Almohad Empire
The Almohads (in Arabic: الموَحدون, al-muwaḥḥidun) "those who recognize the unity of God", or Banu 'Abd al-Mu& #39;min (Arabic: بنو عبد المؤمن) were a Moroccan Berber dynasty that ruled North Africa and the southern Iberian Peninsula from 1147 to 1269.
The Almohads emerged in present-day Morocco in the 12th century. Muhammad ibn Túmart founded a religious movement with the support of a group of Berber tribes from the High Atlas of Morocco (mainly Masmuda), organizing the overthrow of the Almoravids, of Cenhegi origin. Subsequently, Abd al-Moumin and his family, Cenete Berbers, took control and eliminated the Zirids and Hammadis from the central and eastern Maghreb. The Almohads were overthrown by the Berber dynasties of the Marinids, the Ziyanids, and the Hafsids of the Maghreb.
Its history consists of three main phases: one of expansion (1117-1163) that lasted until the death of the first caliph; another of heyday (1163-1199); and a third of decline (1199-1268) until its disappearance, first in al-Andalus (1229) and then in the Maghreb (1268).
After dominating North Africa, confronting the confederation of Berber tribes of the Masmuda with the Almoravid Lamtunas, they landed in the Iberian Peninsula in 1145 and tried to unify the taifas using resistance against Christians as a propaganda element and the defense of Islamic purity. That is why his jihad was directed against Christians and Muslims alike. In little more than thirty years, the Almohads managed to forge a powerful empire that stretched from Santarém, in present-day Portugal, to Tripoli in present-day Libya, including all of North Africa and the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula, and managed to stop the Christian advance when they defeated the Castilian troops in 1195 at the battle of Alarcos.
History
Origins
Muhammad ibn Túmart, founder of the fundamentalist movement, was proclaimed by his followers as mahdi ("the guided [imam]"), a belief rooted in Shiite ideology but also accepted by Sunnism, and called all Muslims to return to the original sources of their faith, that is, the Koran. Fundamentally, their movement was puritanical and reactionary, emphasizing the unique and incorporeal character of God and advocating strict adherence to Islamic norms. Following these radical principles, he and his supporters clashed with the Almoravids, who had imposed a rigid Maliki orthodoxy, but had barely transformed popular customs that were not in accordance with the Koran. Although it was Ibn Túmart who created the doctrine that gave cohesion and foundation to the new political and religious movement, it was his follower and successor at its head, Abd al-Moumin, who contributed the military genius to turn it into a great empire that dominated the Maghreb and al-Andalus.
Expelled from Marrakech in 1120 by the Almoravid authorities with whom he had clashed despite the few doctrinal differences he had with them, Ibn Túmart settled in his native region of Sus. There he preached against the Almoravids and, at the end of 1121, his followers recognized him as mahdi. Shortly after he moved to Tinmal, where he had to repel successive Almoravid campaigns. the nearby Almoravid capital, which he attacked in 1129-1130. Shortly after this defeat, in August 1130, Ibn Túmart died, and Abd al-Mumin succeeded him as head of the movement. all the followers of the deceased and only succeeded in 1133. During this time, the death of the founder of the Almohad movement was concealed. By then, the Almohads had already taken over part of the High Atlas.
Fights against the Almoravids
In 1132, Abd al-Mumin led his first military campaign, against the tribes of the Draa River region, south of the High Atlas. Although its outcome is unknown, it is known that upon his return to Tinmel he was he proclaimed caliph. The first years of his reign saw redoubling of raids against the Almoravids.
This was followed by the long campaign of seven years (1139-1146) which ended with the total defeat of the Almoravids. Their first defeat deprived them of almost the entire Tadla. Even some groups of Cenhegíes from the mountain went over to the Almohad ranks. Around 1140 and after several campaigns with mixed luck, the Almohads managed to seize the Alto Sus. Until then the clashes did not leave a clear winner: while the Almohads spread without brake over mountains, the Almoravids continued to control the plains. From 1139 the fight against the Almohads was left in the hands of the new heir to the Almoravid throne, Tasufín ben Ali ben Yúsef, who had excelled in the fight against the Christians of the Iberian Peninsula and had replaced his deceased brother Sir as such. By this time, however, the Almoravids lost control of the upper Sus. Keeping in the mountains, the Almohads advanced through the valleys of the Middle Atlas and subdued it. They reached the line of the Moluya. By the end of 1141, in successive campaigns they had dominated the Middle Atlas and a large part of the area of the oases, including Tafilalet. The Almoravids lost contact with their region of origin, the Sahara. Around 1142–1143, the Almohads reached the environs of Tlemcen, where they were joined by the Kumiya tribe, to which Abd al-Mumin belonged. In 1142, they seized much of mountainous northern Morocco, though without inflict heavy defeats on the enemy. The decisive year of the war was 1145. In February of that year, Ben Ali died defending Oran; the Almohads immediately conquered the city. They then did the same with Oujda and Guercif. The caliph then turned to Morocco to finally conquer the cities of the plains. Fez, Meknes, Salé and Ceuta fell into his hands in May 1146. The admiral of the enemy fleet went over to their ranks. In June the siege of Marrakech began, which was taken by the Almohads on March 24, 1147. The Almoravid emir perished in the fighting. The rest of the year Abd al-Moumin was dedicated to purifying the city and crushing a revolt in the Sus, although he did not fail to send a small contingent to al-Andalus, where the Christian states were making important conquests.
