The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate

The thirteenth century marks a turning point in the history of the western Mediterranean. The armies of Castile and Aragon won significant and decisive victories over Muslims in Iberia and took over a number of important cities including Cordoba, Seville, Jaen, and Murcia. Chased out of their native cities, a large number of Andalusis migrated to Ifr&#299qiya in northern Africa. There, a newly founded Hafsid dynasty (1229-1574) welcomed members of the Andalusi elite and showered them with honors and high positions at court.

While historians have tended to conceive of Ifr&#299qiya as a region ruled by the Hafsids, Ramzi Rouighi argues in The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate that the Andalusis who joined the Hafsid court supported economic arrangements and political relationships that effectively prevented regional integration from taking place during this period. Rouighi examines an array of documentary, literary, and legal sources to argue that Ifr&#299qiya was integrated neither politically nor economically and that, consequently, it was not a region in a meaningful sense. Through a close reading of narrative sources, especially historical chronicles, Rouighi further argues that the emergence in the late fourteenth century of the political ideology of Emirism accounts for the representation of the rule of the Hafsid dynasty over cities as its rule over the whole of Ifr&#299qiya. Setting the activities of Andalusis such as the celebrated historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) in relation to specific political, economic, and intellectual developments in Ifr&#299qiya, The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate proposes a counter to the dynastic-centric view of the period that pervades medieval sources and continues to inform most modern generalizations about the Maghrib and the Mediterranean.

Autorentext

Ramzi Rouighi

Inhalt

Introduction: Orientations

PART I. THE LIMITS OF REGIONAL INTEGRATION
Chapter 1. The Politics of the Emirate
Chapter 2. Taxation and Land Tenure
Chapter 3. Between Land and Sea

PART II. EMIRISM AND THE MAKING OF A REGION
Chapter 4. The Age of the Emir
Chapter 5. Learning and the Emirate
Chapter 6. Emirism and the Writing of History
Conclusion: Departures

List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index