• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

AD 1207-1534 - Hafsids

The eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed the rise in Morocco of two rival Berber tribal dynasties-the Almoravids and Almohads, both founded by religious reformers-that dominated the Maghrib and Muslim Spain for more than 200 years. The founder of the Almohad (literally, "one who proclaims" the oneness of God) movement was a Sunni aiim, Ibn Tumart (d. 1130), who preached a doctrine of moral regeneratioxi through the reaffirmation of monotheism. As judge and political leader as well as spiritual director, Ibn Tumart gave the Almohads a hierarchical and theocratic centralized government, respecting but transcending the old representative tribal structure. His successor, the sultan Abd al Mumin (1130-63), subdued Morocco, extended the Muslim frontier in Spain, and by 1160 had swept eastward across the Maghrib and forced the withdrawal of the Normans - with safe passage - from their strongholds in Ifriquiya, which he added to the Almohad empire.

Abd al Mumin proclaimed a caliphate at Cordova, giving the Almohad sultan supreme religious as well as political authority within his domains, but religious reform gradually gave way to dynastic politics as the motivating force behind the movement. The Almohads had succeeded in unifying the Maghrib, but as its empire grew and the Almohad power base shifted to Spain, the dynasty became more remote from the Berber tribes that had launched it. By 1270 the Almohads in Morocco had succumbed to tribal warfare and in Spain to the steady advance to Castile.

At the eastern end of the Almohad empire the sultan left an autonomous viceroy whose office became hereditary in the line of Mohamed ben Abu Hafs (1207-21), a descendant of one of Ibn Tumart's companions. With the demise of the Almohad dynasty in Morocco, the Hafsids adopted the titles of caliph and sultan and considered themselves the Almohads' legitimate successors, keeping alive the memory of Ibn Tumart and the ideal of Maghribi unity. Their dynasty survived in Tunisia - as Ifriquiya came to be known - until the sixteenth century.

The poet-prince Abu Zakariya al Hafs (1228-49) moved his captial from Kairouan, which had never recovered from its sacking by the Hilalians, to Tunis, which then became the cultural and po. litical capital of the country. The Hafsids' political support and Tunisia's economy were rooted in the coastal towns, while the hinterland was effectively given up to the tribes that had made their nominal submission to Tunis. The Hafsid sultans encouraged trade with Europe, forged close links with Aragon and the Italian maritime states, and dispatched embassies as far afield as the court of King Haakon of Norway.

The Maghrib and Spain, linked under the Almohads, shared a common culture - called Moorish - that transcended dynastic lines and political boundaries in creating new and unique forms of art, literature, and architecture. Its influence spread eastward from Spain as far as Tunisia, where the return of order and prosperity made possible a second flowering of Arab culture and scholarship. Under the Hafsids the school of the Zituna Mosque in Tunis was recognized as the leading center of Islamic learning in the Maghrib, but Hafsid Tunisia's culture was essentially a phenomenon of the court, dependent on the patronage of its sultans. One of the greatest intellectual figures of the Hafsid age was Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), the historian and critic, who attempted to formulate historical laws to explain the rise and fall of dynasties in the Islamic world in his encyclopedic Al Muqaddinia, (Prolegomena or "Introduction" to universal history), a work that remains an important source of information about early Maghribi history.

Despite commercial and diplomatic ties, Hafsid relations with the European powers eventually deteriorated. In 1270 Louis IX of France (Saint Louis) led the Eighth Crusade to Tunisia, where he died of the plague. The Aragonese intrigued in the dynasty's increasingly troubled and complex internal politics, backing rival claimants to the Hafsid throne. Marabout republics, tribal states, and the coastal enclaves seized by Andalusian and renegade Greek pirates defied the sultan's authority and by the fifteenth century had supplanted it in large parts of Tunisia. The Hafsids periodically attempted to revive the dynasty's fortunes, only to exhaust their resources in the effort; but during the Hafsid era, spanning more than 300 years, Tunisia acquired a distinctive character and defined its place within the Islamic world.