Introduction

Divergent Histories: The Zirids and the Colonizing of Medieval North Africa

Scholarship about medieval North Africa is sparse when compared to works that focus on the histories of Europe, the Middle East, and Iberia.³ What little has been written about the Zirid dynasty has largely been defined by a tradition of French colonial scholarship dating back to the nineteenth century.⁴ According to this narrative, the Zirids peaked at the beginning of the reign of al-Muʿizz ibn Badis (r. 1016–62), who ruled over Ifriqiya during a time of ostentatious prosperity as the emir of the Fatimid imam-caliph of Cairo. When al-Muʿizz renounced his allegiance to the imam-caliph in the late 1040s, however, the Fatimids reacted by unleashing the Arab tribes of the Banu Hilal from Egypt to Ifriqiya. The Banu Hilal brought utter devastation to the region and Ifriqiya dissolved into an anarchic patchwork of city-states. Left in the wake of these invasions were Berber tribes like the Zirids, who were forced to abandon their inland capital of Kairouan for the coastal stronghold of Mahdia and, crippled by the Banu Hilal, existed in a state of “agony” before inevitably succumbing to the Normans.⁵

This narrative evokes the idea of a chaotic, barbaric medieval past in which nomadic Arabs from the tribes of the Banu Hilal regularly displaced and fought against indigenous Berbers in Ifriqiya.⁶ It also emphasizes the overwhelmingly negative consequences of the Hilalian invasions: their destruction of agricultural settlements across inland Ifriqiya, their desolation of urban centers, and their disruption of long-distance trade networks. The seeds of this school of thought first appeared in the research of scholars like Ernest Carette in the middle of the nineteenth century. Carette posited in 1853 that the arrival of the Banu Hilal into Ifriqiya resembled a fire that, “little by little, reduces everything to ashes, both buildings and trees … [and causes] the ruin of cities, the devastation of orchards, depopulation and misery—that is to say, barbarism.”⁷

Scholars writing in the decades after Carette engaged more seriously with Zirid history but still embraced his narrative of decline. Georges Marçais argued in 1913 that the Zirid abandonment of the inland trading hub of Kairouan “annihilated the prestige of the Sanhajan sultans [i.e., the Zirids] and unleashed anarchy” on Ifriqiya.⁸ In a widely read 1927 monograph, Émilie Gautier called the arrival of the Banu Hilal “the end of the world,” an event of apocalyptic significance that was a catastrophe for the Zirids and their Berber brethren.⁹ Charles-André Julien likewise narrated in his 1931 book how “lands made for the cultivation of cereals or fruit-growing were wrested from their proper use, villages and secondary towns were choked into ruin and agriculture was permitted to exist only in a narrow strip along the coast” after the Hilalian invasions.¹⁰ Intertribal conflict in the eleventh century precipitated economic disaster as trade routes from sub-Saharan Africa were severed and once-prosperous agricultural lands were turned over to pastoralism. The ubiquity of the narrative popularized by these academics was such that scholars outside the French academy utilized it in their own work on various facets of medieval Mediterranean history.¹¹

French scholars also produced translations of medieval texts that took extreme liberties with the original Arabic source materials.¹² While the act of translation is inherently one of linguistic domestication, the adaptations produced by some of these academics stretched the bounds of the idea of “translation” in the first place. Abdelmajid Hannoum, for example, has shown how William McGuckin de Slane’s influential translation of Ibn Khaldun, Histoire des Berbers (History of the Berbers), manufactured the idea of constant conflict between “the Arab nation and the Berber race” and misrepresented the French as heirs to the Roman Empire.¹³ French politicians who read this translation thus found historical precedent for their own modern conflicts against groups they identified as “Berber.”¹⁴ The popularity of de Slane’s translation of Ibn Khaldun led to the “Khaldunization” of knowledge of medieval North Africa, through which the idea of a timeless “Berber” ethnicity emerged, in keeping with de Slane’s particular and flawed translation.¹⁵

