The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate: Ifriqiya and Its Andalusis, 1200-1400

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylania Press, 2011. Hardcover. Good +/Good +. Hardcover. 9 1/4" X 6 1/4". 238pp. Mild creasing and shelf wear to covers, corners, and edges of unclipped dust jacket. Creasing along all edges of jacket and inside flaps. Bound in blue cloth over boards with spine lettered in gilt. Cloth is fraying slightly along the outside corners of boards. Mild rubbing along spine. Gentle bump to tail of spine. Faint dust-spotting along top of text block. Pages are clean and unmarked. Binding is sound.

ABOUT THIS BOOK:
The thirteenth century marks a turning point in the history of the western Mediterranean. The armies (truncated) 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 qiy 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 qiy 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 qiy 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 qiy . Setting the activities of Andalusis such as the celebrated historian Ibn Khald n (1332-1406) in relation to specific political, economic, and intellectual developments in Ifr qiy , 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.(Publisher). (Inventory #: 16621)