The Wolf King

Front matter

The Wolf King

Ibn Mardanish and the

Construction of Power in al-Andalus

Contents

Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xiii

Note on Transliteration xv

Introduction: Ibn Mardanish as Historical Figure and Historiographic Subject

Introduction

Ibn Mardanish as Historical Figure and Historiographic Subject

Muhammad ibn Sa'd ibn Ahmad ibn Mardanish became ruler of eastern al-Andalus in 542/1147, as Almoravid power waned. Andalusi by birth, he was the son of a commander of the Marrakech-based Almoravid armies who had, according to legend, given King Alfonso I of Aragon a deadly blow at the Battle of Fraga (528/1134). During his quarter-century in power, Ibn Mardanish was the single most formidable enemy of the Almohad Empire, which by the mid-twelfth century stretched across most of North Africa and conquered the rest of al-Andalus in the decades that followed. He continued to fight off Almohad armies until his death in 567/1172. This fascinating figure does not fit neatly into the typical paradigms for the histories of che eleventh and twelfth centuries in al-Andalus. Those histories often portray the North African-based Berber dynasties of the Almoravids and Almohads locked in conflict with Andalusis. Neither does he fit into the teleological narrative of Christian-Muslim enmity often called the Reconquista, a construct that imagines Christians united to fight Muslim invaders for a period of some seven hundred years. Ibn Mardanish, known in Christian sources as el rey lobo or rex lupus—the Wolf King—broke every mold. He allied with the kings of Castile, Aragon, and Barcelona, formed trade agreements with the Italian merchant cities of Genoa and Pisa, and garnered posthumous praise from a pope as “Wolf King of Glorious Memory.” He even appeared in Castilian documents as a vassal to Alfonso VIII, the child-king, whose regency caused strife among the noble families of Castile and Aragon. At the same time, Ibn Mardanish was at pains to present himself as a standard-bearer for the Abbasid caliphate in the east, and to make his court a major cultural center in the Islamic west. He minted gold coins in the name of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad for the first time on the Iberian Peninsula since 138/755, when the Umayyad ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Dakhil invaded al-Andalus and sent the Abbasid governor packing. As an Andalusi emir for the Abbasids, vassal to a Castilian king, rival to the nascent Almohad caliphate, who managed to gain and maintain power over nearly half of al-Andalus for twenty-five years, “the Wolf King" deserves our attention.’

This book unfurls the story of Ibn Mardanish, both in his lifetime and in the eight and a half centuries that have followed. I situate him in the Islamic world of the Middle Period (1000-1500), when vast numbers of non-Arabs converted to Islam and began to integrate themselves into Islamic political systems, and in the particular context of the twelfth century, when the rivalry between the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates accelerated the rise of new kinds of religious and military leaders. He also operated in the polyglot setting of the western Mediterranean, and drew on traditions near and far to legitimate his authority. Finally, I trace how ideas about Ibn Mardanish have transformed over time, as his territory was lost first to the Almohads and then split between Castile and Aragon, as the last kingdoms of al-Andalus fell, and as scholars in Spain and beyond attempted to make sense of the Iberian Peninsula’s Islamic past. Ibn Mardanish’s story illuminates not only the dynamism of politics and culture in the medieval western Mediterranean, but also how its complexity has been flattened to serve more modern ideologies. Historians writing after Ibn Mardanish’s death have often sought to fit him into categories—geographic, genealogical, temporal—the twelfth-century figure would not have recognized.

1 The best brief overview of Ibn Mardanish's time in power is Emilio Molina López, "Apuntes en torno al perfil biográfico de un dirigente local andalusí, Muhammad b. Sa'd b. Mardanié (siglo XII)," in Regnum Murciae: Génesis y configuración del Reino de Murcia, ed. A. Robles Fernández and I. Pozo Martínez (Murcia: Comunidad Autónoma de la Región de Murcia, 2008), 87-101. In addition, two books in Arabic have focused on Ibn Mardanish and his family. They provide a valuable survey of the Arabic sources that discuss this figure: Jabir Khalifa Jabir, Banz Mardanisb wa-dawrabum al-siyasi wa-l-' askari fi al-Andalus (Damascus: Dar Amal al-Jadida, 2017); Simün Hayik, Ibn Mardanish aw al-Muwahhidün (Jüniya, Lebanon: al-Matba'a al-Bülrya), 1993.