The most substantial study of the Zirid dynasty to date emerged from this French colonial tradition: a 1962 monograph by H. R. Idris titled La Berbérie orientale sous les Zīrīdes: Xe–XIIe siècles (The eastern Barbary under the Zirids: 10th–12th centuries).¹⁶ This work, which remains the standard reference for Zirid history, exhaustively chronicles the dynasty.¹⁷ Idris draws on a host of sources, most of them Arabic, and attempts to reconcile the ambiguous and contradictory information found in them. This monograph is a substantial achievement, one that devotes more attention to the Zirid dynasty than any work of scholarship that preceded it. Nonetheless, Idris adheres to the historical trajectory found in previous accounts of the Zirids, in which the dynasty’s history is a narrative arc of rise and fall, with the catastrophic Hilalian invasions serving as the impetus for the dynasty’s collapse.¹⁸ This arc is explicit throughout the book and is easily seen in the chapter titles for the first volume of Idris’s monograph: “Genesis,” “Rise,” “Apogee,” “Catastrophe,” “Attempted Recovery,” and “Agony.”¹⁹

As French rule in North Africa drew to a close in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new crop of scholars began to refute this portrait of the Hilalian invasions. Scholars like Mohamed Sahli, Mohamed Talbi, Yves Lacoste, Jean Poncet, Michael Brett, and Abdullah Laroui argued (with some variation) that the Zirid dynasty was not a lavish paradise prior to the arrival of the Banu Hilal.²⁰ Rather, the delights of the Zirid court were a mirage that masked widespread economic troubles caused by recurrent drought, shifting trade routes, and the decline of plantation agriculture.²¹ When the Banu Hilal arrived in Ifriqiya, they were not rampaging nomads but rather mercenaries hired to fight on behalf of local governors who, at best, were encouraged by the Fatimids to conquer Zirid lands. These tribesmen then expanded their power in Ifriqiya from Tripoli westward in a series of campaigns that brought some political and economic upheaval, but not a cataclysm.²² Trade across the Sahara persisted throughout the eleventh century, sedentary communities continued to produce agricultural goods, and the political landscape of Ifriqiya did not descend into anarchy.²³ The invasion of the Banu Hilal was a symptom rather than a cause of change in Ifriqiya.

At the core of this revisionist school was the deconstruction of the writings of Ibn Khaldun, whose fourteenth-century Kitab al-ʿIbar (Book of examples) paints a devastating picture of Hilalian destruction that was commonly cited by colonial scholars.²⁴ There is a substantial problem with this narrative: it was a fabrication perpetuated by medieval Fatimid propagandists. The Arabic travelogue of al-Tijani mentions the presence of Hilalian tribes in Ifriqiya as early as the mid-1030s, when they fought on behalf of local lords around Tripoli and later jockeyed for control of the city itself.²⁵ Furthermore, a contemporary letter from the Fatimid imam-caliph shows that the Fatimids were not responsible for sending the Banu Hilal to Ifriqiya to defeat the Zirids; instead, they sought to capitalize on the independent victory of the Arab tribes.²⁶ Through a major propaganda effort on the part of the Fatimids, one of their Ifriqiyan envoys was turned “into a conqueror and his return into a triumph … [passing] into the annals of the Fatimids as a story of condign punishment visited upon the erring [Zirid] sultan through the agency of the Arabs.”²⁷ This story became popular with later chroniclers like Ibn Khaldun, who fit the narrative into his idea of a “fourth age” of Arabs that swept into the North Africa with both divine agency and an established Arabian lineage.²⁸ This mythologized narrative was at the heart of French colonial scholarship and its later refutation.²⁹

For this study of the intertwined histories of the Zirids and Normans, this historiographical trajectory has profound consequences. If we were to take for granted the perspective of the French colonial school, we would see the Zirid dynasty as “powerless in the face of the Arabian tribes” and its rulers as helpless witnesses to “the disintegration of their territory.”³⁰ The adoption of this revisionist narrative, however, allows for a reappraisal of the Zirids and the agency that they exercised in the Mediterranean. Instead of considering Ifriqiya as an anarchic backwater and the Zirid dynasty as a powerless city-state at the mercy of the Normans, we must instead realize that the Zirids were one of a handful of lords in Ifriqiya who tried to leverage the post-Hilalian political landscape to their advantage, both near their base of Mahdia and across the Mediterranean in Sicily.

