An emir in the ruins of Carthage: the life and times of Muhriz Ibn Ziyad (d. 1160 CE)

ABSTRACT

Muhriz ibn Ziyad was an Ifriqiyan lord of the twelfth century who ruled from fortress of al-Muʿallaqa atop the Byrsa Hill in the ruins of Carthage. Located just a few miles from Tunis, he had substantial interactions – both collaborative and antagonistic – with elites in this nearby urban centre. However, he also played a larger role in the political landscape of Ifriqiya as an ally of the Zirid emir of Ifriqiya and as a resistor of Almohad dominion. Muhriz likewise contributed to Mediterranean-wide economic networks by exporting marble from Carthage. The few scholars who have written about Muhriz have described him as a peripheral player who contributed to (or hindered) the works of larger dynasties like the Zirids, Normans, and Almohads. Recentring this narrative to focus on Muhriz permits the analysis of the Ifriqiyan landscape from a new perspective and provides valuable insights. Namely, the life of Muhriz ibn Ziyad shows the degree of political de-centralization in Ifriqiya following the arrival of the Banu Hilal, the various uses that local lords found for pre-existing ancient infrastructure, and the fluidity of alliances both within and between Berber and Arab groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Ifriqiya
• medieval
• Mediterranean
• Zirid
• Carthage
• archaeology

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of the Journal of North African Studies, especially Dr. Andrea Khalil, for helping to bring this article to publication. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer(s) from the journal for their insightful comments about this article. All mistakes within it are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Book of Curiosities, which was written in Fatimid Egypt during the eleventh century, does not mention al-Muʿallaqa. It potentially contains a corrupted form of ‘Carthage’, but no information about the ruins is present within this text (Rapoport and Savage-Smith 2014, 424).

2 Translation is from al-Idrisi (2002, 286).

3 It is possible that al-Idrisi meant that qaṭīʿa should have the same meaning as iqṭāʿ (which translates roughly and controversially as ‘fief’). This latter term denoted a form of land ownership that was common in the medieval Muslim world and was adapted in Norman Sicily from earlier Islamic models (Johns 2002, 16–18, 196–197; Metcalfe 2003, 20).

4 Al-Tijani has little to say about Carthage and only mentions al-Muʿallaqa in the context of the flight of al-Hasan ibn ʿAli to Muhriz ibn Ziyad. He notes that the aqueduct of Carthage is the most splendid monument in Ifriqiya (with the Amphitheater of El Djem second). He evocatively mentions a ‘Ziyad Fortress’ (Qasr Ziyad) in the vicinity of Sfax, though he does not provide additional information that could link this location to the family of Muhriz ibn Ziyad. Likewise, he mentions a port (potentially fortified with a tower) in the region of Carthage called ‘Marsa al-Burj’ during his account of a Hafsid battle, though his description does not provide additional information that could allow for it to be placed on the Byrsa Hill. Rousseau, who translated the work of al-Tijani, similarly grappled with the placement of this port (al-Tijani 1994, 61, 70, 274).

5 The Hafsids initiated building projects around Carthage as the city of Tunis blossomed under their rule, which potentially included the strengthening of fortifications in and around al-Muʿallaqa (Rummel 2016, 113). Louis IX likely attacked the fortress during his 1270 crusade to Tunis as well (Caffaro 1926, 135; Brunschvig 1940, 59; Pringle 1981; Ibn Khaldun 2000, 6:428; Lower 2018, 112–113). In the decades after the Tunis Crusade of Louis IX, the importance of al-Muʿallaqa waned. Ibn ʿIdhari, who wrote his chronicle in the early fourteenth century, equates it broadly with the ‘great city’ of Carthage, but notes that it had fallen disrepair and was without inhabitants (Hurd 1934, 55–65; ʿIdhari 2013, 1:61).