In the 1840s, the eminent Dutch Arabist Reinhart Pieter Anne Dozy sat down to write about a curious incident in the history of Granada, for his book on the political and literary history of medieval Spain. After the fall of the Marrakech-based dynasty of the Almoravids in 1147, he wrote, the struggle for power in al-Andalus came down to two parties: the Berber loyalists, who supported the rival Moroccan Almohad dynasty, and the “Andalusian or national party, who tried yet to maintain the independence of the country.” The chief of this latter party, he wrote, was a man known as Abū Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Sad ibn Ahmad ibn Mardanish (518-67 AH/1124-72 CE), king of Murcia, Valencia, and all of southeastern Spain, a man difficult to classify, characteristic of contexts in which “many nationalities and different religions" have contact? But, Dozy wondered, to which nation did Ibn Mardanish belong?‘ Over the next several pages, Dozy weighed the ruler’s own claims to be Arab against the distinctive, non-Arabic, name of his great-great grandfather (Mardanish), determining that he must have been of “Spanish” Christian origin. Dozy noted that Ibn Mardanish did not seem to want to hide his Christian roots, as later Arabic authors reported he liked to employ Christians and dress like them. His foreign policy consisted of alliances with Christians against the Almohads, and Arabic chronicles say he was known for his feasting, drinking, bedding of slave girls, bravery in battle, and cruelty to his enemies? After several pages, Dozy paused. “If, even in the eyes of impartial history, such men cannot be taken for

2 *Le parti andalous ou national, qui táchait encore de maintenir l'indépendance du pays”; Reinhart Dozy, “Sur ce qui se passa 4 Grenade en 1162,” in Recherches sur l'histoire politique et littéraire de l'Espagne pendant le moyen áge, 3rd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1881), 365. Originally published 1849, republished as Recherches sur Phistoire et la littérature de l'Espagne pendant le moyen áge in 1860. My citations throughout are to the 1881 edition. The later nineteenth-century Spanish Orientalist Francisco Codera y Zaidín translated Dozy and copied him verbatim in his Decadencia y desaparición de los almoravides de Espana (originally published 1899). This work was republished as Codera, Decadencia y desaparición de los almorávides en Espana, ed. Maria Jesás Viguera Molins (Pamplona: Urgoiti Editores, 2004). In Codera's version, he interestingly replaced *andalous ou national” with just “nacional”; see 112-13.

3 Dozy, Recherches, 365: "C'était une de ces figures caractéristiques et difficiles à classer, que le contact de plusieurs nationalités et de différentes religions produisait parfois dans la Péninsule." Codera, Decadencia y desaparición, 113.

4 Though this ruler referred to himself as Muhammad ibn Sa'd, and was called the same by most of his peers, the near universal use of his ancestor's name, Mardanish, to refer to him in the time since has led me to call him Ibn Mardanish throughout this book, except when directly quoting a source that refers to him as Muhammad ibn Sa'd.

5 Dozy, Recherches, 365-70; Codera, Decadencia desaparición, 113-16.

good Muslims, what aversion and horror must they have inspired in the Almohads, ignorant Berbers, animated by the most ardent fanaticism?”®

For Dozy, the complex events in al-Andalus and North Africa during the twelfth century could be explained through race, religion, and nation—the terms and concepts that defined the nineteenth century. Ibn Mardanish had Christian roots, therefore his behavior and politics were philo-Christian, whereas the “ignorant Berber” Almohads fought him because they were fanatical Muslims opposed to Christians as a matter of faith. Dozy believed his narration was “impartial history,” and his assessment of this period has remained largely unchallenged for more than a century and a half. But, as I will show in this book, modern understandings of Ibn Mardanish, and of al-Andalus more generally, are anything but impartial. They have been formed in the political context of Western European ascendancy over North Africa and much of the Islamic world, and serve to reinforce racial and religious hierarchies that privilege the European, the Christian, or the secular over others. The historical processes that have yielded these visions are complex, for it was not Dozy who invented the idea that Ibn Mardanish dressed like a Christian or drank. The failure of Ibn Mardanish’s dynasty and the eventual fall of al-Andalus led to explanations emphasizing his decadence (and that of al-Andalus as a whole) as a reason for the loss of territory. But medieval ideas have been filtered through modern preconceptions in ways that distort them even further.