Divergent Histories: The Normans and the Myth of Tolerance

During the mid-late eleventh century, the Zirids looked across the Mediterranean to expand their political influence. The island of Sicily was a prime target for these ambitions: located less than one hundred miles from the northeastern tip of Ifriqiya and in a state of political fragmentation. Zirid aspirations in Sicily brought them into contact with another group that sought control of the island, the Normans. Despite the geographic proximity of these two dynasties, their historiographical trajectories could not be more disparate. The Norman kingdom of Sicily has been the subject of substantial modern scholarly discourse, as scholars have sought to better understand the “Norman-ness” of this multicultural kingdom and its role in the larger milieu of the medieval Mediterranean. In these histories, the Zirid typically play a minor role, at best, as the objects of Norman conquest during the twelfth century.

In the early and mid-twentieth century, historians sought to better understand the circumstances through which waves of enterprising nobles and mercenaries from northern France arrived on the Italian Peninsula. These historians—including Ferdinand Chalandon, Charles Homer Haskins, and David Charles Douglas—primarily considered the political and military histories of the Normans in the Mediterranean.³¹ They also sought to connect the Normans of Sicily to their cousins located in northwestern Europe. Haskins and Douglas in particular saw the Normans of England, France, Sicily, and Antioch as one ethnic unit with its origins in Viking Scandinavia, and they thought that comparisons of these branches of Normans could reveal deeper truths about their expansionist tendencies.³² Accounts of culture and society across these disparate geographies highlighted the multicultural achievements of the Normans and the supposedly tolerant societies they created.³³ According to these historians, multilingual documents produced in Norman Sicily written in Latin, Arabic, and Greek testified to the vibrant court culture of the island. These narratives tended to focus on the conquering Normans and their relationship to other elites, paying comparatively less attention to the populations of Greek Christians and Muslims in Sicily.

Scholars since the mid-twentieth century have fundamentally rewritten the history of Norman Sicily by reinterpreting the Latin and Greek texts that dominated earlier histories, paying more attention to Arabic-language texts (previously analyzed by Michele Amari), and using archaeological studies.³⁴ By expanding this corpus of sources, scholars have reappraised the characteristics of the Norman regime and the status of those living under Norman rule, especially the Muslim majority on the island.³⁵ The idea of a singular “Norman-ness” across Europe has been replaced with a more regional approach to Norman expansion, which, in the case of Sicily and southern Italy, involved Norman assimilation to regional cultures and the enactment of policies that frequently diverged from those of their brethren in England.³⁶ As the Normans established hegemony in Sicily, they largely abandoned traditions from northern France or England when legitimizing their rule.³⁷ Instead, they looked to the Byzantine East and the Muslim world as models for their regime—namely, to the Fatimid court of Egypt, with whom the Normans had frequent contact.³⁸

