Zayyanid Kingdom of Tlemcen

The crossroads

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

Yaghmurasan ibn Zayyan was the Almohad governor of Tlemcen who stopped being one in 1235, six years after the man governing at Tunis had done the same thing, and nine years before the Zenata confederation to his west began taking Morocco. The Almohad empire produced three successor states within about thirty years, and this is the one in the middle.

Being in the middle is the whole of its history.

Tlemcen sits in the high country of the central Maghreb at the point where two trade systems cross. The east-west road between Morocco and Ifriqiya runs through it; so does the north-south route from the Mediterranean coast at Oran and Honein down to the Saharan oases and, beyond them, the gold of the western Sudan. Whoever held Tlemcen taxed both.

Yaghmurasan understood the position immediately and overreached on it immediately. He took Sijilmasa in 1264, which briefly put the two great northern termini of the trans-Saharan trade under one authority — and he lost it to the Marinids eleven years later, which is the first instance of the thing that happened to this kingdom for three centuries.

The Zayyanids were never the strongest power in the Maghreb and were always worth taking. The Marinids to the west wanted Tlemcen; the Hafsids to the east wanted Tlemcen; and both were larger. What the kingdom had instead was a position everybody needed to remain functional, walls, and a talent for outlasting the states that occupied it.

Ibn Khaldun, who lived there under Abu Hammu Musa II and served him, wrote that science and the arts developed there with success and that it produced scholars whose reputation reached other countries. He also wrote, while working for three such dynasties in turn, the theory of why dynasties like this one do not last.

If it is true, it will profit us with God

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

Ibn Khaldun records that people once traced Yaghmurasan ibn Zayyan's family back to Idris, the sharif who founded the first Muslim dynasty in Morocco, and that Yaghmurasan replied, in the Berber of his own nation:

If it is true, it will profit us with God. But in this world we shall owe our success only to our swords.

Every other dynasty in the region spent its energies on exactly the claim he was waving away. The Idrisids had the descent, the Almohads had the mahdi, the Saadis would make sharifian blood the price of ruling Morocco for the next four centuries. Ibn Khaldun's own comment on the genealogy is that it is an assertion without proof, that nomads know very little about such things, and that what truth there may be in it is known to God alone.

Confirmed by the empire he was leaving

The founding was less dramatic than a secession usually is. Yaghmurasan's brother had commanded at Tlemcen for the Almohads and died in 1236; Yaghmurasan took over with the approval of all the Abd al-Wadid tribes, the towns of the central Maghreb hastened to obey him, and the Almohad caliph al-Rashid sent him a diploma confirming him in the government of Tlemcen. He became a sovereign by being appointed one, and simply outlived the authority that had appointed him.

Assembling a kingdom out of other people's quarrels

What followed is a masterclass in acquiring territory without much fighting for it.

The Maghrawa and the Toujin, the Zenata confederations to his east, watched him begin taking the towns of the central Maghreb and appealed to Abu Zakariya, the Hafsid who had just detached Ifriqiya. The Hafsid came, took Tlemcen, and on his way home confirmed each Zenata emir in command of his own tribe and country, and authorised them to surround themselves with the emblems of sovereignty and appear before him so equipped.

Yaghmurasan took Tlemcen back and went to work on the emirs instead.

The house of Mendil, which led the Maghrawa, fell into a series of fratricides. In 1270 one brother, Omar, undertook to put Yaghmurasan in possession of Miliana in return for being made chief of the Maghrawa; the bargain was executed, and Yaghmurasan found himself master of the confederation with its own chief under his orders. Two other brothers, trying to cut Omar out by the same method he had used, sold him the city of Ténès in 1273 for twelve thousand pieces of gold.

A city bought outright. Not besieged, not stormed — purchased from the ruling family's losing faction.

What it looked like from inside

There is one glimpse of the court in Ibn Khaldun's account and it is about pride. Al-Abbas ibn Mendil, having made peace with Yaghmurasan, came to Tlemcen and was received with every flattery, and at a reception told the company he had once seen a single horseman hold off two hundred. Members of the Abd al-Wadid family present called him a liar. He left the city in a rage and went back to his tribe. Yaghmurasan discovered later that the story was true and that the horseman had been al-Abbas himself.

His son Othman spent the 1280s and 1290s taking the rest — Médéa, Mazouna, Ténès again — until the Maghrawa had lost every town and every stretch of open country they held and were pushed back into the mountains, and their chief took ship for Morocco to beg for help.

Within two generations a governor's brother had turned a diploma into a kingdom running the width of the central Maghreb, on no doctrine, no genealogy and no claim beyond the one Yaghmurasan had stated at the start.

A city built to take a city

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

In 1299 the Marinid sultan Abu Yaqub Yusuf came east and invested Tlemcen. He did not storm it. He built a city outside it.

Al-Mansura went up on the plain in front of the walls: a walled town with its own great mosque and minaret, palaces, baths, markets and a mint, intended to receive the trade that Tlemcen could no longer handle while it was shut in. The siege lasted eight years. The idea was not to destroy the Zayyanid capital but to replace it — to move the crossroads a few kilometres and let the besieged city starve of the only thing that made it worth having.