Dozy’s assessment of Ibn Mardanish and his Almohad rivals echoes pejorative sources stretching back to the twelfth century. The Almohads, whose caliphate lasted from 515-668 AH/1121-1269 CE, worked hard in their chronicles and chancery documents to present their dynasty (dawla) as pious, God-guided, and focused on the hereafter and their rivals, such as Ibn Mardanish, as impious, sensual, dangerously close to Christians, and tangled in the snares of the material world.’ But for Dozy, as for most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars who

7 The Almohad movement began in 515/1121 when Ibn Tümart, their charismatic founder, is said to have declared himself the mahdi, a messianic figure who rules during the end times. ‘Abd al-Mu' min became Ibn Tümart's successor (khalifa) after his death, beginning what would become the Mu'minid caliphate. The Almohad dynasty defeated the Almoravids and took their capital, Marrakech, in 541/1147.

read these Arabic sources, the chronicles that aimed to legitimate the Almohads and their divine mission by denigrating Ibn Mardanish became, in the new framework of modernity, evidence of protomodernity in the past. That is, the very same tools used by the Almohads to discredit Ibn Mardanish’s quest for power later gained legitimacy as hallmarks of Western secular modernity. The result of this strange confluence is that the Almohads’ evaluation of Ibn Mardanish as a “bad Muslim” has turned him, in more recent years, into an exemplar of a “good Muslim,” according to Mahmood Mamdani's categorization: one who is secular, flexible, and Western.? At che same time, the Almohads are classified as “fanatical,” and their perceived piety becomes a mark of their danger.

I discuss this nineteenth-century historiography not to denigrate Dozy, a great scholar who worked almost exclusively with manuscripts and who valorized Arabic sources as integral to the history of Spain and of Europe—approaches still rare today. Nor do I mean to imply that scholarship on Ibn Mardanish and on al-Andalus began and ended in the nineteenth century. Rather, I begin here because so many of the questions historians work with today are echoes of nineteenth-century preoccupations. To what nation did Ibn Mardanish belong? Was his Islam sincere or simply pragmatic? How did his fight against the Almohads reflect a nascent Spanish identity that could transcend religious difference? What is the relationship between his race, his religion, and his politics? Were the Almohads fierce fanatics as opposed to flexible, protosecular Andalusis?

Behind all of these questions, omnipresent in the scholarship about Ibn Mardanish, is another set of broader questions about the history of al-Andalus and of Spain, about geography, ethnicity, national identity, and religion. These questions, in turn, encode even bigger concerns— about how humans construct their identities through classifying and categorizing, labeling people, ideas, places, and periods as like or unlike themselves and their own experiences. Many of the ideas that frame contemporary understandings of the western Mediterranean in the Middle Ages are born of the nineteenth-century construction of academic knowledge: the creation of the medieval to separate the ancient and the modern, the invention of Islam as the singular, monolithic Other

8 This juxtaposition of the “good,” secular, modern Muslim, who is allied with Christians, with the “bad,” religious, premodern, fundamentalist Muslim persists in contemporary discourse about twenty-first century events. See Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Penguin Random House, 2005).

for Europe’s Christianity, and the assertion of secularism, science, and progress as the modern, against religion, tradition, and culture as the past. The nineteenth century is when the written record was enshrined as the primary source of the historian, and objects and artifacts were relinquished to the “antiquarian.” It was the century that championed history as a science, a positivist undertaking that could reveal how things really were, and simultaneously, endorsed a vision of history as the scaffolding for human progress, enabling humanity to move inexorably toward a more perfect future.

Even as, in the twentieth century, scholars of medieval France and postcolonial India advocated history from below, even as new generations of scholars from wider swaths of the world and of increasingly diverse backgrounds began to question the power structures inherent in traditional modes of research, the architecture of knowledge has remained mostly intact. In spite of a push toward interdisciplinarity, historians, art historians, archaeologists, and literary scholars frequently do not read each other’s work, and they engage even less frequently with each other’s sources. Notwithstanding a growing interest in transregionalism and global approaches, most scholars still focus on regions defined according to national boundaries created in the nineteenth century. The hegemony of the discipline, and of the nation-bounded region, operate so forcefully that it is easy to miss the interstices and those slippery subjects that refuse to rest peacefully in one discipline or nation.

