Midrarid Emirate of Sijilmasa

The northern end of the road

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

Every account of the trans-Saharan gold trade points at the same town, from whichever end it starts. From the south there are the goldfields of Bambuk and Bure; from the north the funduks of Tlemcen where the metal met European bills of exchange; along the routes, Ibadi merchants carrying doctrine with the cargo.

Sijilmasa is the place in the middle.

It was founded in the late 750s in the Tafilalt, an oasis on the northern edge of the Sahara where the desert crossing ends and the roads to Fez, Tlemcen and the Mediterranean begin. The founders were Sufri Kharijites of the Miknasa — part of the same Kharijite world as the Ibadis of Tahert, holding that the leader of the community is whichever Muslim is qualified, and in permanent doctrinal opposition to the caliphate.

The town became rich immediately and stayed rich for two centuries. Ibn Hawqal, who was there in the tenth century, records seeing a bill of exchange for forty-two thousand dinars and says he had never encountered such a sum anywhere in his travels — which, from a man who had been across the Islamic world, is the single most useful sentence anyone wrote about this polity. Al-Mas'udi records that gold from the Sudan was minted here.

That is the whole state: a transit duty and a mint, and nothing else. A town with a wall, a customs house and a fortnight of desert between it and the next town, taxing the only route by which the gold of West Africa reached the Mediterranean economy — and therefore, indirectly, taxing the coinage of half the Islamic world.

Kharijite doctrine and enormous commercial wealth are not an obvious combination and it is worth naming the fit. A community holding that the caliphate is illegitimate needs to be somewhere the caliphate cannot easily reach, and a fortnight of desert is such a place. The Rustamids made the same calculation at Tahert. Both were merchant states run by sectarians in country nobody could occupy cheaply, and both ended in the same decade at the hands of the same movement.

Salt for gold

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

The trade this town lived on had a shape, and almost everything else in the medieval Maghreb depends on it.

Two things moved. Gold came north from the Bambuk and Bure fields beyond the upper Senegal and Niger, worked by people no empire on either end of the route ever governed. Salt came south from the Saharan pans — Taghaza above all, where the mines were worked by slaves and the blocks were cut and loaded straight onto camels. The exchange was between a region with gold and no salt and a region with salt and no gold, and both parties were prepared to trade them at rates that look extraordinary from anywhere else.

The caravans ran on an annual cycle dictated by the desert: assembled in the autumn at Sijilmasa, south by the wells, weeks in the sand, then the sahel markets — Awdaghust first, later Timbuktu and Walata — and back before the heat. Nobody crossed the Sahara casually. A caravan was a capitalised venture with investors, guides, guarantors and a return date, and a town at either end that could store, finance and tax it.

That is what Sijilmasa was. Not a market in the ordinary sense but the northern terminal: warehouses, moneychangers, a mint striking the gold as it arrived, and a customs house. Ibn Hawqal's bill of exchange for forty-two thousand dinars is a credit instrument — which tells you the trade was sophisticated enough to move value on paper across the desert rather than carrying it.

One story about it should be handled carefully because it is repeated everywhere. Herodotus describes a silent trade on the African coast — one party leaves goods, withdraws, the other leaves gold, and neither sees the other — and Arabic writers later attach the same account to the gold of the western Sudan. It is a very old literary motif, told about the edge of the known world in several traditions, and there is no good evidence that the Saharan trade worked that way. The actual mechanism, as far as the sources show it, is ordinary: brokers, agents, credit, and Muslim merchant communities settled at both ends who spoke to each other constantly.

That last point is why this town's Kharijism matters commercially as well as doctrinally. Trust across a fortnight of desert requires a network, and a sectarian community that is a minority everywhere is a network by construction: its members can identify each other, have obligations to each other, and can be disciplined by exclusion. The Ibadis of Tahert carried their doctrine south along these same routes for the same reason, and the doctrine travelled because the credit did.

The dinar

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

Sijilmasa struck gold coin, and the coin is why a caravan town has a place in the monetary history of the medieval world.

Gold arrived from the south as dust and nuggets. It left as dinars. The mint at Sijilmasa is the point at which West African metal became Mediterranean money, and for two centuries a substantial share of the gold circulating in North Africa, Egypt, al-Andalus and — through them — Christian Europe had passed through this one customs house and been struck with this one town's name on it.