While the siege of Marrakech was taking place, the Almohads lost several important cities (Ceuta, Tangier, Salé and Algeciras), mainly due to uprisings against them. Between May and June 1148, however, they crushed the rebels and recovered the squares. These victories allowed them to pass to the Iberian Peninsula.
Expansion throughout the Iberian Peninsula
The request for help from the lord of the Taifa of Mértola, Ibn Qasi in September-October 1145 prompted the caliph to send a first military contingent to al-Andalus in the spring of the following year. Alfonso VII of León, who was besieging an Almoravid general in Córdoba at the time, he abandoned the siege when he heard the news in May. Also during the spring the admiral of the Almoravid fleet, who had just gone over to the Almohad ranks, submitted Cádiz to the authority of caliph. At the time of the long siege of Marrakech, several more Andalusian lords accepted the authority of the Almohad caliph, which later facilitated the conquest of the peninsula.
The caliph's envoy, a former Almoravid, went to the Iberian Peninsula in the spring of 1147 where, cooperating with the forces of Ibn Qasi, who had risen up against the Almoravids, he managed to subdue Jerez, Niebla, Mértola and Silves in the Algarve, Beja and Badajoz. In January 1148, the Almohad forces and their associates conquered Seville. The Almoravids entrenched themselves in Carmona. A major rebellion of the Sus and western Atlas tribes spread to Ceuta, Tangier and Siyilmasa, temporarily stopped the expansion. Not only a large part of the Moroccan Maghreb rose up against the caliph, but also the Andalusian territories that had submitted to him, except for Ronda and Jerez. The harassment of Alfonso VII the Almoravid general Yahya ibn Ganiya, whom he made pay tribute, prompted him to agree with the Almohads. In exchange for their help, he ceded Córdoba and Carmona to them. Alfonso tried again to conquer Córdoba, but the arrival of relief from the Magre b, from Niebla, Ronda and Jerez made him give up on the company and retire.
In May, despite the support offered to the rebels by the Almoravid governor of Córdoba, the caliph managed to quell the uprising. In 1150, the caliph's authority was recognized by the lords of Ronda, Jerez, Badajoz, Tavira, Beja, Évora and Niebla. Abd al-Mumin later ordered a purge of the administration to eliminate abuses, but also a great purge of the tribes in which some thirty thousand people perished, considered disaffected. In 1153, the Almohads they seized Malaga; in the following years, from Granada; in 1157, from Almería and in 1157-1158, they completely dominated the Algarve. At the same time, the peninsular Christian states took advantage of the conflict to extend to the south, and conquered important places such as Lisbon, Lérida or Tortosa. The arduous Andalusian conquest was left in any case in the hands of generals and governors, while the caliph was dedicated to subjugating the Maghreb. The capital of Almohad al-Andalus was Seville and in times of expansion through the eastern Maghreb the governor of the peninsular territories was the son and Caliph's successor, Abu Yaqub.
In the late 1150s (1157-1160), the Almohads suffered another series of severe setbacks in al-Andalus: the rebels controlled Carmona, Écija, Úbeda, Baza, Jaén, and besieged Córdoba. -Andalus and, especially, the threat to Seville, made Abu Yaqub urgently request the help of his father in 1160, who immediately began preparations for a great campaign in the peninsula, which he finally could not carry out because He died. The Almohads, engaged in the subjugation of the Andalusian territories, took several decades from their first appearance on the peninsula to confront the Christian states of the north, despite the serious crisis in which they were plunged after the death of Alfonso VII of León and the division that he ordered in his testament of León and Castilla. The first great Almohad campaign against the northern States took place in 1174.