Ibn Mardanish is one such slippery subject. He minted dinars in the name of the distant Abbasid caliph and constructed a palace, Dar al- Sughra, that incorporated new architectural forms from the Islamic East. He also served as vassal to King Alfonso VII of Castile-Leon and King Alfonso VIII of Castile, paid tribute to the count-kings of Barcelona, and executed trade agreements with the Italian city-states of Genoa and Pisa. Written sources, from the twelfth-century Almohad chronicler Ibn Sahib al-Sala to the seventeenth-century historian al-Maqqari, focused on his alliances with his Christian neighbors and suggested that he was an infidel. Yet records from his court, especially its material culture, suggest that Ibn Mardanish sought to connect himself to the caliphate in the east much more closely than any earlier Andalusi ruler had. In this book, I untangle the complex threads of Ibn Mardanish’s identity, politics, and legacy. By bringing together evidence from chronicles, chancery documents, poetry, architecture, coins, and portable objects, I trace Ibn Mardanish’s transformation from warrior to the founder of a dynasty. Ialso show how he adapted language and forms from around the Islamic world to articulate a vision that was powerful enough to allow him to gain and maintain power. Using methodologies from history, religious studies, and art history, I examine processes of political legitimation and identity formation and then explore how narratives about the dynasty— and al-Andalus more generally—shifted after its dissolution.

Considering Ibn Mardanish’s ruling culture through written and material sources allows me to situate him (and his rivals and successors) in complex networks of affiliation and resistance. I investigate how rulers aspiring to great power legitimated their authority; what they said, wrote, and did to present themselves as righteous. I look at how they constructed their palaces and houses of worship, and the motifs and language they imprinted on their coins. Every choice a would-be ruler made situated him amongst the caliphs, sultans, and kings of his day and his predecessors. The specific forms and legends minted on a ruler's coins reflected not just what would be deemed acceptable in the marketplace but also whom he sought to emulate and whom he sought to challenge. These relationships were in some cases hyperlocal—building a palace could demonstrate resistance to a dangerously ambitious brother, for example—but they could also span the Mediterranean or the Pyrenees or reach back across centuries to honorable predecessors. Reconstituting this web of connections helps to challenge the paradigm of al-Andalus as a peripheral or exceptional place. Like in the Islamic East, in al-Andalus the twelfth century was a time when newly Muslim populations began to integrate themselves more fully into systems of government and to assert their power. In the East, such populations were mostly Turkic peoples; in the west, they were Berbers and former Christians? Ibn Mardanish was likely descended from Iberian

9 I use the word Berber here following the vast majority of sources dealing with the Almoravids and Almohads, in both medieval Arabic works and contemporary scholarship, but Iam cognizant of recent challenges to the term on the grounds that its roots in the Greek word for foreigner (barbaros) can be seen as pejorative. Even more problematically, as Ramzi Roughi has recently shown, the category Berber effaces the enormous heterogeneity of peoples, languages, and cultures that are now lumped together as Berber. Roughi shows that the idea of the inhabitants of North Africa as a cohesive group called Berbers was elaborated by historians writing in Arabic in al-Andalus, beginning with Ibn Hazm (d. 456/1064) and culminating in Ibn Khaldün (d. 808/1406). Rouighi describes the colonial roots of the nowpreferred term for contemporary indigenous peoples of North Africa, Amazigh/Imazighen, and emphasizes that it functions as a calque for Berber rather than offering more specificity or historicity. Ramzi Rouighi, Inventing the Berbers: History and Ideology in the Maghrib (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). For a more traditional overview of the peoples known as Berbers, see Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).

Christian stock (though, as I discuss later, this is a fraught question), and he fought the Berber Almohads. Throughout the Islamic world, Jews and Christians lived under Muslim rule or negotiated alliances and enmities along the Islamic empire’s borders. Al-Andalus was no more peripheral than any other border region, and the regular circulation of people and goods between the Maghrib and the Mashriq guaranteed that its people had considerable familiarity with the Islamic East. Nor was the attitude toward non-Muslim subjects and rivals substantially different in the two regions. Like Ibn Mardanish in al-Andalus, his contemporary Saladin in the Levant was occasionally chastised by companions for spending too much time fighting fellow Muslims and making alliances with neighboring Christians.