It nearly worked. It ended in 1307 when the sultan was murdered by one of his own eunuchs and the Marinid army went home to deal with the succession, and the Zayyanids came out of the gates and pulled al-Mansura down. The minaret is still standing in the fields, on its own.

Almost every siege in the medieval record is a contest for a place. This one was a contest for a route, and the attacker's method was to offer the merchants a better address.

The rest of the fourteenth century ran the same way with less imagination. Abu al-Hasan of Fez took Tlemcen outright in 1337 and held it eleven years, until the disaster in Ifriqiya that broke his army near Kairouan; the Marinids took it again in 1352 and held it seven more. Each time the Zayyanid house survived somewhere, came back when Fez was distracted, and resumed. The kingdom reached perhaps a hundred thousand people in the 1330s, built the Tashfiniya madrasa whose tilework the Marinids then copied, and went on collecting the customs.

This is a kingdom whose entire achievement is continuity under pressure, which is the hardest thing there is to put a number on. It held no impressive territory, produced no empire and carried no doctrine anywhere. It lasted more than three centuries in the most contested corridor in North Africa, and the duration is the achievement rather than the setting for one.

Where the gold changed hands

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

Tlemcen had a funduk — a walled compound with warehousing, lodging and a chapel, where foreign merchants lived, stored goods and did business under their own consul and, within limits, their own law. Genoese, Venetian, Pisan and Catalan merchants held them across the Maghreb by treaty, on the same terms the Hafsids granted at Tunis and Bougie.

What made the Tlemcen one matter is what arrived there.

Gold came north out of the western Sudan by camel across the Sahara — the same metal that moved with Mansa Musa's pilgrimage, on the same routes, and the same trade whose two northern termini the Almoravids had taken before they took Morocco. Tlemcen and Sijilmasa were where it reached the settled Maghreb. European merchants came south to meet it, and the exchange happened in a compound like this one.

The mechanics are the interesting part. Genoese bills of exchange circulated at Tlemcen. Christian merchants took credit from Muslim ones and the reverse. The gold went north and became the coinage of the Italian city-states — the Genoese genovino and the Florentine florin, struck from the 1250s onward, are made substantially of West African gold that came through ports like these. The commercial law that made that possible had to work across a religious frontier that the chronicles on both sides treat as the organising fact of the age.

And this is the same kingdom whose capital was besieged for eight years by a neighbour trying to divert exactly this traffic, in the chapter before. The al-Mansura siege makes sense only if you know what the funduk was worth.

Tlemcen had farmland and taxed it, and the farmland was never the point. A kingdom the size of three provinces, permanently threatened by two larger neighbours, financed itself for three centuries on a customs house — and the reason the neighbours kept coming was that they wanted the customs house rather than the kingdom.

Three hundred and eighty miles long, twenty-five wide

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

Leo Africanus saw the kingdom in its last decades and gives its dimensions before anything else, because the dimensions are the problem:

This kingdome stretcheth in length from east to west 380. miles, but in bredth from north to south, that is, from the Mediterran sea to the deserts of Numidia not aboue fiue and twentie miles: which is the occasion that it is so often oppressed by the Arabians inhabiting the Numidian deserts.

A ribbon of country between a sea it did not control and a desert it could not police. The kings, he goes on, had always tried to buy the goodwill of the Numidians with great gifts, "but they could neuer satisfie their insatiable couetice. A man shall seldome trauell safely through this kingdome" — and then, in the same breath: "howbeit here are great store of merchants, perhaps either because it adioneth to Numidia, or else for that the way to the land of Negros lieth through it."

Unsafe to travel and full of merchants. That is the kingdom in one sentence.

A dish of boiled horse-flesh

Leo's version of the eight-year siege has a detail the chronicles do not. The Marinid Yusuf had built his fort on the east side and the city was starving. The citizens went in a body to their king and begged him to have pity on their want. To acquaint them with his own supper, he showed them what he had: a dish of boiled horse-flesh and barley. They saw then that the king's estate was little better than the meanest citizen's. He called an assembly, told them it was more honourable to die in battle for their country than to live in that condition, and they resolved to fight the next day.

That night Yusuf was killed by one of his own people. The citizens marched out, scattered the leaderless army, and found provisions enough in the enemy camp to end the famine.

The second and greater damage

The next Marinid siege had no such ending. About forty years later Abu'l-Hasan built his own town two miles west of Tlemcen, besieged the city for thirty months, assaulted it daily and put up a new fort every night, until his forces came in. He carried the king of Tlemcen home to Fez, had him beheaded there, and had the body thrown out among the filth of the city. Leo calls it the second and the greater damage the city sustained.

Then the Marinids decayed, and Tlemcen was repaired and refilled. Under Abu Tashfin it had held sixteen thousand families; after the recovery it reached twelve thousand. Each trade had its own quarter, on the plan of Fez, though Fez was built more handsomely. There were five colleges, sumptuously built — some by the king of Tlemcen and some by the king of Fez, which is a strange thing to find in a town two Moroccan sultans had starved. There were two inns kept for the merchants of Genoa and Venice.