Conquest of the central and eastern Maghreb
Already almost dominated al-Andalus, Abd al-Moumin undertook two campaigns in which he conquered the rest of the Maghreb that was not yet in his power. The first was carried out in 1152-1153 against the Hamadids, from whose territory seized. Algiers, Bugia, Constantine and Bona, among other towns, fell into his hands, with hardly any fighting. defeated, thus ensuring dominance of the region.
In 1153-1155, Abd al-Mumin proclaimed his son his successor, which precipitated the uprising of various groups against this attempt to found a dynasty. Abd al-Mumin crushed the rebels with the help of the newly subdued Arab groups. He defeated the five tribes that had hitherto formed the core of the movement: the Hintata, Tinmal, Ganfisa Gadmiwa and Harwa. The Masmudid sheikhs, so important in the early days of the movement, were relegated to a second place. flat during the reign of the first caliphs of the Abd al-Mumin dynasty, although they regained part of their power later, with the crisis of the State. With the Masmudids bankrupt, Abd al-Mumin sustained himself thanks to the support of his own tribe, the Kumiya, and Arab groups. He also created a large group of minor officials, the hafices, mainly of Arab origin and versed in Almohad doctrine, who replaced the Berber chiefs in the new state administration. of then he also began to hand over provincial governments to some of his sons, generally accompanied by some notable Almohad.
In the following campaign through the region, undertaken in 1159-1160, he seized Ifriqiya, reached Tripoli and eliminated the Christian presence in the area, which had expelled the Zirids and spread along the coast. He seized the city of Mahdia from Roger II of Sicily, which he had conquered in 1147-1148, on January 21, 1160. He took advantage of these conquests to add to his forces soldiers from the Arab tribes that had inhabited the region since the previous century. The Norman threat in the area was what led the Almohad sovereign to start an offensive in Marrakech.
Troubles in al-Andalus and revolts in the Maghreb
Almohad Caliphs
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In November 1160, the caliph went to al-Andalus to coordinate with his lieutenants the great campaign to subdue the territory. His forces recaptured Carmona after an arduous campaign in 1161. The caliph spent two months on the peninsula, organizing his government, before returning to the Maghreb in January 1161. If at the end of 1161 the Almohads recovered Carmona, the following year they lost Granada, handed over by one of its Jewish inhabitants to his enemies due to the discontent that spread among the Jewish population by the forced conversion to Islam that the Maghrebis had imposed. The Portuguese took possession of Beja for four months, which they had to evacuate in April 1163, after razing it.
The main task of the caliph in 1162 was to prepare the great expedition that he planned to undertake in the spring of the following year, and for which he assembled a large fleet. Abd al-Mumin died in Salé in May 1163, when he was preparing troops to carry out a campaign in the Iberian Peninsula. Shortly before, he had decided to change his heir: Muhammad, considered dissolute, left the post to his brother Abu Yaacub Yúsuf, who had gone to Marrakech. Two other brothers, lords of Fez and Bugia, unhappy with the decision, died soon after.
Abu Yaacub Yúsuf inherited the throne, but had difficulties holding onto it, and had to face uprisings by the Gumara (around Ceuta, in 1167) and stabilize the situation in al-Andalus. Only after these difficulties were overcome he assumed the title of amir al-mu'minin, in 1168. In 1165 and after crushing a Berber revolt against him, he was able to send troops to the Iberian peninsula, which obtained a series of of victories. They defeated a Christian army coming from Santarén that tried to confront them and seized several important positions (Andújar, Vélez Rubio) from Muhámmad ibn Mardanís, who had to reduce the harassment to which Córdoba was subjected. they fought near Murcia in mid-October. Unable to reduce the plaza, the Almohad forces felled the surrounding area and withdrew. Ibn Mardanís's raids continued. In 1166–1167 the Gumara Berbers rose up against the emir between Ceuta and Alcazarquivir; the revolt was crushed in the summer of 1167.
In al-Andalus, in September of that year, the Almohads seized Tavira, which had been in rebellion since 1151. The Portuguese advances between 1165 and 1169 (conquest of Trujillo, Cáceres and Évora [1165]; de Badajoz [1169]) made Ferdinand II of León join forces with the Almohads and help them retake Badajoz. the north of the region. Further west, the Castilians continued their forays and in 1170 they felled the lands of Ronda and Algeciras.
