya set off with his troops at once and entered Sijilmasa on the morning of the very day Yaghmurasan appeared before it. It was with extreme chagrin, Ibn Khaldun writes, that the emir of Tlemcen gave up the hope of taking the place, where he found his adversary already installed.

Two attempts on the same town, seven years apart, both defeated by arriving first.

Salé, 1260

The other acquisition is a warning about what came with the coast.

A rebellious nephew of the sultan's had recovered Salé for himself and wanted arms to hold it against his uncle, so he contracted with European merchants for a supply. In 1260 the port filled so thoroughly with their ships that the number of sailors exceeded the number of townspeople.

The opportunity was too good to pass up. At the end of Ramadan, while the whole city was celebrating the feast that breaks the fast, the crews took the town, carried off the women and put everything to the sack. The nephew shut himself in the ribat across the river and sent a courier to the sultan.

Abu Yusuf was at Taza, watching Yaghmurasan. He gathered his fighting men, rode at a full gallop, and was under the walls of Salé within twenty-four hours. Volunteers and paid troops came in from every side; he besieged the town for fourteen days, carried it by assault, and killed every one of the raiders his men could reach.

Then he ordered the breach in the western wall through which they had entered to be closed with masonry — and, to deserve more of the divine favour, worked at it with his own hands.

What the two stories have in common

Neither is a battle. One is a bribe and a forced march; the other is a rescue of a city that had sold itself the means of its own sack. Both are about speed, and both are about the two things the Marinids had understood before anyone else in Morocco: that the country was held from the roads, and that the coast was now a place where somebody else's ships could decide matters.

Three centuries later Portuguese ships were doing at Safi exactly what those merchants did at Salé, and no Moroccan sultan rode fast enough.

What they built instead

Drafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)peak

The Marinid answer to having no doctrine was the madrasa, and they built them in numbers nobody in the Maghreb had before.

The Saffarin at Fez in 1271, then the Attarin, the Sahrij, the Misbahiyya, the Bou Inaniya at Fez and another at Meknes — a programme of foundations running through the whole dynasty, each endowed with property to fund teachers and lodge students, each carrying an inscription naming the sultan who paid for it. They are among the most elaborately decorated buildings in the western Islamic world: carved plaster, cedar, zellij tilework, and a courtyard plan that became the standard Moroccan form.

The reasoning is legible and the sources make it explicit. A madrasa produces scholars and judges; scholars and judges staff the legal system; a dynasty that trains, houses and employs the religious establishment does not need to argue with it. It is also a way of reaching past the tribes to the towns. Nizam al-Mulk had done the same thing two centuries earlier and three thousand miles east, for the same reason and with the same instrument; the Almohads had instead made their own doctrine the qualification for office. The Marinids took the Seljuk approach rather than the Almohad one, because the Almohad one was not available to them.

They also patronised the Qarawiyyin, founded at Fez in 859 and never more prestigious than under their sponsorship. And they built for themselves at Chellah outside Rabat — a walled necropolis on a Roman site, with a mosque, a minaret and the tombs of the sultans, which is what a dynasty with no sacred ancestry does about wanting a sacred place.

The people who passed through are the measure of it. Ibn Battuta was a Moroccan of this generation who returned to a Marinid court and dictated his travels to a secretary the sultan provided. Ibn Khaldun served the Marinids at Fez among his other employers and wrote about them at length — including the judgement, from someone who had worked for them, that a dynasty which rests on paid loyalty rather than solidarity is already in its third generation.

The book they paid a secretary for

Drafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)aside?What aside means

Ibn Battuta was born at Tangier in 1304, left in 1325 to make the pilgrimage, and came back in 1354 having been away for twenty-nine years. What he had done in the interval is the largest documented journey of the pre-modern world: the Hijaz, Iraq, Persia, Yemen, East Africa as far as Kilwa, Anatolia, the Golden Horde, Constantinople, Central Asia, India — where he was a judge for the Delhi Sultanate for several years — the Maldives, Ceylon, Bengal, Sumatra, China, and on the way home the Black Death at Damascus. Afterwards he crossed the Sahara to Mali, and came back again.

