The Mercenary Mediterranean_ Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon - Hussein Fancy

28 chapter one

such as the Zanāta to the universal mission of Islam.^69 Thus below, wher-

ever possible, I have attempted to balance Ibn Khaldūn’s text with other

sources.

In his time, Ibn Khaldūn described the Zanāta as an ethnic grouping

comprising numerous tribes that dominated the central Maghrib (con-

temporary Morocco and Algeria), so numerous, in fact, that the entire re-

gion was colloquially known as the “land of the Zanāta (waṭan al- zanāta).”^70

He roughly divided the history of these tribes into two periods of ascen-

dancy, key examples of his recurrent cycle: in the tenth century, under the

Maghrāwa (specifically, the Banū Khazar and Banū Yifran), and again, in

the thirteenth century, under the two great Berber dynasties, the Marīnids

(Banū Marīn) and the ‘Abd al- Wādids (also known as the Zayyānids).

In that first period, according to Ibn Khaldūn, although these tribes

were composed of a variety of transhumant stockbreeders, cultivators,

and city dwellers, the Zanāta had already developed a singular reputation

for their formidable warriors, above all their cavalry ( fāris, pl. fursān), who

were lightly armed and specialized in raiding.^71 The Zanāta, in particular

the Maghrāwa tribe, formed the backbone of the Andalusī Umayyad’s

resistance against the Fāṭimids, shī ‘ īs, who — supported by the traditional

rivals of the Zanāta, the Ṣanhāja — were making inroads into central North

Africa.^72 And although the Zanāta eventually agreed to become clients of

the Umayyad Caliphs, as Ibn Khaldūn described, this alliance involved a

curious embrace of reciprocal manipulation.^73 Ruling from a distance, the

Umayyads played the various Zanāta tribes off of one another, showering

honors and titles on one chief in order to incite the jealousy of others.^74

Through this policy, engineered by the ambitious chamberlain (ḥājib) and

later sultan, Ibn Abī ‘Āmir al- Manṣūr (Almanzor in contemporary Span-

ish sources), the Umayyads pursued a short- lived but failed imperial proj-

ect in North Africa.^75 For their part, the Zanāta chiefs, above all those of

the Maghrāwa, turned this strategy to their own advantage by using the

threat of rebellion to negotiate for land grants (iqṭā‘), rights, and honors.^76

Throughout this first period of ascendancy, the Umayyads recruited

Zanāta and Ṣanhāja troops into al- Andalus, that is, into the Iberian Pen-

insula.^77 They referred to these new troops generically as the Tangerines

(Ṭanjiyyūn) because they arrived from the port of Tangiers. And in the

period of the Caliph al- Ḥakam II al- Mustanṣir (r. 961 – 976 ), these paid

troops entirely displaced Arab Syrian armies, becoming the dominant

force on the Muslim- Christian frontier. Simultaneously, the Berber tribes

also became a powerful political force in al- Andalus. Their involvement