North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

VI

The secular phase of Berber life in these ages is vividly illustrated in the person and career of Yarmorâsen Ben Zeiyân, the founder of the first kingdom of Tlemcen. He belonged to the tribe of Abd el-Wâd, who, with their cousins, the Beni-Mérin, under the pressure of the Arabs of the second invasion, came up from the desert and took possession of the coast, the former about Tlemcen and the latter in Morocco. For many years these tribes, under the Almohades, had exercised feudal rights over the country; they came north in the spring and summer, and collected tribute from the agriculturalists and townsmen, and returned in winter to their desert homes with the supplies they had thus obtained. Their rise has been termed, not inaptly, a renaissance of the Berber race power, as, indeed, the entire history of the Berbers was a series of explosions of national force, succeeding each other in one or another place at long intervals, but impotent to found a permanent political state. Yarmorâsen was of the type of Tamburlane; a simple Berber, he was unable to speak Arabic, but he had military and organizing genius, became chief and conqueror, and founded the dynasty with which the glory of Tlemcen began. At the moment the Almohades were nearing their fall. The country is described as in anarchy: everywhere the spirit of revolt broke out, the people refused to pay taxes, brigands infested the great routes, the officials were shut up in the towns, the country people were without protection; the region was at the mercy of its nomad masters. It was then that Yarmorâsen found his opportunity, seized independent power, and established order such as was known to that civilization. He was a great man of his race, brave, feared, honored, who understood the interests of his people, political administration, and the art and ends of rule. He reigned forty-four years, amid continuous war; he was defeated early in his career by the ruler of Tunis, but the victor could find no better man on whom to devolve the government than the foe he had overthrown; and it is an interesting point to observe that his ambassador of state, on this occasion, who made the treaty, was his mother. He was respectful of the rights of courtesy, at least, and won applause by his kind treatment of the sister and women of the Almohad prince he overthrew, sending them back to their own land under escort.

In the battle which marked the fall of the Almohades and the independence of Tlemcen there were characteristic incidents. The van of the march of the old princes was led by the Koran, one of the earliest and most famous copies, which the Almohades had captured from the Moors of Grenada and rebound and incrusted with jewels; it was borne on a dromedary, and enclosed in a silk-covered coffer surmounted by a beautiful palm; small flags fluttered from the corners, while before it floated a great white banner on a long staff. It was thus that the Almohades always went out to war. When the two armies stood in battle order, the women on both sides ran through the ranks with uncovered faces and by their cries, gestures, and looks animated their warriors to fight. A similar scene is described by a modern author in writing of a Kabyle village feud; the battle-field, he says, was the dry bed of a torrent, between two slopes; on the heights of the ravine on either side stood the women, barefooted, bare-armed, uttering sharp cries which crossed over the heads of the fighters. “They are all there, their mothers, their wives, their sisters, their daughters, serried one against another like the flowers of a crown; even the widows whose husbands were killed in the last spring combat, even the révoltées who had left their husbands declaring they would no longer serve them,—all adorned and painted for the battle. Rich or poor, young or old, beautiful as idols or disfigured by age and suffering, they are all together, their arms interlaced, their eyes wide and full of fire, at the foot of each village, a confused mass of ornaments, bright colors and miserable rags, lifted by one movement, erect with hate and terror.” The men charge, fire point-blank, engage hand to hand with their yatagans—“better a hundred times die here than go back to the village, because their women will that they should die.” It was such a scene when Yarmorâsen fought with the Almohad prince, Es-Saïd.