6 Other writers of the early-mid nineteenth century testify to this general geographic impression. Felice Caronni, who travelled to Carthage and documented his experiences in an 1805 travelogue, described how on the Byrsa Hill ‘even today the houses that are seen among those ruins are called Malga’ (Caronni 1805, 54). J.E. Humbert, who undertook the earliest modern excavations of Carthage in the 1820s, likewise mentions the context in which he discovered two artifacts: ‘I could see some distance in front of me the almost unrecognisable remains of a Roman amphitheatre; and the hill, on which was located in part the small village of Malga, overlooked on my left the small plain that I was traversing’ (Audollent 1901, 822).

7 Some historians equated the Cisterns of La Malga with al-Muʿallaqa and, thus, assumed that Muhriz ibn Ziyad ruled from these cisterns. Rousseau’s translation of the travelogue of al-Tijani provides a footnote for a mention of Muhriz ibn Ziyad and al-Muʿallaqa that reads ‘The name of Ma'lk'a is given today to a miserable little village located in the middle of the ruins of Carthage. We see the remains of vast cisterns which still serve as stables and straw stores for the Arabs, and which, in the past, were the reservoir of the great aqueduct of Carthage, at the time when the emperor Adrian [sic] wanted to drive into the city’ (al-Tijani 1994, 254).

8 The lack of concern that nineteenth-century French builders showed to the archaeology of Muslim Carthage was typical of the time. Led by archaeologists like Alfred Louis Delattre, a generation of scholars conducted fieldwork with dubious methods that prioritised pre-Muslim settlement. Delattre and others were particularly concerned with finding traces of Christian inhabitation in Carthage and to pinpoint the places where early Christian martyrs had met their end (Mahjoubi 1997, 19; Vitelli 1981, 18–19). They did so (in their minds) despite the best efforts of generations of Muslims, whose ‘iconoclastic fanaticism’ did ‘not succeed in destroying everything’ from the years of Christian inhabitation at Carthage (Delattre 1907, 154). The preoccupations of these archaeologists facilitated the eradication of much of the evidence for medieval inhabitation.

9 Arabic texts commonly provide the tribal name of Fadiʿ (فادع) and Fadigh (فادغ), though there is some variation within manuscripts, including Badakh (بادخ) and Faragh (فارغ). For the sake of simplicity, I will stick to the most common ‘Fadigh’ for the remainder of this article (Idris 1962, 1:356, 402; al-Tijani 1981, 341; Ibn Khaldun 2000, 6:28, 318). We can be fairly certain that Muhriz’s father was named Ziyad, for there is only one entry from Ibn Khaldun that provides an alternate nasab of ‘ibn Zanad’ across multiple manuscripts. Indeed, the similarities in the Arabic spellings of Ziyad (زياد) and Zanād (زناد) provide a possible explanation for this anomaly(Ibn Khaldun 2000, 6:28). The works of al-Tijani, Ibn al-Athir, and Ibn ʿIdhari – which provided much of the material for Ibn Khaldun’s Kitab al-ʿIbar – give without fail the nasab of ‘ibn Ziyad’. This consistency provides some degree of confidence that a man named Ziyad, who would later father Muhriz, had an otherwise undocumented role to play within the political landscape of Ifriqiya during the late-eleventh and early-twelfth century.

10 Ibn al-Athir confusingly names Muhriz as Maymun in this account. However, circumstantial evidence points to this entry being about Muhriz and not Maymun ibn Ziyad al-Sakhri al-Muʿadi. At no point within The Complete History does Ibn al-Athir reference the involvement of someone named Maymun during earlier conflicts in Ifriqiya during the 1110s and 1120s. Indeed, in an entry from The Complete History for the year 543H (1148–49), Ibn al-Athir mentions that al-Hasan ibn ʿAli had previously favoured Muhriz ibn Ziyad over all other Arabs – similar to the circumstances that contributed to conflict in Mahdia in 529H (1134–35) (Ibn al-Athir 2009, 11:64–65). Given the similarity in spelling between Maymun and Muhriz, this particular entry is likely the result of scribal error rather than a reference to another previously unnamed individual (Idris 1962, 1:344).