Scholars have likewise critiqued the nature of tolerant multiculturalism in Norman Sicily. The Normans produced documents from their chancery in multiple languages, etched multilingual engravings on their royal palaces, and sponsored works written in Arabic, Greek, and Latin at the court of Palermo. These were not, however, simple acts of altruism or humble acknowledgements of the cultural diversity of their island. Instead, they were part of a larger campaign of propaganda through which the Normans—an extreme minority on the island, whose rule was often perilous—sought to control and speak for their subjects.³⁹ The appropriation of administrative and artistic models from the Greek and Muslim worlds, including the patronage of Muslim poets and scholars, was essential to the cultivation of this lofty image of rulership.⁴⁰ Beneath this veneer of tolerance was tension. Although the Normans used Muslim soldiers in their army, employed crypto-Muslims in their court, and adopted Islamic traditions of rulership, latent animosity toward Muslims nevertheless existed at all levels of society.⁴¹ Pogroms against Sicilian Muslims in the second half of the twelfth century laid bare the limits of religious and cultural toleration in the Norman regime—a toleration that came to an end with the rise of the Hohenstaufens.⁴²

After the Normans conquered Sicily in the late eleventh century, they sought to bolster their standing in the Mediterranean through the emulation of Muslim dynasties, intermarriage with well-established Christian dynasties, and political legitimation in the eyes of religious powers like the papacy. Scholars have studied these connections to assess the role of Norman Sicily against the backdrop of the larger medieval Mediterranean.⁴³ Roger II had a number of infamous run-ins with the Crusader states during his reign, which deterred him from any crusading endeavors, yet Norman Sicily (and southern Italy especially) nonetheless had meaningful connections to the crusading movement in both the Levant and the Reconquista in al-Andalus.⁴⁴ The Normans likewise had substantial contact with the Fatimids of Egypt and appropriated certain administrative structures and monarchical stylings from them.⁴⁵ The Norman Christian minority in Sicily maintained control over a non-Christian majority through a series of institutional and cultural mechanisms, including the installation of new taxes that resembled the ubiquitous jizya (a head tax collected from Christians and Jews) of the Muslim world.⁴⁶ Although religious minorities in Sicily were treated as second-class citizens, they nonetheless established substantial communities on the island where they managed to thrive—especially relative to their Muslim and Jewish coreligionists elsewhere in Latin Christendom.⁴⁷

This scholarship has fundamentally transformed scholarly perceptions of Norman Sicily, yet it tends to deemphasize the connections between Norman Sicily and Zirid Ifriqiya.⁴⁸ Scholars, in exploring Christian-Muslim relations in the Mediterranean, have most often compared the Normans with the Fatimids of Egypt or the pre-Norman dynasties of Sicily. The Zirids, meanwhile, are usually mentioned as the objects of Norman aggression, and North Africa is considered as one of several theaters of conflict—alongside southern Italy and the Balkans—through which the Norman kings of Sicily sought to extend their power. This Norman-centric, Sicily-centered perspective warps our understanding of the role the Zirids played in Norman and Mediterranean history. The Zirids and Normans had coexisted in the central Mediterranean for decades prior to the eventual Norman conquest of Zirid lands in Ifriqiya. To reduce this rich and dynamic relationship to one in which the powerful Norman kings gradually exerted their authority over the coast of Ifriqiya is to distort the active role the Zirids played as contesters for power in Sicily, as raiders across the Mediterranean, and as aggressors against the Normans.

Bringing the histories of these two dynasties into dialogue forces a new narrative of the dynamics of the central Mediterranean during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, one that eschews easy trajectories of ascent and decline. The Zirid dynasty, so long obfuscated by the shadow cast by colonial interpretations of Ibn Khaldun and the Banu Hilal, deserves a thorough reappraisal as an active player in the medieval Mediterranean. So, too, should Norman Sicily be considered against this backdrop of a reinvigorated Zirid dynasty, whose proximity to and interactions with the court of Palermo makes its presence crucial to our understanding of the Normans. When these disparate histories are brought together in a singular narrative focused on the central Mediterranean, the numerous exchanges between the two are apparent and the Zirids consequently grow in importance.