Yarmorâsen was more than a fighter; he was an enlightened governor. Tlemcen was then a double city—Agadir and Tagrart, not an arrow’s flight between them. Tagrart had been the “camp” of the invading Almoravides, who had taken Agadir, and as victor it was now the city of the functionaries and government, while the people—the old inhabitants—continued to live in Agadir. Yarmorâsen cared for both, and built the minaret of Agadir, and also that of the grand mosque of Tlemcen, but he declined to inscribe his name upon them, saying: “It is enough that God knows.” He built other public works and the city grew into a thriving capital, not only of war, but of residence and trade, and also became famous for its schools. Among other learned men whom his reputation as a protector of the liberal arts attracted to his court was one, brilliant in that century, Abou Bekr Mohammed Ibn Khattab, whose story especially interested me. He was a poet, and commanded not only a fine hand, but a beautiful epistolary style. Yarmorâsen made him the first secretary of state, and he wrote despatches to the lords of Morocco and Tunis so elegantly composed that, says the Arabian historian Tenesi, they were still learned by heart in his day; and he adds that with this poet the art of writing diplomatic despatches in rhymed prose ceased. The Berber prince deserves grateful memory among poets as the last patron of a lost grace of the art, not likely to find its renaissance ever; and they must read with pleasure the starry and flowery titles with which the chroniclers adorn his glory—the magnanimous, the lion-heart, the bounteous cloud, the shining rose, the kingliest of nobles, the noblest of kings, the well-beloved, the sword of destiny, the lieutenant of God, crown of the great, Emir of the Moslems, Yarmorâsen Ben Zeiyân.

He left a line of strong and brilliant rulers who were warriors first of all, for the glorious age of Tlemcen was a period of intense life, and the little city had often to battle for its existence. It suffered reverses; not long after the death of Yarmorâsen a contemporary Arabian traveller thus depicts it: “This city is very beautiful to see, and contains magnificent things; but they are houses without inhabitants, estates without owners, places that no one visits. The clouds with their showers weep for the misfortunes of the town, and the doves on the trees deplore its destiny with their moaning cry.” Its recovery, however, must have been rapid, for in the next reign Tachfin found time in the intervals of war to build the Great Basin and a beautiful college, and he reared also the minaret of the great mosque at Algiers. These were the years of the life-and-death struggle with the Beni-Mérin, of which Mansourah is the monument. The great siege had been sustained and the peril beaten back; but now the enemy returned, and from a new Mansourah on the same site they directed their attack so well that they took Tagrart, old Tlemcen—Tachfin, the king, falling in battle. The victor, Abou’l-Hasen, was a worthy conqueror and the founder of the artistic Mansourah, that I have described, with its palace, its mosque, and its columns; he made the new city his royal residence, over against Tagrart as Tagrart had stood over against Agadir, and he adorned the suburbs of the old city; he built the mosque and college of Sidi bou-Médyen, and his son the mosque of our good Saint Bonbon; he was an art-loving prince and a wide victor, magnificent in royal presents which he exchanged with the Sultan of Egypt, and in all ways glorious; but I remember him best as the conqueror who, after he had swept the coast of Africa to the desert limit, returning, stood on that solitary beach at Mahdia, that so impressed me, and “reflected on the lot of those who had preceded him, men still greater and more powerful on the earth.” But this domination of the Beni-Mérin, who after all were cousins, lasted only a score of years; and the line of Yarmorâsen came to its own again, in the person of Abou-Hammou, of the younger branch. He had been born and bred in Andalusia, and was an accomplished prince. He wrote a book upon the art of government for the education of his son, which may be read now in Spanish, and he was a great patron of learning; he built a beautiful college, adorned with marble columns, trees and fountains, for his friend, the sage Abou-ben-Ahmed, attended the first lecture and endowed the institution with sufficient property for its maintenance. He, too, labored in war; but the remarkable trait of these princes of the rude Berber stock is that, notwithstanding the state of instant and long-continued warfare in which they held their lives and power, they were as great builders as warriors, and unceasing in their patronage of learning and the arts. This was the great age of the city in the reigns I have touched on. A score of descendants carried on the rule through another century to the scene of trade, war, and study that Leo the African portrays in the city. He describes the various aspects of this great market of the desert, its buildings, and especially its four classes of citizens, merchants, artisans, soldiers, and students. Of these last he says: “The scholars are very poor and live in colleges in very great wretchedness; but when they come to be doctors, they are given some reader’s or notary’s office, or they become priests.” Alas, the scholar’s life! Doubtless it was the same in Yarmorâsen’s time. It is a pathetic thing to me to think of those thousands of poor free scholars, through generations, seeking the light as best they could in this university city, for such it was—what a record of self-denial and deprivation, of belief in the highest, of living on the bread of hope! But it was all to end—the old Tlemcen—with the coming of the Turk; he came in the peculiarly atrocious form of the pirate, Aroudj, master of Algiers, who gathered all the young princes of the old blood royal, a numerous band, and drowned them in the Great Basin.