The sultan Abu Inan had him dictate it. A young Andalusi man of letters at the Marinid court, Ibn Juzayy, was assigned to take it down and worked it into literary form, finishing in 1356. Without that commission there would be no book: Ibn Battuta had no manuscript, had lost his notes in the Indian Ocean, and was working from memory thirty years on.

That commission is why the book belongs in a history of this dynasty. The Rihla is not a Marinid achievement in any ordinary sense — the dynasty did not make the journey and does not appear in most of it. What the dynasty did was recognise that a man who had seen the Islamic world end to end was worth an official scribe and a year of his time — which is the same posture that produced the madrasas, and which cost about as much as a week of the war with Tlemcen.

The book that resulted is one of the most useful narrative sources for the whole fourteenth century. It is a first-hand description, by one observer with consistent interests, of the Delhi Sultanate, the Golden Horde, the Mali empire, the Anatolian beyliks, Mamluk Egypt and Yuan China, at a moment when most of those are otherwise known only from their own chanceries. Where the chronicles tell us what rulers claimed, Ibn Battuta tells us what the roads were like, who fed travellers, what a judge in the Maldives was paid, and how the Mali court seated its officials.

None of it is the sort of thing a dynasty gets credit for. A hundred dinars for a secretary bought the best single window anyone has onto the century, and it was spent by a government that could not otherwise explain why it should be obeyed.

The list of kings

Drafted from Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Batuta (1829)aside?What aside means

The Marinids paid a secretary for a year to take down Ibn Battuta's travels. What they got for the money is visible in a single paragraph near the end, where the most travelled man alive describes arriving home.

He reached Fez in the autumn of 1349 — twenty-four years out from Tangier, and with the Sahara crossing and Mali still ahead of him — presented himself to the reigning sultan, and was honoured by a sight of him. Then this:

The awe that surrounded him made me forget that of the King of Iraq; his elegance, that of the Emperor of India; his politeness, that of the King of Yemen; his bravery, that of the King of the Turks; his mildness, that of the Emperor of Constantinople; his religious carriage, that of the Emperor of Turkistan; his knowledge, that of the King of Sumatra.

Seven sovereigns, named in order, each outdone in the quality he was famous for by Abu Inan of Fez. It is the most efficient piece of flattery in medieval travel writing, and it works because the man delivering it had actually stood in front of all seven. Nobody else in the world could have written that sentence, and the sultan who commissioned the book had bought exactly the ability to write it.

Then the traveller closes the account:

In Fez, too, I terminated my travels, after I had assured myself that it is the most beautiful of countries.

What the transaction was

This is what a court commission produces, and it is worth being precise about what that does and does not damage.

Abu Inan did not get a true comparative assessment of the rulers of the fourteenth-century world. He got a testimonial, from an unimpeachable source, placing him at the top of a list he could not otherwise have appeared on at all. The Marinids had no religious doctrine of their own, no descent from the Prophet, and no claim to the Almohad caliphate they had replaced. What they had was money and Fez, and they spent both on the things that confer standing — madrasas with the founder's name in the plaster, a chronicle, a library, and a traveller.

What the commission also produced, incidentally, is the most useful narrative source for the fourteenth century anywhere between Morocco and China. The flattery cost a paragraph. The rest of the book is Delhi, Kilwa, the Maldives, the Black Death at Damascus and the road to Mali, and it exists because a Marinid sultan wanted a compliment.

Gibraltar

Before settling down he went to see his father's tomb at Tangier, then to Ceuta, and then, it occurred to me that I should take pleasure in the warfare for the faith, so he crossed to Gibraltar.

His description of it is the other Marinid claim, stated the way the dynasty wanted it stated. The rock is one of the greatest refuges of Islam and the place where Tariq ibn Ziyad landed, from which it takes its name; a despicable foe had held it for about twenty years until our Lord the Sultan Abu'l-Hasan reduced him, sent his son with an army, won completely, rebuilt the fortifications and stored it with cavalry, treasure and engines. This was one of his good deeds, the effects of which still remain.

That is the whole of the Marinid case for existing: not descent and not doctrine, but that they were the people paying for the defence of Islam in Spain. Ibn Battuta says it in the voice of a man who had been away since 1325 and had every reason to be impressed by whoever was in front of him.