Instead of suggesting that al-Andalus was a special site of tolerance, I show that later teleological interpretations of al-Andalus’s eventual collapse imbued its earlier history with a fablelike simplicity: al-Andalus was perpetually doomed, either because its glories, like those of the Garden of Eden, were too wonderful for fallible humans to maintain or because its cosmopolitan population cared too little about its religious duty to fight the infidels. Both of these narratives have made Ibn Mardanish into an embodiment of tolerance (whether conceived as a virtue or an evil) and envisioned his enemies, the Almohads, as pious and violent. This book traces how this historical memory crystallized as Ibn Mardanish’s story transformed over time from that of a rebel against the Almohads to a proximate cause for the fall of al-Andalus, and further to an emblem of modern nationalist and secularist visions of the past. In the nineteenth century, ideas about the superiority of al- Andalus (and Europe) were sometimes used to justify European colonial ventures in North Africa and the Middle East. In the twentieth century, Ibn Mardanish became a proto-Spanish nationalist or a hero of a tolerant “European Islam,” vaunted and celebrated by European historians, Arab nationalists, and regional governments alike. Today, debates about tolerance and violence and essentialist declarations about the nature of Islam and “the West" dominate headlines, and Ibn Mardanish appears in Spanish newspapers as evidence of a cosmopolitan, flexible, Iberian Islam. Ibn Mardanish's historiographic treatment therefore parallels the broader othering of al-Andalus, which went from being seen as an important component of a diverse collection of Islamic territories to being cast as a unique, particularly advanced corner of the empire by virtue of its location in what would come to be known as Europe. His uses in the legitimating processes of new, modern forms of domination has obscured much of the complexity of his story and, by highlighting him as an exception, has reinforced distorted conceptions of a normative Islamic culture that would never be flexible, complex, or generous to Christian inhabitants.

Ibn Mardanish’s quest for power demonstrates how deeply imbricated rulers in the western Mediterranean were in overlapping spheres of culture and authority. Ibn Mardanish; his Almohad rivals; and the kings of Castile, Barcelona, and Sicily, among others, traded gifts, exchanged women, borrowed architectural forms, and sent scholars and poets to each other’s courts. The motifs and people they exchanged hailed, in many cases, from points further east. Rather than a world defined by conflict between Muslims and Christians or between the forces of cosmopolitanism and those of strict religiosity, we find constantly shifting, kaleidoscopic arrangements of alliance and violence, in which the Almohad caliph and the king of Navarre might ally against Castile, and Barcelona and Murcia might unite against the Almohads and Navarre, only to shift alliances again. Ibn Mardanish was intensely eastward-looking in his ruling culture, and the visual forms and language he imported from Baghdad and Cairo made their way to his allies in Castile. He sent gifts of silk, gold, and camels to King Henry II of England, indicating his position as a member of a brotherhood of kings. He also joined the Castilian armies in fights against Navarre and received their help in his fights against the Almohads. After his death, Ibn Mardanish’s children were incorporated into the highest echelons of the Almohad elite, with his daughters marrying the current caliph and the future caliph, and his descendants included later Almohad caliphs. Ibn Mardanish’s relationships transcend the binaries by which the study of the Iberian Peninsula has often been defined (Islamic/Christian, Arabic/Latin, Berber/ Andalusi) as well as the broader binaries that have formed the architecture of academic knowledge (Europe/not-Europe, secularism/religiosity, medieval/modern, text/art).

By illuminating Ibn Mardanish’s world before the dominance of such binaries distorted the picture, this book offers a portrait of an al- Andalus that was more closely integrated with its Christian neighbors and with the Islamic East than is typically understood. And by tracing Ibn Mardanish’s story over time, it reveals how the history of medieval Iberia was demolished in order to construct a European identity for a Spain built in opposition to Islamic and African others. Ibn Mardanish’s story demonstrates the dangers of academic disciplinary divisions in reifying regions, periods, and religions as separate categories. Finally, it counteracts the idea of a pure, white European Middle Ages that is now being weaponized by racist extremists, while simultaneously indicating the inadequacy of visions of medieval coexistence that ignore religious motivations.

As the title of this book indicates, I focus on the construction of power. By power, I mean not simply the Weberian imposition of control over bodies and territories but also the assertion of a connection to the divine. As I discuss in the first two chapters, the conflict between Ibn Mardanish and the Almohads was, at root, about who had the right to proclaim divine guidance, to act as the deputy of God on earth, and to unify the global Muslim community. Their fundamentally different perspectives on the caliphate led to the development of different religious and governmental systems, rituals, spaces, and objects. At the same time, they expressed their differences through violence—on the battlefield, against the bodies of rebels, and in the destruction or transformation of objects and spaces. The administrative systems they created, their alliances and treaties, and their cultural programs constituted a mode of constructing their power, often explicitly in relation to their rivals. So, too, did their battles and acts of violence, which served to perform their righteousness by painting their rivals as enemies of God and their acts of destruction as signs of divine justice. Power, in the hands of these new dynasties, was expansive and flexible. Divine favor could be proven through success on the battlefield, through the splendor of a new monument, or through the relationships of loyalty demonstrated in alliances, tribute, or marriage.