Sijilmasa dinars turn up in hoards across the Islamic west and beyond. They were known for their fineness, which is what one would expect of a mint sitting at the source with no incentive to debase: a town whose whole business is being trusted does not clip its own coin.

What that made the town worth

Everybody wanted it, and nobody could hold it.

The Fatimids took it in 909 and lost it. The Umayyads of Córdoba backed a Midrarid restoration against them and lost it too. Zanata clients held it in between. The Almoravids took it in 1055 as one of their first acts, before they had a country, because a movement that intends to conquer needs a bullion supply more than it needs territory.

That sequence is not a story about Sijilmasa's politics. It is a story about what the mint was worth: a state that held it could pay armies in good gold while its rivals could not, and every serious power in the western Mediterranean understood that for three hundred years.

The other thing that came north

It should not be left out.

The same caravans that carried the gold carried people. Slaves moved north from the sahel markets alongside the metal, in numbers nobody can quantify and over the same six centuries, and Sijilmasa taxed both. The salt going south was cut by slaves at Taghaza; the gold coming north was accompanied by slaves walking; and the mint that made the town famous was fed by a route on which human beings were one of the standard cargoes.

A dinar struck at Sijilmasa is a beautiful object and a very fine piece of metalwork, and the system that produced it is the one described in this paragraph.

The prisoner in the oasis

Drafted from Halm, The Empire of the Mahdi: The Rise of the Fatimids (1996)contraction

Around 905 a man arrived in Sijilmasa with his young son and settled quietly as a merchant. He was Abd Allah, the head of the Isma'ili mission — the hidden imam whose agents were at that moment converting the Kutama Berbers of the Kabylie in his name. He had come west from Syria ahead of Abbasid agents and chosen the far end of the world to wait in.

The Midrarid ruler eventually worked out who his guest was and imprisoned him. The reasons the sources give are the ordinary ones: pressure from Baghdad, and the ruler's own reluctance to be holding a man claiming to be the mahdi.

In 909 the Kutama army finished the Aghlabids at Raqqada and then marched west across the Maghreb — a very long way, for one prisoner — took Sijilmasa, and released him. Abd Allah was proclaimed caliph and mahdi, and the Fatimid caliphate dates from that moment. The dynasty that would rule Egypt for two centuries and found Cairo collected its founder from a cell in this oasis.

The town was left with a Fatimid governor and then, repeatedly, without one. Sijilmasa was too far from Ifriqiya to hold and too valuable to abandon, so the tenth century runs through a sequence of Midrarid restorations, Fatimid reconquests, a ruler who converted to Sunnism and declared for the Umayyads of Cordoba, and the proxy war between Cairo and Córdoba that consumed the far Maghreb for most of the century. The dynasty was finally removed in 976, and the town passed between Zanata clients until the Almoravids took it in 1055 — which gave a desert movement a bullion supply before it had a country.

Nobody can say with confidence which Midrarid was the last, because the sequence of restorations is disputed in the sources.

What is worth keeping is the disproportion. A walled oasis town of no military weight sat on the pipe through which West African gold reached the Mediterranean for two hundred years, minted it — and happened to be holding the founder of the Fatimid caliphate in a cell when his army came to collect him.

A hundred years of being fought over

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

The Midrarid state did not decline. It was captured, repeatedly, by people who wanted the mint.

After 909 the town spent most of a century changing hands: Fatimid governors, Midrarid restorations, a Midrarid ruler who converted from Kharijism to Sunnism and declared for the Umayyads of Córdoba, Fatimid reconquests, and Zanata clients of whichever caliphate was currently paying.

That is not the ordinary shape of a small state's ending. It is what happens to an asset in a war between two much larger powers.

The proxy war

Cairo and Córdoba spent the tenth century fighting over the Maghreb without either of them being able to occupy it.

The Fatimids had taken Ifriqiya and then Egypt, and claimed the caliphate. The Umayyads of Córdoba responded by claiming it themselves in 929 — the first time in nearly three hundred years that three men simultaneously called themselves caliph — and by funding anybody in the Maghreb who would fight the Fatimids. Neither could reach the far west in force. Both could pay.