The Medieval Sources

The divergent historiographies of the Zirids and Normans have minimized scholarly appreciation of their substantial interactions. The disparity in the quantity of contemporary sources to document the two dynasties further compounds this already distorted picture. Far more medieval sources exist for Norman Sicily than for Zirid Ifriqiya, and the vast majority of the documents that consider the latter are written in Arabic, a language that historians of the medieval Mediterranean have only recently begun to thoroughly incorporate alongside the more traditional Latin and Greek.⁴⁹ Nonetheless, a substantial corpus of textual sources exist that document the Zirid dynasty, which, when mobilized alongside environmental and archaeological evidence, reshapes the picture of the relationship between these two dynasties.

Arabic texts provide the most substantial accounts of the Zirids and their relationship with the Normans. In this corpus of texts, the works of Ibn al-Athir, al-Tijani, Ibn ʿIdhari, and Ibn Khaldun provide the greatest detail and, as such, deserve some degree of introductory consideration.⁵⁰ Although these four authors provide crucial (and at times contradictory) details on the Zirids, all of them wrote either decades or centuries after the dynasty’s disintegration in the 1140s, on the basis of histories written by the Zirid administrator Abu al-Salt and/or the Zirid prince Ibn Shaddad.⁵¹ These earlier works survive only because they are embedded in direct quotations from later texts or in (rarely cited) narratives presented in the works of Ibn al-Athir, al-Tijani, Ibn ʿIdhari, and Ibn Khaldun.⁵²

Fortunately, biographies of Abu al-Salt and Ibn Shaddad survive in other medieval texts, which helps to inform our analysis of their now-lost works. Abu al-Salt was born in al-Andalus around 460H (1067–68) and studied extensively there before traveling to Fatimid Egypt, where he joined the royal court. As a client of the court of Cairo, Abu al-Salt delivered lectures and wrote a number of works on medicine, philosophy, astronomy, and literature.⁵³ Eventually, though, he ran afoul of the imam-caliph and was imprisoned for three years. On his release, he traveled to Ifriqiya around 506H (1112–13), where he was welcomed by the Zirid emir Yahya ibn Tamim.⁵⁴ Abu al-Salt remained in Ifriqiya as a panegyrist and historian of the Zirid emirate until his death in 529H (1134–35).⁵⁵ While working at the Zirid court, he frequently communicated with individuals in Palermo, including the high-ranking administrator Abu al-Dawʾ, and was thus well informed about the Norman court.⁵⁶ It is from the pen of Abu al-Salt that al-Tijani copied a triumphant letter sent by the Zirid emir to other Ifriqiyan lords after the Battle of al-Dimas (summarized at the beginning of this chapter), which is one of the few surviving texts from the Zirid court of the twelfth century.⁵⁷

The Zirid prince Ibn Shaddad continued the narrative of Abu al-Salt by documenting the history of his dynasty up to its fall.⁵⁸ He grew up in Mahdia as part of the familial circle of emir al-Hasan ibn ʿAli. When the Normans conquered the city in 543H (1148–49), he likely fled with the emir to the court of Muhriz ibn Ziyad outside of Tunis and possibly after that to the Almohads. After this, his whereabouts are unknown until 551H (1156–57), when he was in Palermo.⁵⁹ By 571H (1175–76), he was living in Damascus and working on his chronicle about the history of the fallen Zirids. He continued writing until at least 582H (1186–87), when al-Tijani reports that he conducted an interview with a man from Mahdia who was in Damascus.⁶⁰ Ibn Shaddad was thus actively writing his history in close proximity to the campaigns of Saladin against the Crusader states, which likely led him to draw direct comparisons between this violence and that of the Zirids against the Normans.⁶¹

We must therefore read the works of Ibn al-Athir, al-Tijani, Ibn ʿIdhari, and Ibn Khaldun bearing in mind their two registers: that of the Zirids (Abu al-Salt and Ibn Shaddad) who wrote the original accounts and that of later chroniclers who copied, paraphrased, or repurposed them to suit their own agendas. This complexity is compounded by the transmission of Ibn Shaddad’s text, which was circulated in at least two different editions in North Africa and the Levant.⁶² The juxtaposition of narrations of the same scene as reported by three of these writers shows the overarching similarities yet subtle differences between them.⁶³ Below are three versions of a passage from a speech that Abu al-Hasan al-Furriyani of Sfax gave to his son before departing for Sicily as a hostage of Roger II:

Ibn al-Athir

“Indeed, I am old in age and my end approaches. When the opportunity arises for you to fight against the enemy, do it. Don’t have sympathy for them. Do not think about me being killed. Reckon that I have already died.”⁶⁴

Al-Tijani

“Oh my son, I am old and I face death. I myself speak the truth on behalf of Muslims that when the opportunity arises for you [to fight against] those Christians, seize it. Forget about me and kill.”⁶⁵

Ibn Khaldun

“Oh my son, I am old in age and my end nears. When the opportunity arises for you to deliver the Muslims from the rule of the enemy, take it. Do not be afraid for me. Reckon that I have already died.”⁶⁶

These three accounts were built on “stones of re-use,” as Ibn al-Athir, Ibn Khaldun, and al-Tijani each constructed a narrative that was originally from the work of Ibn Shaddad.⁶⁷ While the overall message of this speech is recognizably similar across these three texts, important differences between them put on display the morphing of the lost original: the evocation of a collective group of Muslims, the order to “kill” or “take” action, and the mention of Christian enemies. The words of Ibn Shaddad represent the unknown shared core of this episode, which was then copied or manipulated by later authors. Without this original text, however, it is impossible to parse Ibn Shaddad’s exact wording or to discern with any degree of detail his authorial biases beyond his clear anti-Norman perspective. The same holds true for the now-lost text of Abu al-Salt for the years prior to the mid-1130s.

We are thus helped by other Arabic sources not based on the writings of Abu al-Salt and Ibn Shaddad.⁶⁸ The geographical compendia of al-Bakri and al-Idrisi, poetry by members of the Zirid court, legal rulings handed down by the jurist al-Mazari, and letters from the Almohad chancery provide additional vantage points through which to examine the Zirids.⁶⁹ So, too, do merchant letters from the Cairo Geniza (a collection of discarded texts from a synagogue in Old Cairo) consider economic conditions for Jewish traders in the central Mediterranean during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.⁷⁰ These combined sources provide further context and counterpoint to the narratives derived from Abu al-Salt and Ibn Shaddad, illuminating the larger Mediterranean context in which the Zirids were operating.

Little material culture survives from the Zirid dynasty, especially for the latter years of their rule.⁷¹ Archaeological excavations that focus on medieval Ifriqiya are few and generally have not been interested in the years after the arrival of the Banu Hilal.⁷² Studies about the topography of Norman Africa are likewise confined to cursory notes in the assessments of the urban landscape of Mahdia.⁷³ A lack of archaeological evidence makes it difficult to substantiate information such as the numbers of soldiers and ships mentioned in medieval texts, which are often contradictory or intentionally manipulated to suit a particular authorial agenda. As a result, I have tended to shy away from attempting to quantify the military logistics of conflict between these two dynasties.⁷⁴ Environmental data, however, helps fill in some of the gaps left by written sources and material culture. In particular, annual rainfall statistics from the Old World Drought Atlas (OWDA) permit a more detailed analysis of the extent of drought in Ifriqiya during the middle of the twelfth century.⁷⁵

In contrast, the corpus of medieval sources from Norman Sicily is rich and tracks the circumstances that drove Norman interactions with the Zirids. The Latin chronicles of Alexander of Telese, Amatus of Montecassino, Falco of Benevento (and the continuation of his work in the Ferraris Chronicle), Geoffrey Malaterra, (so-called) Hugo Falcandus, Robert of Torigni, Romuald of Salerno, and William of Apulia narrate the political and military environment that drove Norman involvement in Sicily and their later governance of the island.⁷⁶ Like Arabic-language chronicles, these Latin texts had specific goals and were directed to a specific audience, necessarily skewing their narratives. These texts, however, have the benefit of being written contemporaneously or near-contemporaneously with the events they purport to record, which minimizes (but does not eliminate) some of the issues surrounding textual transmission that are so prominent in the Arabic-language corpus of evidence.

