Prelude: Shadows and Dust
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the crescent moon of Islam had been steadily waning. The golden age of the Ummayad and Abbassid Caliphs was but a distant memory, their legacy evaporating as the once great empire shattered and burst into ever smaller sultanates and emirates. When the Almohad dynasty collapsed in 1269 – under the combined pressure of the Christian kingdoms in Al-Andalus and perpetual domestic feuds – the ancient dream of a universal ummah seemed lost forever.
For almost two centuries the local berber dynasties of North Africa, claiming to be true successors of the Almohads (or “unitarians”), tried to carve out a new Maghribi empire. The Hafsids of Tunisia, The Marinids of Morocco, and the Zayyanids of Western Algeria all strived for hegemony, but in the end they barely managed to get a grip on their own lands. Like the ever shifting sands of the nearby deserts, fortunes were flimsy in the whirlwinds of Ifriqiya.
But not all was shadows and dust – a few inspired sultans truly showed greatness. Indeed, most historians today agree that Yaghmurasan, the founder of the Zayyanid dynasty, planted the seeds of a proto-Algerian state. From his capital at Tlemcen, situated at he head of the old imperial route to Marrakech, he held sway over much of the central Maghreb. During his lifetime, Oran, the kingdom’s port and trading centre, became one of the great emporiums of trans-Saharan trade, controlling a steady influx of opium, gold and slaves. But great wealth bore great envy, and in the decades following Yaghmurasan’s death, Tlemcen was besieged and sacked repeatedly by the Marinids of Morocco. A new invasion in 1370 forced two princes of Tlemcen to flee for their lives into the sea of dunes, where the sands swallowed them. Thus the unity of Algiers under the Zayyanids remained ephemeral at best, as they were vulnerable to attacks from their more powerful neighbours, as well as to internal division and strife within the Imazighen – or “free men”, as the berbers called themselves.
It was the profound awareness of this vulnerability that made the Zayyanid rulers of the fifteenth century rethink their priorities. For the first time, the sultans looked at the sea in earnest. Indeed, their berber ancestors had the desert life burned so deeply into their minds that they didn’t think much of traveling by ship and ocean. But along the Mediterranean basin, piracy had been a way of life since the dawn of civilization. In 1415, Henry the Navigator led two hundred sailboats across the Gibraltar Straits to Portugal’s first overseas venture, and the quick seizure of the Moroccan port of Ceuta demonstrated once again that there was no strong Muslim state left in the Maghreb or Spain. Hence, when Ahmad ascended the Zayyanid throne in 1430 after another period of tribal conflicts, he began working actively toward a new Maghribi alliance. In the ensuing years, he moved his court to Algiers, a safer and more heavily fortified city – and an ideal corsair base. The Islamic answer to the Christian advances would be hard and uncompromising.
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