Mauretania

Mauretania was an ancient Berber kingdom in north-west Africa, centred on what is now northern Morocco and later stretching into western Algeria. Its people were known to the Romans as the Mauri, the origin of the word "Moors". Independent from at least the late third century BCE, the kingdom became a Roman client state in 25 BCE and was annexed by Rome in the 40s CE, after which the name lived on in two Roman provinces.

The Latin name joins Mauri with a territorial ending and is usually explained as "land of the Moors". Greek myth placed the Titan Atlas, its first legendary king, in the region, and some ancient writers put the garden of the Hesperides near the city of Lixus. The Roman historian Sallust offered a different tale, deriving the Mauri partly from Medes who had served in the army of Hercules.

The first king known from history is Baga, who ruled around the end of the third century BCE from the Atlantic coast to the Moulouya River. Mauretania stayed formally neutral in the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome, though in 206 BCE Baga gave the exiled Massylian prince Masinissa an escort of 4,000 horsemen. After a gap in the record, Bocchus I appears around 110 BCE. He first backed his son-in-law Jugurtha of Numidia against Rome, then, persuaded by Sulla, betrayed him to the Romans in return for western Numidia. Close ties with Rome followed, and Mauretania became an important source of wild animals for Roman games.

After Mastanesosus, the kingdom was shared between two brothers: Bogud in the west and Bocchus II in the east, based at Iol. Both sided with Julius Caesar in his civil war, and Bogud fought for him at Munda in Spain. In the struggle that followed they split, Bogud backing Mark Antony and Bocchus II backing Octavian. In 38 BCE Bocchus seized the west and reunited the kingdom; on his death in 33 BCE he left it to Octavian, who governed it directly for some years.

In 25 BCE Augustus made Mauretania a client kingdom under Juba II, son of King Juba I, who had grown up in Rome; he married Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Antony and Cleopatra. Juba renamed Iol Caesarea, modern Cherchell, rebuilt cities in Greco-Roman style and developed a purple-dye industry on the Atlantic coast near Mogador. His Romanising policies, however, provoked local revolts. His son Ptolemy succeeded him around 23–24 CE and helped Rome fight the rebel Tacfarinas, but in 40 CE the emperor Caligula had him executed, for reasons that ancient and modern writers explain differently.

Ptolemy's death sparked a rising, led first by his freedman Aedemon and then by a commander named Sabalus, which Roman armies under Claudius suppressed by about 44 CE. Rome then organised the land as two provinces, Mauretania Tingitana, governed from Tingis (Tangier), and Mauretania Caesariensis, divided at the Moulouya River. Mauretania gave Rome one emperor, Macrinus, who ruled briefly in 217–218. Christianity was present from the third century.

From the late third century, Roman control shrank to a few coastal towns, and much of the interior passed to local Berber rulers who kept elements of Roman culture; one, Masuna, called himself king of the Moors and Romans. The Vandals took Roman Africa in the fifth century, and after the Byzantine reconquest of 533–534 imperial rule in Mauretania was largely nominal. The Romano-Berber kingdoms resisted the Arab conquest until the early eighth century, after which Islam became the dominant faith.

Our maps for 200 BCE and 100 BCE draw the kingdom, labelled "Mauretania", in northern Morocco, beside Numidia, its eastern neighbour in this period.