In June 1169, an Almohad ultimatum to the Andalusian lords to submit definitively to the caliph failed to convince Ibn Mardanís, but it did convince his father-in-law and until then ally, Ibrahim ibn Hamushk, lord of Jaén with whom the relations had soured. Ibn Hamushk continued to hold Córdoba and, since his father-in-law's change, also Jaén, which the Almohads had difficulties defending. That same year, the caliph met with his Andalusian governors to finally prepare a campaign directed in person by the caliph on the peninsula. The long illness, from September of that year to November of the following, prevented him from doing it as planned, so he delegated command of some forces to one of his sheikhs, who became the peninsula in July 1170, rescued Badajoz and then went to confront Ibn Mardanís in the spring of 1171. The Almohads took Quesada and returned to Murcia. Soon Lorca, Baza, Elche, Almería and Alcira rebelled with against Ibn Mardanís and surrendered to the Almohads.The arrival of a new Almohad army on June 8, this time under the command of the Caliph himself, thwarted the attempts of Ibn Mardanís and his brother—lord of Valencia—to recapture Alcira.
In 1171 Abu Yaacub Yúsuf returned to al-Andalus, where he stayed until 1176; during his stay he undertook several campaigns with little success. In the first, carried out in July 1171, part of the army ran over the Toledo lands, while the Caliph and the bulk of his hosts remained in Córdoba. In September he returned to Seville, where he was in charge of attending to Andalusian government affairs. Meanwhile, one of his brothers continued to harass Ibn Mardanís. This, abandoned by all, agreed to submit to the caliph, but died before being able to do so, in March 1172. His Relatives, who had risen up against him at the last moment, reconciled with the Almohads and recovered part of their domains (Valencia, Denia, Játiva or Alcira). Abu Yaacub Yúsuf, however, settled part of his troops, both Berbers as Arabs, in the region.
With the Levant subdued, the Almohad army turned against the Castilians, who were officially at peace with the caliph, but who had privately fought as mercenaries in the pay of Ibn Mardanís. Despite the conquest of Vilches and Alcaraz at the end of In June 1172, the campaign was not very successful. After crossing the Castilian border, the army unsuccessfully besieged Huete for ten days in July, with the caliph's notable disinterest in the fate of the fighting. Abandoning the siege, the army departed to rescue Cuenca, surrounded by the Christians for five months, and managed to break the siege. At the end of the month he began the precarious, ill-prepared retreat through the Levant and at the beginning of September he was back in Seville.
In 1173 the Almohads raided Talavera and Toledo, recaptured Beja from the Portuguese, who had burned it down, and signed a truce with Portugal and Castile. Between 1174 and 1178, the Almohads were at war with the Leonese. In 1174, they dispossessed the Leonese of Alcántara and a large part of the territories to the south of the Central System and besieged Ciudad Rodrigo in vain.
In 1176 the caliph returned to the Maghreb, hit by a plague epidemic that spread to al-Andalus. The following year the Castilians attacked Cuenca and the Almohads attacked Talavera. Cuenca fell after nine months of siege, in October. When the truce expired, Alfonso I of Portugal ordered raids on the lands of Arcos and Jerez in 1177 and Seville and the Lower Guadalquivir the following year. The fierce fighting spread to the Algarve.
Ifriqiya riots and confrontation with the Banu Ganiya
Abu Ya'qub Yusuf also had to campaign through Ifriqiya which, being a distant province, tended to rebellion. Indeed, the province was a continuous source of problems for the empire due to its remoteness from the political center and eventually ended up in the hands of a local dynasty, the Hafsids. In 1180, a new rebellion in Gafsa in which the Almohad governor was killed triggered another intervention by the caliph. After this campaign, unsuccessful as many tribes continued to harass the Almohads, new Arab contingents went to the western Maghreb, to participate in the holy war in the Iberian Peninsula.
At the end of September 1183, the hosts that had to go to the Iberian Peninsula began to gather to stop the Portuguese advances. In May 1184 the army crossed the strait. Abu Yaqub Yúsuf died in July, in the middle of the intervention in al-Andalus —he perished in the siege of Santarém—, and was succeeded by his son, Abu Yúsuf Yaqub al-Mansur. His proclamation as sovereign and caliph took place in Seville, and was later confirmed in Marrakech, without any opposition. A pious man, more inclined to the zahiri school than to the predominant Maliki school, he gradually lost his devotion to the founder of the Almohad movement, a tendency that later culminated in his son, who abandoned the creed of Ibn Túmart. His religiosity made him pursue philosophy and logic and order the destruction of works dedicated to these matters. At the end of his reign he also forced the Jews to dress in a special way, so that they would be distinguished.
Al-Mansur immediately ended the military campaign and returned with the army to the Maghreb. As his father and grandfather had done, he continued to incorporate Arab contingents into the army and, as his father had already done, also included soldiers from Turkish origin. With this sovereign the empire reached its apogee, although the reign was plagued with problems, mainly the crisis in al-Andalus and the Ifriqiya rebellion, fomented by the Banu Ganiya. The latter were descendants of the disappeared Almoravid sovereigns. The Maghrebi problems meant that, despite the hardships that his Andalusian supporters were experiencing due to the Portuguese and Castilian attacks, the caliph could not cross to the peninsula until 1190.