He then spent some days with the scholars of the garrison, one of whom was his own cousin, and went home.

One year of the whole Maghreb

Drafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)contraction

Abu al-Hasan, who ruled from 1331, came closer than anyone since the Almohads to putting North Africa back together, and the attempt destroyed his dynasty in about eight years.

The sequence is quick. He took Tlemcen from the Zayyanids in 1337, which gave him the central Maghreb. He crossed into Spain to support Granada and was destroyed at Rio Salado in 1340 by a Castilian and Portuguese army — after which no North African power ever again intervened seriously in Iberia — and lost Algeciras four years later. Then in 1347 he took Ifriqiya from the Hafsids, and for something under a year he was master of the Maghreb from the Atlantic towards Tripoli.

In 1348 an Arab tribal revolt broke his army near Kairouan. The Black Death arrived in the same year. His son Abu Inan declared himself sultan at Fez while his father was still alive and still in Ifriqiya; Abu al-Hasan came back, fought him, lost, and died in the Atlas in 1351. Abu Inan then tried the same eastern campaign himself, got as far as Tunis, and was strangled by his own vizier in 1358.

Two things this leaves.

The first is that nobody tried again. The Maghreb had been one polity under the Almohads and was one for less than a year under Abu al-Hasan, and after 1358 the three-way division into Morocco, Tlemcen and Tunis was permanent — the shape North Africa has kept, in outline, ever since.

The second is what the failure did to Fez. After Abu Inan the sultans were mostly children or nonentities and the government was run by viziers and by the Wattasid family, who were Marinid kinsmen and became hereditary regents. The dynasty lasted another century in that condition. Portugal took Ceuta in 1415 and kept it, which is the first European foothold in North Africa; Castile had taken Tetouan in 1399. A dynasty that had crossed the strait to intervene in Spain eighty years earlier was being landed on.

In 1465 a rising in Fez killed the last Marinid sultan. Nobody conquered Morocco that year; the people who ended up with the state were the people who had already been running it for forty years.

A great citizen of Fez

Drafted from Africanus, The History and Description of Africa (1896)end

The dynasty ended in a city riot, and the most compact account of it is four lines in Leo Africanus, written by a man who grew up in Fez two generations afterwards and had it from the people who remembered.

Esserif a great citizen of Fez, hauing slaine Habdulac the last king of the Marin-familie, was by the fauour of the people aduanced vnto the Fessan kingdome.

That is the whole of it. In 1465 a notable of the city killed the reigning sultan and the population made him ruler.

Why a citizen could do that

By that year the sultans had been ornamental for a century. After the failure of the eastern campaigns the throne mostly held children, the Wattasid kinsmen of the family ran the government as hereditary regents, and the effective authority in Morocco was divided between the regency, the Arab tribes and the towns.

Fez had one thing the sultan did not: a reason for people to obey it. The sharifian families — the descendants of the Prophet through Idris, whose shrine stands in the middle of the city — were the recognised aristocracy of the place, and the man Leo calls Esserif was one of them. When a government that ruled on possession alone was seen to be losing possession, the city transferred its allegiance to the credential it already respected.

What happened next was not stability

The sharif did not keep it. A Wattasid whom Leo calls Saic Abra, pricked forward with ambition, went about to conquer Fez and make himself king; he was beaten and put to flight to his great disgrace, and then returned while the sharif's best counsellor was away pacifying Temesna, besieged New Fez for a whole year with eight thousand men, took it by the treason of the townsmen, and compelled the sharif and his whole family to flee to Tunis.

So the sequence is: a dynasty with no doctrine is killed by a man with the best doctrine in Morocco, who is then thrown out by the regents the dynasty had been carrying. Seven years of that, and the family that had actually been governing since 1420 was on the throne under its own name.

The bill for the whole century

Leo puts the two things in the same sentence, and the juxtaposition is the point. In the same season that the Wattasid was besieging Fez, the king of Portugal sent a fleet and took Arzila. Among the prisoners carried to Lisbon was a boy of seven, the son of the man who would be sultan, along with his sister.

He spent seven years in Portugal and learned the language exactly. His father ransomed him for a great sum. When he came to the throne he was known as Muhammad the Portuguese.