In contrast to the paucity of documents from the Zirid court at Mahdia, a rich corpus of texts survives from the Norman court at Palermo, including charters, lists of taxpayers (jarāʾid), and documents concerned with the boundaries of estates (ḥudūd). Documents like these are indispensable for understanding the mechanisms of Norman governance on the island—especially with regard to Muslims and the fate of rural populations.⁷⁷ In addition, a host of Latin texts written outside the confines of Norman territory, often by authors hostile to the Normans, documents their broader relations with European and Mediterranean powers.⁷⁸ Although less is found about the Zirids and Normans in the Greek tradition, the poetry of a Norman noble exiled to the island of Gozo during the 1140s is a notable exception.⁷⁹ Beyond these written sources, scholars have conducted substantial archaeological and art historical work on Norman Sicily (relative to Ifriqiya), which allows us to better assess both the dynamics of agricultural life on the island and the artistic programs adopted by elites.⁸⁰

These sources, taken together, permit a reassessment of interactions between the Zirids and Normans, as well as the larger Mediterranean context in which these interactions happened. That said, narrative gaps remain and make it difficult at times to parse the details of these narratives. In the following chapters, I am forthcoming about these lacunae and suggest what might have happened during the years for which little information is given in the source materials. I have done this largely by analyzing nearby entries in medieval sources as well as drawing comparisons with geographies for which more surviving evidence exists. Further, I tend to see gaps in the written sources as indicative of times of relative peace, since the majority of entries from these texts focus on instances of conflict. Gaps in narrative sources also mean that it is necessary at times to draw broad conclusions from one or two pieces of evidence. This is particularly true when looking at the economic networks in which the Zirids and Normans operated. A single letter from the Cairo Geniza or a passing reference in an Arabic chronicle sometimes represents the only evidence of commercial contact between Ifriqiya and Sicily for more than a year. These singular references nonetheless indicate a larger infrastructure that enabled such overseas travel to happen on (at least) a semi-regular basis.⁸¹ That said, when there are contradictions between medieval sources, I have tried to be forthcoming (often in footnotes) about these narrative dissonances and their implications.

At times, I have also used anachronistic and problematic identifiers for the sake of narrative comprehension. Thus, Banū Zīrī of Arabic sources becomes the “Zirids” and al-Muwaḥidūn becomes the “Almohads.” I use these terms in a political sense to consider the ruling dynasty and the lands they governed, while likewise acknowledging that these groups ruled over diverse people and that the borders of their lands were amorphous. I also use “Norman” as a broad political category to denote the ruling dynasty in Sicily and southern Italy established in the eleventh century. Despite its ambiguity and diversity, the term is frequently evoked in medieval sources and is entrenched in modern scholarship. We should note, however, that there were shifting conceptions of what it meant to be “Norman,” that there were different groups of Normans across Europe and the Mediterranean with their own identities, and that the majority of people living in the Norman kingdom of Sicily were non-Normans of varied ethnicities and confessional identities. Issues surrounding the geographic limitations of power and ethnic/tribal/dynastic affiliation are discussed in greater detail in chapter 1.

I also use the admittedly broad categories “Latin Christian,” “Greek,” and “Muslim” to refer to areas where political power was in the hands of a dynasty that had nominal allegiance to the pope of Rome, the patriarch of Constantinople, or the reigning Sunni caliph/Shiʿa imam-caliph (respectively). These terms obfuscate regional diversity and the ambiguity of religious identity, but are nonetheless useful for categorizing territories in which a given religious tradition had the greatest political and cultural traction.⁸² When referring to regions in the Mediterranean basin, I use the term “central Mediterranean” to broadly refer to the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, the region of Ifriqiya (the specifics of which are discussed in chapter 1), and intermediate islands between these territories. I trust that these anachronisms, while straying from the vocabulary of the medieval sources, help make the narrative more easily digestible and consequently meaningful for readers of the twenty-first century.