On May 22, 1185, Ali ibn Ishaq ibn Ganiya captured Bejaia. Around the same time, Qaraqus, a Mamluk soldier of Saladin's nephew, seized Fezzan and then Jebel Nefusa. The two joined forces against the Almohads. With the help of some Arab tribes, the Banu Ganiya then took control of Algiers, Asir, Miliana and Qal'a. They lost Bejaia seven months after conquering it, recovered by an Almohad fleet but, together with Qaraqus, conquered other places: Gabes, Gafsa. Qaraqus conquered Tripoli.
To put down the rebellion, al-Mansur left for the province from the imperial capital on December 17, 1186. Part of the army was defeated in June 1187 near Gafsa. The caliph then defeated the enemies on October 14, near Gabes. He then subdued all the cities in the region that were in the hands of the enemy league. The success of the campaign was, however, temporary, and did not end the enemy actions, which continued. By the late 1190s, the region was again in rebellion and partly in the hands of the Banu Ganiya, Qaraqus and their Arab allies.
The caliph had to rush back to the western Maghreb in 1188 as two of his uncles and a brother had taken advantage of his absence to conspire against him. The plot, however, failed, and the three ringleaders were killed. During the campaign in the east, the Almohad sovereign had to prepare to move to al-Andalus to face the increasingly serious Portuguese and Castilian incursions. On September 3, 1189 and after four months of siege, Sancho I de Portugal and a Crusader fleet conquered Silves. For his part, Alfonso VIII of Castile continued with his cavalcades through the south of the peninsula and in June 1190 he took possession of Magacela and then Calasparra.
Resistance and disaster in al-Andalus
After the campaigns in the Maghreb, the caliph was finally able to go to al-Andalus in the spring of 1190. He signed a truce with the Castilians and, having a truce in force with the Leonese, dedicated himself to fighting the Portuguese. He sent forces to raid the lands of Silves and Évora while, with the bulk of the army, he marched to take Torres Novas. He then suffered a slight defeat at Tomar and returned to Seville at the end of June. In April 1191 He set out to recapture Alcácer do Sal, which he conquered in June. After dismantling a series of Portuguese castles (Palmada, Coina and Almada) he surrounded Silves, which fell into his possession at the end of the same month of June. The Portuguese then agreed to sign a truce. In October 1191 and after signing truces, which were to last until 1195, with Castilians and Leonese, he returned to the Maghreb.
Abu Yúsuf Ya'qub returned to the Iberian Peninsula in June 1195, because the truce signed with the Castilians had expired and they had decidedly resumed their incursions. He inflicted a crushing defeat on the Christians in the battle of Alarcos on July 18; the Castilian king did not wait for the promised Navarrese and Leonese reinforcements, attacked the Muslims and was defeated. The Almohad forces seized Alarcos and a series of nearby plazas. The caliph refused to make peace with the Castilians, and carried out aceifas against them in 1196 and 1197. He had the collaboration of the Leonese and the simultaneous attacks of Navarre and Aragon against Alfonso. In the first campaign, he took Montánchez, occupied Trujillo and Santa Cruz and Plasencia surrendered. He could not, however, take Talavera, Maqueda or Toledo. In 1197 he made a similar cavalcade, although somewhat more extensive (he came to pass through the lands of Madrid, Alcalá de Henares, Guadalajara, Huete, Cuenca and Alarcón, before returning via Jaén). The Almohad incursions served mainly to eliminate the Castilian outposts in La Mancha, since many places resisted them in the Tagus. with the Castilians, although not with the Leonese, abandoned the campaigns and returned to Seville. From there he went back to the Maghreb in April 1198, already ill, where he died in January of the following year. His son Muhammad an- Násir.
During his reign, the Almohad's inability to simultaneously confront the Christian states of the peninsula, their North African rivals, and the revolts in their territory became clear. In 1200, in Ifriquiya the Almohads only held Tunis and Constantine, the rest of the territory had been submitted to the Banu Ganiya, who defeated the caliph's forces on several occasions. To solve the problem, the caliphate authorities decided to attack the enemy's Balearic territory: in the summer of 1202 they sent a fleet from Denia that was made with Ibiza; the following year, they conquered Majorca. This did not discourage the Banu Ganiya, who continued their advances into the eastern Maghreb: in December 1203, they dispossessed the Almohads of Tunis. In February 1205 the Caliph set out at the head of an army that he inflicted a severe defeat on Yahya ibn Ganiya in October; He had to abandon Tunis and other cities and concentrate his forces on the defense of Mahdia, which, despite everything, he lost in January 1206. The new Almohad governor, who was granted extensive powers to put an end to the remnants of the Banu Ganiya, was the ancestor of the Hafsi dynasty that later seized power in the region.