Throughout the book, I also use the frame of genealogy as a mode of thinking about the practice of power, from the familial and cultural genealogies that Ibn Mardanish and the Almohads presented in texts and material culture to the salasil (sing. silsila) or chains of transmission scholars used to authenticate their knowledge. At the same time, I think about genealogy as Foucault did, following Nietzsche, as Herkunft, the descent of an idea, in order to excavate how and why people thought about the history of Ibn Mardanish in a particular way." I think about genealogies on three levels: familial lineage, cultural and intellectual expressions of filiation, and the genealogy of ideas (al-Andalus, Europe, secularism). On each level, chose expressing their genealogy have the

10 Michel Foucault, *Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).

chance to formulate their identity, to understand their relationships to one another, and to articulate their legitimacy. Tracing back these lines of descent does not yield a narrative of origins or promise linearity. Instead, like Foucault, I aim to discover “the accidents, the minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us."!! The narratives about Ibn Mardanish crafted by historians after his death, made in different contexts and to legitimate new powers, also constructed distinct visions of religion, identity, and geography that continue to exist today. The varied ways in which the histories of this period were constructed across centuries led to the accretion of new layers of meaning that express new forms of domination. Teleological narratives, which impose linearity on complexity, relegate failed dynasties and subjects that do not fit neatly into the narratives’ categories to the periphery. In the case of Ibn Mardanish and the Almohads, and al-Andalus more generally, che construction of geographical, racial, and temporal hierarchies has fundamentally distorted how the period is understood. As I will discuss in the last chapter of the book and in the postscript, the ideas constructed around this period, born from “minute deviations" and “false appraisals” of early sources, have become dangerously potent ideologies in recent years.

In seeking to understand how historical narratives produce systems of power, I follow historians of women and other marginalized groups who, in the last fifty years, have worked to expand the range of sources historians use to interpret the past in order to illuminate the stories of figures often left out of written narratives." What Joan Wallach Scott has called “the invisibility of women" in historical narratives not only reflects but helps construct a world organized by hierarchies that silence those who are deemed Other.? Most of this book focuses on how historical knowledge was constructed to naturalize the ascendance of later powers, from the Almohads to che modern nation of Spain, transforming

11 Foucault, *Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," 146.

12 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, *Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and tbe Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 271-313. For an overview of the field of women's history in the late 1980s, and its approach to sources in particular, see the essays collected in S. Jay Kleinberg, ed., Retrieving Women’s History: Changing Perceptions of the Role of Women in Politics and Society (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1988), especially the introduction by the editor, ix-xii.

13 Joan Wallach Scott, *The Problem of Invisibility," in Retrieving Women's History, ed. Kleinberg, 5-29; Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, Thirtieth Anniversary ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

earlier understandings of Ibn Mardanish. But it is important to note that there are other marginalized figures even within the history of Ibn Mardanish I seek to excavate, doubly invisible for their gender, social status, or servile position. Most important among these for the purposes of this book are the women—wives, concubines and sisters—who appear at the edges of the narrative, mentioned in passing in historical chronicles or on tombstones, where even in death they are left nameless. Ibn Mardanish’s rise to power was facilitated through alliances cemented by marriage, and the integration of his children into the Almohad elite was similarly aided by the marriage of two of his daughters to the Almohad caliph and his heir. In most cases, these women are referred to simply as the daughter of their father or the wife of their husband, their identities reduced to their relationship to the men around them. Although chronicles rarely offer insights into the lives these women led, the fleeting mentions of their existence suggest their importance in formalizing alliances and in knitting together the empires of former enemies." As D. Fairchild Ruggles has shown, women who bore rulers’ children, whether free or enslaved, captured or traded or married across borders, had a profound role in producing the complex culture of al-Andalus.’ Although these women are not the focus of this book, I endeavor to listen for their presence in the sources, and to speculate about their lives, even when historians have minimized their contributions and omitted their names. Like Ibn Mardanish’s dynasty more generally, these women are casualties of a “bundle of silences” born from power dynamics at particular moments in the creation of sources, archives, and narratives in the construction of history."®

Like the women of Ibn Mardanish's family, his regime appears only at the margin of most historical narratives. The dynasty Ibn Mardanish founded failed, lasting only as long as he lived and leaving few written

14 Manuela Marín's magisterial volume on women in al-Andalus discusses the importance of weddings as a form of political representation and affirmation. Marín, Mujeres en al-Andalus, Estudios Onomástico-Biográficos de al-Andalus 11 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000), 442-43.