Fifteen thousand ducats out of one ship

The customs are the whole fiscal history of the kingdom, and Leo gives a figure. A single Genoese ship put in carrying goods enough to supply Tlemcen for five years; the tenth part of it, paid to the king as duty, came to fifteen thousand ducats.

That is what everybody had been fighting over for three centuries. Not the ribbon of dry country, not the twelve thousand families — the ten per cent.

What went in 1521

A great part of the city was inhabited by Jews, who had once all been exceedingly rich, and who wore a distinguishing turban. On the death of the king in 927 of the Hijra, Leo writes, they were all so robbed and spoiled that they were brought almost to beggary.

He records it in the same tone as the harbours: something that had been part of what made the place valuable, and was not any more. Oran and Mers el-Kebir, the kingdom's two great trading ports, where the Genoese and the Venetians came, had been taken by Ferdinand the Catholic a decade before — to the great inconvenience, Leo says, of all this kingdom. The king who lost them was driven out by his own subjects.

Three hundred and eighty miles long and twenty-five wide, with the ports gone, the merchants' community ruined and the desert side unpoliceable. What was left was the road, and the road was about to acquire two new owners.

Between two empires, again

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

The fifteenth century reduced the kingdom to a client. It was at various points a tributary of the Hafsids at Tunis, of the Marinids and their Wattasid successors at Fez, and of the Crown of Aragon, which wanted the grain and the trade and was prepared to pay for a friendly ruler. Tlemcen went on being rich and stopped being independent in any sense that would have been recognised by Yaghmurasan.

Then the western Mediterranean became a frontier between two empires that had no interest in the central Maghreb as such.

Spain took Oran in 1509 and Bougie in 1510 and planted a fortress in the harbour at Algiers, as part of a campaign of coastal presidios running from Morocco to Tripoli. The Ottomans arrived from the sea in the person of the Barbarossa brothers and made Algiers a base. Between them the Zayyanids became what Tunis was becoming in exactly the same years: not a party to the contest but an instrument in it, installed and deposed as each side needed a local name.

The Ottomans took Tlemcen in 1551. The last Zayyanid ruler fled to Spanish Oran, was baptised, and lived out his life there under the name Carlos. By 1556 the territory was a beylik of the Regency of Algiers.

The kingdom had also become, briefly, a refuge. After the expulsions from Spain in 1492 several thousand Jewish refugees settled in the kingdom, and Andalusi Muslims came in far larger numbers over the following century, into Tlemcen as into Fez and Tunis. The three successor states of the Almohad empire absorbed the population of a fourth that had ceased to exist.

And the three-way division held to the end. Hafsid, Zayyanid and Marinid ran 345, 321 and 221 years respectively; none of them ever conquered the others for long, and the borders they settled into are approximately Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. That is an unusually durable outcome for a partition nobody designed.

The road outlived it

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

A dynasty that had spent three centuries taxing people passing through was replaced, in 1551, by an Ottoman beylik that taxed people passing through. The crossroads did not notice.

What Tlemcen kept doing afterwards is visible in a book written eighty years later by a man born there.

The manuscript from Guadix

When al-Maqqari came to describe the omens that Granada had received before its fall, his authority was a manuscript he had read in the author's own hand: the work of Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn al-Haddad al-Wadi-ashi — from Guadix — a learned hafiz, secretary and historian who, the note says, resided at Tlemcen.

That is one sentence and it contains the whole afterlife. An Andalusi scholar from a town in the Granadan sierra, displaced, living out his life in the central Maghreb, writing the history of the country he had lost; and a Tlemceni a generation or two later reading his handwriting and copying him out. Tlemcen had stopped being a capital and had not stopped being a place where a man could put a library.

The road from Oran

The last movement al-Maqqari records went the other way along the same route. When the Moriscos were finally expelled from Spain in 1610, many thousands went to Fez and thousands crossed from Oran to Tlemcen, while the greater part took the road to Tunis.

Few reached where they were going. They were set upon and robbed on the way, and al-Maqqari specifies the worst stretches: the roads to Fez and to Tlemcen. Those who sailed for Tunis mostly arrived intact.

Read that against Leo Africanus, writing ninety years earlier, on the same kingdom: a man shall seldom travel safely through this kingdom, because the strip is too narrow to police and the Arabs of the desert cannot be bought off. The dynasty had gone, the Spanish had taken Oran, the Ottomans had taken Tlemcen, and the specific hazard of that specific road was exactly what it had been. Some facts about a country belong to its geography and not to whoever is collecting the customs.

What the three states left

The Almohad empire came apart into Ifriqiya, the central Maghreb and Morocco inside forty years. Tunis lasted 345 years, Tlemcen 316 to 321 depending on which capture you count as the end, and Fez 221. None of them ever held another for long, and the frontiers they wore into the ground are close to the ones between Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco now.

Tlemcen is the one that made the case hardest. It was the smallest of the three, the poorest in land, the most often occupied, and it was the one whose survival was least explicable by anything except that both its neighbours needed the road open and neither could keep it. A state can be built on being indispensable and impossible to digest, and this one was, for longer than most states built on anything else.