In the peninsula, truces were fundamentally respected until the end of the first decade of the 13th century. In May 1211 the caliph went to Seville and was defeated the following year at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa by a broad Christian coalition. This defeat marked the extent of the weakness in the caliphate. resume the repopulation of the southern sub-plateau, entrusted, like the defense of the area, to the military orders. The Christian victory did not have great immediate effects, however, due to the crisis in which Castile and Aragon plunged almost immediately, with the death of their kings and the advent of minors. Muhammad an-Násir immediately returned to the Maghreb after the disaster, locked himself in the royal fortress and was assassinated there by his courtiers at the end of December 1213. He was succeeded by a young son, Abu Yaqub Yúsuf II al-Mustánsir, who had to face the powerful Berber threat of the Marinids.
Heyday
Abu Abdal·lah ibn Túmart was born in a Berber tribe in northwestern Morocco, in a very austere environment where he stood out for his ability to study. Around the age of 18, he undertook a fifteen-year long journey through the Arab world that took him to Córdoba, Mecca, Damascus and Baghdad among other large cities. Returning to his native city, he launched a religious reform movement supported by three main pillars, and which synthesized in an original way a large number of influences received in the previous period. These three pillars are:
- The need to develop science and knowledge to consolidate faith
- The existence of God, which seems undoubted and is perceived through reason
- The absolute unity of Allah, radically different from any of his creatures. It will criticize the typical custom of Western Islam to associate the divine with the earth, giving Allah anthropomorphic attributes. God is a pure, almost abstract entity, without any attribute that brings him closer to our reality. This absolute uniqueness was also reflected in its understanding of the Islamic community, which should be led by an imam, as a guide and model, to whom all must obey and imitate.
Despite the efforts of the rulers, the Almohad dynasty had problems from the beginning to dominate the entire territory of al-Andalus, especially Granada and Levante, where the famous Wolf King resisted for many years, with Christian support. On the other hand, some of his more radical positions were poorly received by the Muslim population of the Iberian Peninsula, alien to many Berber traditions. At the beginning of the XIII century, it had managed to reach its maximum territorial expansion with the submission of the current Tunisian territory and the conquest of the Balearic Islands.
The Christian threat from al-Andalus
Shortly thereafter, the Christian victory in the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) marks the beginning of the end of the Almohad dynasty, not only because of the outcome of the encounter itself, but also because of the subsequent death of the caliph al- Násir and the succession struggles that occurred and that plunged the caliphate into political chaos.
In 1216-1217, the Benimerines confronted the Almohads in Fez. In 1227 Ibn Hud proclaimed himself emir of Murcia, rising up against the Almohads. In 1229 the Hafsids of Tunisia became independent. In 1232 Muhammad I of Granada, known as al-Ahmar, proclaimed himself emir in Arjona, Jaén, Guadix and Baza. In 1237 he is recognized as emir in Granada. An army formed by forces of the Military Orders and the Bishop of Plasencia laid siege to the city of Trujillo. Muhammad ibn Hud responded to the request for help, but withdrew without harassing the besiegers. The city was conquered on January 25, 1232.
Decay
The principle of dynastic inheritance displeased the tribal chiefs, the sheikhs (from the Arabic sheikh or šayḫ, شيخ). After a serious defeat near Tunis in 1187, the emir had to ally with Saladin.
The Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula (Castilla, Aragón and Navarra and, to a lesser extent, Portugal and León) organized themselves to undertake a new Reconquest offensive; they put an end to their internal disputes and inflicted a crushing defeat on an-Násir at Las Navas de Tolosa (01212-07-16 16 July 1212). The caliph was assassinated by his courtiers a year later, in 1213, and was succeeded by his son Abu Yaqub II al-Mustansir, who managed to pacify the situation and is considered the last great sovereign of the empire. In reality, he lacked power, he did not abandon the capital except to visit the tomb of Ibn Túmart and left the management of the State in the hands of his uncles, great-uncles and some notable Almohads, dedicated more to intrigue than to face the serious crisis of the caliphate. Al-Mustánsir relieved various governors Andalusians and signed truces with the Castilians in 1214 and 1221; the Christian kingdom was then in the minority of two kings (Henry I and Ferdinand III). The truces were actually only partially respected. He had to crush Berber revolts in 1215 and 1221 and confront the Banu Ganiya on the limits of Ifriqiya. The main threat to the dynasty, however, came from the Benimerines, Cenete Berbers who defeated the governor of Fez in 1216 and that of Taza in 1217. They were extending their authority over rural areas and to collect taxes from some cities (Fez, Meknes, Rabat).
