for reclaiming power from the hands of the ḥājibs, and beginning the process of concentrating power in the hands of the ruler. Ḥafṣid historians depict Abū al-‘Abbās as the ruler of all Ifrīqiyā, even though he delegated a great deal of power to emirs such as his son Abū Fāris of Qasantīna. But even correcting for later Ḥafṣid bias in favor of regional unity, Abū al-‘Abbās had begun the process of pulling Ifrīqiyā together.
When Abū al-‘Abbās died in 1394, Abū Fāris was recognized as the new emir. He left Qasantīna for Tunis and was proclaimed ruler without the sort of opposition the Ḥafṣids had until now made customary. Whereas Abū al-‘Abbās had established peace, Abū Fāris naturalized it. He expanded his domain in the south and in the west, bringing Tilimsān under his authority. Importantly, under his rule Tunis became the undisputed capital of Ifrīqiyā, and greatest city of the Maghrib, rivaled only by Fās (Fez), the Marīnid capital. His forty-year reign was that of a regional emir. The historians agreed: according to Ibn al-Shammā‘, Abū Fāris “attained the maximum control over Ifrīqiyā (balagha min mulki Ifrīqiyā al-ghāyatu al-quṣwā) by subduing the Bedouins (a‘rāb).”68
After Abū Fāris’s death, his grandson Abū ‘Abd Allāh ruled for a little more than a year. ‘Uthmān (r. 1436–88) succeeded him. ‘Uthmān had to face a certain Abū al-Ḥasan, who had declared himself ruler of Ifrīqiyā from Bijāya and attempted to take over Tunis. However, by 1440, his attempt was crushed, and ‘Uthmān ruled a unified Ḥafṣid dynasty for decades. Under him, the Ḥafṣids brought into the fold the urban notables who had previously been so difficult to persuade. Far from the cities and the areas that they controlled, the picture was less clearly in their favor. However, no single group could now challenge the Ḥafṣids. While the Bedouins enjoyed a great deal of autonomy vis-à-vis the dynasty—not all of them paid taxes or contributed soldiers—with Abū Fāris, the Ḥafṣids were once more able to bring all of Ifrīqiyā under their rule. Tunis was once more the capital of Ifrīqiyā.
In the view of Ḥafṣid authors, Abū Fāris proved to be the greatest ruler the dynasty had produced in more than a century. He subjected local emirates, Bedouin confederacies, and independent cities that had blossomed for nearly a century outside Tunis’s control. If this description of Abū Fāris likens him to a messianic figure, it is only because in the eyes of those who lived through the period of war and instability, he was one. He finally realized the political fantasies of the preceding generations. Ḥafṣid commentators saw him as the true heir to the legacy of his two ancestors, Abū Zakariyā (d. 1249) and al-Mustanṣir (d. 1277), whom they so idealized. For them, the accession of Abū Fāris was a second coming of the regional emirate and a rebirth of the dynasty.69
The Ḥafṣid intellectuals in the fifteenth century who celebrated Abū Fāris by comparing him to Abū Zakariyā and al-Mustanṣir accomplished an important ideological slight of hand. They recast the history of Ifrīqiyā in the intervening period in terms of the heroic task of returning Ifrīqiyā to the hands of the Ḥafṣid dynasty. This idea anchors their dynastic conception of historiography and casts the fourteenth century as a period of chaos and war between cousins.
How Ḥafṣid Was Ifrīqiyā?
In the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Ḥafṣid emirs led a number of political coalitions. Sometimes, the support they garnered allowed them to control Tunis and all the large cities of Ifrīqiyā. At other times, they effectively controlled just a few cities. But many of these emirs were mere puppets in the hands of powerful Andalusi or Almohad ḥājibs. Consequently, the idea that Ifrīqiyā was a region ruled by the Ḥafṣid dynasty does not correspond to the political realities of the time. Even when, in its regional configuration, Ḥafṣid domination brought together cities from Tripoli to Bijāya, there were always areas that were beyond its reach—and not only mountainous ones. The local Ḥafṣid emirs’ ability to impose their domination was severely limited by their fear of venturing too far from their cities lest someone take them in their absence.
Adding up the areas effectively ruled by local Ḥafṣid emirs would, then, still leave a great deal of Ifrīqiyā outside the dynasty’s purview. Local emirs controlled areas near the cities. When the political realignments at the end of the fourteenth century eliminated local emirs, they did not radically alter this basic aspect of Ḥafṣid rule. Even under the regional emirate of Abū Fāris, the Ḥafṣids did not control all the “territory” of Ifrīqiyā, as modern historians have claimed following the medieval chronicles. Rather, they held the cities and projected their influence from there.
Not that this “influence” was an abstraction. It was tied to the ability to accumulate wealth and raise armies. Political and financial considerations were inextricably linked. The pledges of allegiance the dynasty received from urban elites, “small” dynasties, and Bedouins engaged all these groups either militarily, financially, or both. For this reason, no analysis of politics can be complete without an examination of the system of land tenure, agricultural production, and taxation through which the Ḥafṣids exercised their power in Ifrīqiyā. To discern the contours of the dynasty’s influence, one must understand the extent to which it was able, through its political leadership, to engender regional integration on an economic level.
CHAPTER 2
Taxation and Land Tenure
The Ḥafṣid dynasty was not able to keep all of Ifrīqiyā under its political control in the fourteenth century. However, there is nothing preventing the local configuration of Ḥafṣid rule from fostering the development of a regional economy. Political unity and economic integration needed not go hand in hand. But the activities of the ruling elite and its allies did nothing to encourage, promote, or support the types of specialization in production and circulation that would have made Ifrīqiyā an economic unit. Instead, the range of their intervention outside cities narrowed over time and became mostly extractive and predatory and, in effect, undermined the cause of economic integration.
Agriculture and animal husbandry were the two most important economic sectors in Ifrīqiyā, dwarfing both commerce and manufacturing.1 Most people in Ifrīqiyā worked the land or tended animals, and often did both. By itself, however, the preponderance of these two activities did not amount to regional specialization or integration: the organization of agricultural production did not follow a single mode. Throughout the fourteenth century, a number of economic arrangements prevailed, maintaining markedly different types of land tenure, labor contracts, and legal and fiscal regimes. When the Ḥafṣid dynasty levied taxes, rents, and even ransoms, it brought these economic zones together, but there were limits on the degree of integration this produced. The treasury took the economic surplus and redistributed it to generate, maintain, and reproduce political, rather than economic, ties.
This had been the situation for a long time. The Almohads (1130–1269) had tried to bring together the pieces of this economic mosaic by force and implement a coercive fiscal system. But their political situation empowered semi-independent allies and enemies, especially Bedouins, and local Ḥafṣid emirs ruled independently of, and often in conflict with, one another. Ultimately, the Ḥafṣids (1229–1574) undid important components of the Almohad system or, to put it more accurately, remade them in the process of imposing their rule in its local or regional form. The involvement of the urban Ḥafṣid dynasty and its supporters in agriculture became increasingly limited to the perimeters of cities such as Bijāya. Concurrently, the remaking of politico-economic relations in the country, through mechanisms and institutions not fully controlled by the urban elite, led to the formation of novel social relations. These processes further consolidated the disengagement of the urban dynasty from the affairs of the country and strengthened economic zones that were often only