A dynasty that had crossed the strait four times to fight in Spain ended with its successor's heir being brought up as a Portuguese hostage, and nobody in Fez that year was in a position to think about it.

The account book, and what happened to the endowment

Drafted from Africanus, The History and Description of Africa (1896)afterlife

The Marinids answered their lack of a doctrine by building colleges. A hundred and fifty years after the dynasty ended, a man who had grown up in Fez walked through them and wrote down what he found.

What was still standing

Leo Africanus counted two most stately colleges and a number of others, some holding a hundred study-rooms, some more and some fewer, all built by various kings of the Marinid family. The finest was the one Abu Inan put up. He describes it in detail because it deserved it: a marble fountain with a cistern of two pipes; a little stream running through in a channel edged with marble and Majorcan tile; three cloisters on eight-sided pillars of different colours, the arches between them overcast with gold and azure, the wooden roof elaborately worked; sides built close enough that nobody outside can see who is walking within; brass gates carved, wooden doors made by hand; and in the chapel a pulpit nine steps high, the steps of ivory and ebony.

On the walls, in very large black letters that can be read from a distance, verses giving the year the college was built and epigrams in praise of the founder.

Forty thousand ducats, and then four hundred and eighty thousand

Leo repeats the story that was told about the cost. Having finished it, the king wanted to know what he had spent. He read a leaf or two of the account book, found the sum of forty thousand ducats, tore it up and threw it into the little river running through the courtyard, quoting an Arabic saying:

Each pretious and amiable thing, though it costeth deere, yet if it be beautifull, it cannot choose but be good cheape: neither is any thing of too high a price, which pleaseth a mans affection.

A treasurer, Leo adds, later made a particular account of the whole expense and found the building had cost his master four hundred and eighty thousand.

That is a dynasty's argument for itself in a single anecdote — the gesture of not counting, and the clerk who counted anyway.

The prize for the best poem on the Prophet's birthday

The other thing that goes when an endowment goes is the occasion.

Every year on the Prophet's birthday the poets of Fez went early in the morning to the chief judge's palace, climbed onto his tribunal and read their verses to a crowd, and the man whose verses were judged best was proclaimed prince of the poets for the year. When the Marinids prospered, Leo says, they used to invite all the learned men of the city to the palace instead, entertain them honourably, and have each recite; and the one everyone thought the best poet was given a hundred ducats, an excellent horse, a slave woman, and the robes the king was wearing at the time. Everyone else got fifty ducats, so that nobody went away without the king's liberality.

Then Leo dates the end of it, and dates the rest with it: an hundred and thirtie yeeres are expired since this custome, together with the maiestie of the Fessan kingdome, decaied.

The part that did not survive

The buildings are the least of what a madrasa is. What makes one work is the endowment: property settled on it in perpetuity, whose rents pay the professors and keep the students.

In times past, Leo writes, the students of these colleges had their clothing and their food found for them for seven years. By his own day they had nothing free but their chamber. The wars had destroyed many of the possessions by which learning was maintained, so that the greatest college of them all had two hundred ducats a year for its professors and the second had one hundred.

Then he draws the conclusion himself, and it is the harshest sentence in his book about his own country: this perhaps may be one reason, among many, why the gouernment not onely of Fez, but of all the cities in Africa, is so base.

The colleges, he says, were now furnished with no scholars except strangers living on the alms of the city; if any citizens lived there at all, not above two or three.

What the Marinids actually left

Not the scholarship, which was already going in the 1510s. Not the dynasty. Not the empire, which lasted under a year.

What they left was the frame. They were the first rulers, Leo says, who ever called Fez a kingdom — before them it was a city with a governor, and after them Morocco has been a kingdom ruled from a capital that expects to be one. They left the courtyard madrasa as the standard Moroccan building. They left the Qarawiyyin at a level of prestige it had not had before their patronage and has not lost. And they left a walled necropolis at Chellah, on a Roman site outside Rabat, where a family with no sacred ancestry had arranged to be buried in a sacred place.

Everything on that list is an institution rather than a claim. It was a dynasty that could not tell anyone why it should be obeyed, and it dealt with the problem by building things that were useful whoever obeyed whom.