He died in 1224, shortly before the resumption of the Castilian incursions into al-Andalus. His power, however, had waned compared to that of his predecessors. He died perhaps of poisoning and left no children.
Power struggles and short-lived caliphs
He was succeeded by his great-uncle al-Wáhid, the ephemeral governor of Seville in 1121-1122, during whose reign the Almohad decadence worsened, both due to internal dissensions and the expansion of the Marinids, who since the beginning of the century ruled the rural areas of the Maghreb. His advent broke the traditional succession from father to son typical of the dynasty, which unleashed the ambition of other members of the family. Whoever owed the throne to one of the viziers also granted to these great influence on the politics of the caliphate. In September, after only eight months in power, he was deposed and, three days later, strangled. The Andalusian governors tried to establish themselves in their provinces and shake off Maghrebi control. of al-Wáhid marked the beginning of the disputes for power between the sons of the former caliph Abu Yúsuf Yaacub. In the middle of that decade, the resurgence of the power of the peninsular Christian states for the solution of The crises that arose in the previous decade were joined by the worsening of the Almohad crisis, characterized by the differences between peninsular Almohads and North Africans, between Andalusians and Almohads, and between Almohad groups on the peninsula.
In March 1224, the governor of Murcia, al-Ádil, whom al-Mustánsir had appointed in 1222, withdrawing the government of Granada, rebelled. He proclaimed himself caliph and obtained the recognition of his brother Abu l- 'Ula, governor of Córdoba and Granada, that of Abdalah al-Bayyasi, governor of Seville, and that of the rest of the Muslim territories of the peninsula, with the exception of Valencia, which remained faithful to the ephemeral al-Wáhid. -Wáhid was dethroned shortly and al-Ádil was recognized for a short time throughout the empire. At the end of the year, however, al-Bayyasi (the Baezano) rose up against him from his new fiefdom in Córdoba and obtained the support of Jaén, Quesada and the strongholds of the middle border. Faced with this uprising, al-Ádil, who in principle had remained in the peninsula despite having also been recognized as sovereign in the Maghreb, abandoned it and went to Africa, where he was assassinated in October 1226. To hold his own against Abu l-'Ula, the Baezan made a pact with Fern Commando III of Castilla, who helped him in exchange for the delivery of some strongholds; in 1226, he was, however, assassinated for his alliance with Castile. The Castilians seize Capilla and Baeza. Al-Bayyasi's request for help from Ferdinand III of Castile to confront Abu l-'Ula paved the way for Castilian conquests of Andalusian territories.
Abu l-'Ula, brother of the caliph and governor of Seville, proclaimed himself caliph in 1227, twenty days before the assassination of al-Ádil, under the name of al-Mamún. To treat to avoid the Castilian attacks, he paid them three hundred thousand maravedis of silver. Ibn Hud rebelled against him, but was defeated, although this setback had little consequence. The Andalusian caliph then prepared to go to the Maghreb and, in anticipation, expanded the pact with the Castilian king, to whom he ceded several more border fortresses. He went to the Maghreb a year after his proclamation as sovereign, in October 1228, to try to impose his dominance in the empire, since a nephew ruled in Africa his, al-Mutásim, from whom he seized power. His march marked the end of Almohad power in the Iberian Peninsula, except in some isolated nuclei, which lost contact with the central government. The vacuum was filled by Ibn Hud, who extended his influence throughout al-Andalus.
At the time that Fernando advanced in al-Andalus and subjected the main rebels to the Almohad power to vassalage —the lords of Baeza and Valencia—, the uprisings spread in the peninsula. The main one was that of the new lord of Murcia, Ibn Hud, who recognized the religious authority of the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad and obtained the support of Córdoba, Jaén, Seville and Granada. In the extreme east, the Catalan nobility and bourgeoisie decided to put an end to the source of piracy that the Balearic Islands and that harmed trade in the western Mediterranean. In September 1229, the expedition set out to conquer Majorca, which fell on the last day of December. The rest of the island, without military defenses, was easily occupied. In 1231 Menorca agreed to pay tribute to James I the conqueror and in 1235 a group of Catalan nobles took over Ibiza.