11 At some point, Muhriz likely fathered a son. One entry from Ibn al-Athir introduces Abu Mahfuz Muhriz ibn Ziyad, though no additional details are provided (Ibn al-Athir 2009, 11:121–122).

12 These letters frequently mention Ifriqiyan ports, but not Carthage itself. Given that one of the more common routes of the Geniza merchants was from Alexandria to Ifriqiya (especially Tripoli and Mahdia) to Sicily, it is likely that these merchants opted to travel north to Sicily instead of continuing westward to Carthage. If the wares of Geniza traders ever did reach Carthage, it would have been via other trading vessels that exchanged goods within Ifriqiya (Udovitch 1978, 503–546).

13 Records for the exchange of goods between the northern and southern shores of the central Mediterranean increase in quantity during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Accompanying this burgeoning commerce was infrastructure in the form of Christian funduqs, which were established in many North African cities as early as the twelfth century (Constable 2003; Valérian 2005; Valérian 2006).

14 The use of spolia during the Middle Ages was common, especially in places with substantial ancient ruins like North Africa. Emperor Charles V (d. 1558), however, imported lime and bricks from Sicily to North Africa, which could mean that marble had become scarcer in the region in the early modern period (Greenhalgh 2009, 136; Greenhalgh 2012, 70; Capilla 2014).

15 This entry from Ibn Khaldun is part of a larger discussion about the numerous dynasties needed to construct great monuments (of which Carthage stands alongside the Umayyad Mosque of Cordoba and the Great Pyramids of Giza). Nonetheless, even though the process of destroying these monuments is much easier than constructing them, this destruction still requires much effort. Ibn Khaldun notes that the stone arches of the Zaghouan Aqueduct, for example, only fall a small bit at a time even after much effort (Ibn Khaldun 2000, 1:429–430).

16 Although Ibn Khallikan (reporting on the basis of Ibn al-Athir and Ibn Shaddad) corroborates that al-Hasan sought to flee first to Egypt then to the Almohads, he also writes that the stay with Muhriz caused the Zirid emir ‘annoyance and toxicity’ (al-ḍajar wa al-sāma). The incongruity here is curious – perhaps a scribal error edited a few words from earlier texts? Or perhaps an earlier copy of the work of Ibn Shaddad (now lost) paints a different picture of the relationship between the Zirid emir and Muhriz during the period after the fall of Mahdia (Ibn Khallikan 1868, 101 and 1978, 217)?

17 Ibn ʿIdhari refers to Muhriz as ‘Muhammad ibn Ziyad al-‘Arabi’ in his entry. He also refers to Muhriz’s fortress as ‘al-Qalʿa’, which could either be him confusing al-Muʿallaqa for the city of al-Qalʿa (located further west in modern-day Algeria) or him simply referring to al-Muʿallaqa as a generic ‘fortress’ (Ibn ʿIdhari 2013, 1:346–347; Ibn Khaldun 2000, 6:217–218).

18 The date of this conflict is contested in the sources. In one section of the Kitab al-ʿIbar, Ibn Khaldun mentions that Muhriz ibn Ziyad died near Kairouan in 554H (1159–60). In a different section of the Kitab al-ʿIbar, however, Ibn Khaldun mentions Muhriz’s death in 556H (1161–62) (Ibn Khaldun 2000, 6:218–219, 318). Ibn Khallikan reports that Muhriz died at Sétif in 555H (1160), the date (but not location) of which is corroborated in the chronicle of Ibn al-Athir (Ibn Khallikan 1978, 6:219).

19 The only pocket of resistance to their rule came from Masʿud ibn Zimam who, despite retreating from Horn Mountain, remaining unwilling to accept Almohad supremacy (Idris 1962, 1:401–403; Ibn al-Athir 2009, 11:122).