So the western Maghreb spent decades as a board on which two caliphates moved Berber clients, and Sijilmasa was the most valuable square on it. A Midrarid prince changing his madhhab from Kharijism to Sunnism in order to take Umayyad money is exactly what that environment produces, and it is also, doctrinally, the end of the thing the dynasty had been founded to be.

What was lost before the state was

The sect.

The Midrarids had been Sufri Kharijites — a community holding that the caliphate was illegitimate and that leadership belonged to whichever Muslim was qualified, which had been the whole reason a merchant republic on the desert edge could exist beyond the reach of Baghdad. By the middle of the tenth century their ruler was a Sunni client of a caliph in Spain.

The dynasty was formally removed in 976 and the town went on. That order matters: Sijilmasa lost its doctrine, then its dynasty, and kept its trade for another five hundred years, because the trade never depended on either.

976

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

The last Midrarid was removed in 976 and nobody recorded much about it.

By then the dynasty had been restored and deposed several times, had changed sect, and had spent most of a century as the client of whichever caliphate was currently paying for the Maghreb. The removal was not a conquest of Sijilmasa — Sijilmasa went on, richer than most places in Africa, for another five hundred years. It was the point at which the family that had founded the town stopped being the people who held it.

An ending with nothing in it

There is no siege, no last stand, and no agreement among the sources about which Midrarid was the last one. That is unusual even by the standards of small dynasties, and it says something precise about what this state had become.

A dynasty that matters produces a contested ending: somebody writes down who took it and from whom, because the succession is worth arguing about. Sijilmasa's chroniclers were interested in the town, the mint and the caravans, and by the 970s the ruling family was an administrative detail of an asset that Cairo and Córdoba were fighting over.

What outlasted it

Everything except the dynasty and the doctrine.

The mint went on striking. The caravans went on assembling in the autumn and leaving for the south. The customs house went on collecting. The Zanata held the town, then the Almoravids took it in 1055 and used its gold to conquer Morocco and Spain, then the Almohads, then the Marinids.

Four centuries after the Midrarids, Ibn Battuta walked into a handsome city with the best dates in the world and lodged with a scholar whose brother lived in China. Nothing in his account suggests he had any idea whose town it had originally been.

What is left of it

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

Sijilmasa is a field of mounds. The town declined after the fifteenth century, was fought over, and was finally abandoned; what stands in the Tafilalt now is decayed mud-brick under windblown sand along the east bank of the Ziz, spread over something like a square mile and a half.

A Moroccan-American excavation worked the site through the late 1980s and 1990s, and almost everything specific anybody can say about this state comes out of it rather than out of any text.

Three findings matter here.

The site is not one town. The stratigraphy shows successive settlements on overlapping ground rather than a single walled city continuously occupied — a place that was rebuilt, moved and re-walled as its fortunes changed, which is what an oasis dependent on one trade route would do.

The excavators found the foundations of a congregational mosque of over two and a half thousand square metres, with its earliest phases dated to the eighth century. That makes it, on the excavators' reading, the oldest mosque identified in Morocco — earlier than the Qarawiyyin at Fez, founded in 859. The first substantial Islamic building in the far Maghreb was in a Kharijite caravan town on the desert edge, not in either of the cities the written tradition treats as the country's origins.

And the ceramics — some twenty-two thousand pieces catalogued — show the trade directly: material from Ifriqiya, from al-Andalus, from further east, in an oasis a fortnight from anywhere.

Nobody knows how large this state was or how many people lived in it, and its written record is a handful of paragraphs in chroniclers who were mostly interested in somebody else. What is actually known about it comes from pottery counts and wall lines — which is a different kind of evidence entirely, and the reason a caravan town of no military weight can be described at all.

A fortnight of desert

Drafted from Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Batuta (1829)afterlife

Ibn Battuta came to Sijilmasa in the winter of 1351, intending to cross the Sahara, and describes it in two sentences that say most of what the town was for.

Sigilmasa, which is a very handsome city. It produces many very good dates, and in the abundance of these it may be compared with Basra, except only that those of this place are the best.

He lodged with a scholar named Muhammad al-Bushri — whose brother, he notes, he had met in the city of Qanjanfu, in China.