In the Maghreb, five other caliphs held waning power: al-Mamoun (1229-1232), al-Rashid (1232-1242), as-Said (1242-1248), al-Murtada (1248-1266) and Abu Dabus (1266-1269). The political and military crisis worsened due to the weaknesses of the Almohad State: a religious doctrine that clashed with the Maliki dictates, when it was the lawyers of this school who carried the weight of the State Administration; great cultural diversity; collapse of the Berbers, the first support of the Almohads who were later relegated by the Arabs and for this reason repeatedly rebelled and formed the nucleus of two rival dynasties (Marinids and Abdalwadis).
After the invasion of Eastern Barbary by the brothers Ali and Yahia ben Ghania, descendants of the Almoravids that Abd el-Mumin had dispossessed after crossing Algeria victoriously. The two brothers had established a principality in the Djerid; Ali was assassinated, but his brother Yahia began the conquest of central and northern Ifriqiya. He managed to seize Mahdia, Kairouan and Tunis in 1202, taking the Almohad governor and his sons prisoner. Ben Ghania looted the cities, their gardens and their animals. Faced with this situation full of dangers, the caliph an-Násir, who reigned in Marrakech, set out to reconquer Ifriqiya. He entered Tunis in February 1206, abandoned by the enemy, and stayed there for a year to restore Almohad authority throughout the territory. So, before returning to Morocco, he entrusted the government of the province to one of his trusted lieutenants, Abd el-Wáhid Abu Hafs el-Hentati (Arabicized form of the Berber name Faska u-Mzal Inti ).
The new government had been invested with broad powers: it recruited troops that were necessary for peace and for war, it appointed state officials, the cadis. He was an intelligent and energetic sovereign. After his death, his son Abu Zakariya succeeded him in 1228 and a year after his appointment, he declared independence from the caliph of Marrakesh, on the pretext that he had embraced Sunnism. Prince of a great dynasty, Abu Zakaria must have founded the Hafsid dynasty that ruled the eastern Maghreb for three centuries.
The Ending
The imperial territory was divided into a series of states governed by new dynasties: the Marinids, the Hafsids, the Nasrids and the Abdalwadis. In al-Andalus, the military failure before the Christian states and the Almohad's inability to maintain unity by force they sealed the loss of authority; in the eastern Maghreb, the power of the sheikhs, supported by the powerful Arab tribes of the area, led to the rise of the Hafsids; in the central zone, the abdalwadíes, Berbers arose; In the western area, it was the Marinirines, also Berbers, who stripped the Almohads of power.
In the Maghreb, local dynasties prevailed: the Hafsids in Tunis in 1229; the Abdalwadis in the central Maghreb in 1239; or the Merinids, who in 1244 conquered Meknes, located in the west of the Maghreb. In al-Andalus, the third Taifa kingdoms arose. The Nasrids of Granada created an independent kingdom that lasted until 1492. At the same time, the Reconquest was progressing apace: Qurṭuba (present-day Córdoba), the symbol city of Hispanic Islam, fell in 1236; Balansiya (Valencia), in 1238; Isbiliya (Seville), in 1248. These successive setbacks and the disintegration of the empire sounded like a death knell for the Almohad dynasty, which ended with Abû al-`Ulâ al-Wâthiq Idrîs, after the capture of Marrakech by the Marinids in 1268. The following year, the Marinids seized Tinmallal.
Economy and trade
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Despite continuous warfare, the empire was prosperous during the reign of the first three caliphs.
In the time of the Almohads, the Muslims, who had already organized the forms of their trade according to the needs of international traffic, refined their methods, which were inspired by the Christians. Despite the differences of religion, and despite the development of the race (where control escaped the African sovereigns), relations and exchanges between Christians and Muslims did not stop growing.
The Maghreb did not only trade with Spain, since its commercial ties reached the cities of Tunis, Bugía, Constantina, Tlemcen and Ceuta (in Ceuta there was a Marseilles funduk, fundicium marcilliense, around 1236). Goods produced in this area were transported and exchanged with the states of Pisa, Genoa, Venice, and the wealthy city of Marseille. In 1186, despite religious differences, the caliphate signed a trade treaty with Pisa.
Almohad art
The buildings of the Almohads are characterized by being simple and austere, a reflection of the hard life of the nomads of the Maghreb. However, on many occasions the buildings reach a considerable size. Classic examples of this movement are the Torre del Oro and the Giralda, both in Seville, the Espantaperros tower in Badajoz, the Kutubiyya mosque in Marrakech or the Hasan Tower in Rabat.
Torre del Oro (Sevilla)
Torre de Espantaperros (Badajoz)
Giralda de Sevilla
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