Kingdom of Tlemcen

For more than three centuries the Zayyanids, a Berber dynasty, ruled a kingdom from the city of Tlemcen in what is now north-western Algeria. Founded in the 1230s as the Almohad Caliphate broke apart, it sat between two stronger neighbours, the Marinids of Fez to the west and the Hafsids of Tunis to the east, and grew rich on the caravan trade linking the Mediterranean with the gold markets south of the Sahara, before the Ottomans absorbed it in the 1550s.

The ruling family, the Banu Abd al-Wad, also called the Zayyanids, were a Berber clan long settled in the central Maghreb. Chroniclers credited them with noble Arab ancestry, but their founder, Yaghmurasen ibn Zayyan, reportedly brushed the claim aside in Berber with "God only knows". Governor of Tlemcen for the Almohads, he took over the family leadership in 1235 and soon declared independence. In 1248 he defeated and killed the Almohad caliph at Oujda, and in 1264 he took Sijilmasa, bringing the two chief northern outlets of the Saharan trade under one ruler for about a decade.

Through most of its history the kingdom was on the defensive. The Marinid sultan Abu Yaqub Yusuf besieged Tlemcen from 1299 to 1307, building a rival town, al-Mansura, outside its walls; when he was murdered and his army withdrew, the Zayyanids razed it. Under Abu Hammu I and Abu Tashfin I the kingdom recovered, the city grew to perhaps 100,000 people by the 1330s, and Zayyanid troops even occupied Tunis in the 1320s. The Marinid Abu al-Hasan answered with a siege that took Tlemcen in 1337, and the Marinids held it again in the 1350s.

Abu Hammu Musa II, who reigned from 1359 to 1389, restored the dynasty and fought the Marinids, the Hafsids and rival relatives for three decades. The historian Ibn Khaldun lived in Tlemcen during his reign, helped him deal with the nomadic Arab tribes, and praised the city's scholars. Tlemcen became the main intellectual centre of the central Maghreb, with madrasas, mosques and palaces such as the fortified Mechouar.

Tlemcen lay on the east-west road from Fez to Ifriqiya and on a north-south route from the port of Oran to the Saharan oases and the markets of West Africa. Its souq traded rugs and woollens, local leather and pottery, slaves and gold from across the desert, while a European trading house linked African and European merchants, and Genoese bills of exchange circulated there. Tlemcen merchant families kept agents as far away as Mali.

From the late fourteenth century the kingdom slid into vassalage, at different times to the Marinids, to the Hafsid dynasty and to the Crown of Aragon. Abu Malek briefly took Fez in the early fifteenth century, but Hafsid intervention soon reduced him. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, many exiles settled in the kingdom; one rabbi put their number at around 12,000. By then the emirs controlled little beyond the city itself, and Spanish power was spreading along the coast. In the 1550s the Ottoman Regency of Algiers took Tlemcen; accounts date the end of the dynasty to between 1551 and 1556. The last sultan fled to Spanish-held Oran and was baptised as a Christian.

Shown on our maps as the Zayyanid Caliphate, the kingdom appears in 1492 and 1500, in its late, weakened phase, between Morocco to the west and the Hafsid lands to the east.