That is worth stopping on. A family of religious scholars in an oasis on the edge of the Sahara had one brother at home and another in southern China, and a Moroccan traveller happened to meet both. It is the single best illustration of what the fourteenth-century Islamic world actually was: not a region but a network, along which a literate man could travel from Morocco to the Pacific and expect to find someone to lodge with.

What he went out into

He left in February 1352 with a large company of merchants, and after twenty-five days reached Taghaza — the salt mine at the far end of nothing.

a village in which there is nothing good, for its houses and mosque are built with stones of salt, and covered with the hides of camels. There is no tree in the place; it has nothing but sand for its soil; and in this are mines of salt.

They dug in the earth and found thick tables of salt lying as though they had been cut and stacked underground. Nobody lived there except the merchants' servants, who did the digging and lived on dates and other provisions brought up from Sijilmasa.

Which is the whole system

Set the two descriptions side by side and the trade explains itself.

Sijilmasa: a handsome walled city with the best dates in the world, colleges, water-wheels, a mint, and scholars whose brothers were in China. Taghaza: twenty-five days south, no tree, no soil, houses built out of salt because there was nothing else to build with, inhabited only by other men's slaves.

The first place existed because of the second, and the second existed only because the first could feed it. Neither could support a population on its own. Between them they moved the salt that West Africa had no source of and brought back the gold that the Mediterranean had no source of, and the arrangement ran for six hundred years.

Ibn Battuta's caravan went on from Taghaza with water for ten days and reached Walata, and from there he went to Mali. He was, in effect, travelling down the pipe this town had been built to control — four hundred years after the Midrarids had lost control of it, and with the trade still running exactly as they had organised it.

Three hundred and fifty castles

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

By the time Leo Africanus reached the Tafilalt, around 1510, Sijilmasa was gone.

He describes what it had been — a town on a plain by the river Ziz, enuironed with most stately and high wals, euen as in many places it is to be seene at this present; gallantly built; rich inhabitants with a great traffic to the land of the Blacks; stately temples and colleges; water lifted out of the river by wheels; and an air he calls temperate and wholesome except for the winter damp.

And then: But now since the towne was destroied, the inhabitants began to plant themselues in the next castles and villages.

Leo lived in the region for about seven months, in one of those castles.

What replaced a city

Three hundred and fifty of them.

The oasis along twenty miles of the Ziz, he says, contained about three hundred and fifty castles besides villages and hamlets — fortified settlements, each walled, each with its own irrigation off the river. Three were principal: Tenegent with a thousand families and a great many craftsmen, Tebuhasan eight miles south and busier with merchants than anywhere else in the region, and Mamun, which Jewish and Muslim traders both used.

The three had three separate governors, and Leo's sentence about them is the whole political condition of the place:

These three castles haue three seuerall gouernours, who are at great dissension among themselues. They will oftentimes destroy one anothers chanels, whereby their fieldes are watered, which cannot without great cost be repaired againe. They will stow the palme-trees also to the very stocks.

Cutting a rival's irrigation channel and pruning his date palms to the stump is warfare adapted precisely to an oasis: it destroys the only two things anybody there has, and both take years to restore.

The wall they built and then lost

The most telling detail is what they did immediately after the city fell.

The inhabitants walled the entire territory — an eighty-mile circuit, Leo says, done cheaply — so that horsemen could not raid into it. It worked while they were at peace with each other. Then they fell to quarrelling, the wall was pulled down, and each faction invited in the Arabs it thought would help against the others.

A community that could organise an eighty-mile wall could not keep it, because keeping it required the three governors to agree about anything.

And the road, still there

They were still striking coin, in silver and in gold, and still rich: some of their principal men, Leo says, had great traffic to the land of the Blacks, carrying the wares of Barbary and exchanging them for gold and slaves. The system the Midrarids had built was running six hundred years later, in the absence of the town, the dynasty and the sect that built it.

The road north was still being taxed too. Between the Tafilalt and Fez the way ran through country held by people who exacted heavy tribute from the caravans, and Leo describes one of the three castles on it — set on a rock so high it seemeth to touch the cloudes, with a guardhouse below where soldiers stood permanently and took a quarter of a ducat for every camel-load that passed.

Which is what became of an empire whose entire purpose had been to charge for crossing the desert: three hundred and fifty walled villages cutting each other's water, and a man on a rock taking a quarter-ducat a camel.