Third Saudi state

The third Saudi state is the name historians give to the realm built by Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman Al Saud, known as Ibn Saud, from his seizure of Riyadh in January 1902 to the proclamation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, and to the kingdom that continues it today. It followed two earlier Saudi states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and passed through several stages and names, from a small emirate around Riyadh to a dual Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd.

The House of Saud lost Riyadh in the early 1890s to its rivals, the Al Rashid of the Emirate of Jabal Shammar, based at Ha'il. The family wandered through eastern Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain before settling in Kuwait for nearly a decade. In late 1901 the young Ibn Saud set out with a small band of relatives and followers, and in mid-January 1902, according to differing accounts on the 13th or 15th, they slipped into Riyadh by night with about forty men and killed the Rashidi governor. This raid marks the start of the third Saudi state.

From 1902 to 1913 the new state was the Emirate of Riyadh. Ibn Saud fought a long struggle with the Rashidis and their Ottoman backers, suffering a heavy defeat in June 1904 before wearing down Ottoman forces with guerrilla warfare. By 1912 he controlled most of Nejd, the central plateau of Arabia, and around then he founded the Ikhwan, a religious and military brotherhood of settled Bedouin who became the core of his armies.

In 1913 Saudi forces took the eastern region of al-Hasa from its Ottoman garrison, and the state became the Emirate of Nejd and Hasa. Under the Treaty of Darin with Britain, and again after the First World War, Ibn Saud received British weapons and money, and in 1920 he turned against the Rashidis once more. Their defeat and the capture of Ha'il left him master of all Nejd, and in 1921 he took the title of Sultan of Nejd. In 1922 a treaty with Britain signed at Uqair recognised many of his gains.

The Hashemite rulers of the Hejaz, the western region holding Mecca and Medina, had long been rivals. Saudi forces took Mecca in 1925, and the kingdom of the Hejaz surrendered on 19 December that year. On 8 January 1926 Ibn Saud was proclaimed King of the Hejaz, receiving the oath of allegiance in the Great Mosque of Mecca, and his lands became known as the Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd.

Ibn Saud made Nejd a kingdom too on 29 January 1927, and by the Treaty of Jeddah of 20 May 1927 Britain recognised his independence. The Soviet Union had already recognised the kingdom in 1926, and the United States followed in 1931. For five years the two halves were governed separately. The Ikhwan, angered by his ban on raids into British-protected territories, rebelled, and Ibn Saud crushed them at the Battle of Sabilla in March 1929.

On 23 September 1932 Ibn Saud proclaimed the union of Nejd, the Hejaz, al-Hasa and Qatif as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, under his own crown. The new state succeeded the First Saudi State and the second as the realm of the House of Saud and is the direct ancestor of modern Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud reigned until his death in 1953.

Our 1930 map shows the realm as the Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd, two years before it was renamed Saudi Arabia.