Chapter Overview

This book traces the intertwined and interdependent histories of the Zirids and Normans from their dynastic origins through the fall of the Norman kingdom of Africa in 1160.⁸³ Chapter 1 considers the geographical context in which these two dynasties operated by analyzing the topography, climate, and borders of medieval Ifriqiya and Sicily. The ambiguous boundaries of Ifriqiya in both Arabic and Latin sources make it difficult to quantify the extent of power among medieval dynasties ruling in the region, especially outside of coastal urban centers. The Aghlabids, Fatimids, Zirids, and Normans nonetheless benefited from the wealth produced by substantial commercial networks that passed between Ifriqiya and Sicily, including profitable long-distance trade that originated in sub-Saharan Africa. The Zirids stood to inherit this wealth by virtue of their service to the Fatimid dynasty, a Shiʿa group whose apocalyptic message was well received in much of Ifriqiya and the Maghreb. When the Fatimids moved their capital from Ifriqiya to Egypt at the end of the tenth century, they appointed their loyal Zirid generals as emirs of Ifriqiya—thus initiating Zirid rule in the region.

The early history of the Zirid dynasty and its initial interactions with the Normans are explored in chapter 2. On their appointment as emirs of Ifriqiya, the Zirids waged perennial wars against rival tribes across northwest Africa and eventually met their match in the form of the Banu Hilal, who drove the Zirids from their inland capital of Sabra al-Mansuriya to the coastal stronghold of Mahdia in the middle of the eleventh century. The displacement of the Zirids to coastal Ifriqiya reoriented their foreign policy toward the Mediterranean and especially Sicily, where they sought to expand their power. Zirid armies arrived on the island and made alliances with local rulers, as did another group of enterprising newcomers to Sicily: the Normans. In a handful of military encounters between the two dynasties, the Normans emerged victorious and forced Zirid armies off the island. Nonetheless, both groups eventually decided that conflict was less profitable than mutually beneficial trade, which led to the establishment of a commercial partnership between them.

The increasingly tenuous relationship between the Zirids and Normans from 1087 until the Zirid victory at the Battle of al-Dimas in the summer of 517H (1123) is the focus of chapter 3. The fruitful trading partnership between the two dynasties weathered a Pisan-Genoese campaign against Mahdia in 1087 as well as the First Crusade, but it was disrupted when the Ifriqiyan governor of Gabès tried to forge an alliance with the Normans in the early twelfth century to further his own commercial goals. The Zirids subsequently formed an alliance of their own with the Almoravids of Morocco to destabilize Norman power in Sicily, which led to a successful raid on Norman lands. The Normans responded to this aggression by sending an army to Ifriqiya, which the Zirids and their Arab allies dispatched at the Battle of al-Dimas. This was a meaningful victory for the Zirid emir, al-Hasan ibn ʿAli, who sent a letter to his neighbors that highlighted his victory over the tyrannical Normans and extolled the righteous zeal of his allies.

Chapter 4 explores the events leading to the collapse of the Zirid dynasty in 543H (1148–49) and the foundation of the Norman kingdom of Africa. Relations between the two dynasties largely stabilized after the Battle of al-Dimas, as the Zirids looked to expand their power in Ifriqiya and the Normans campaigned in southern Italy. The Normans were far more successful in their expeditions than the Zirids, who, having lost their Almoravid and local Arab allies, were forced to turn to the Normans for aid when Mahdia was besieged in 529H (1134–35). This Zirid-Norman victory proved pivotal in the history of the two dynasties, for it marked the beginning of a gradual ascent of Norman control over the affairs of coastal Ifriqiya. In the years after 529H (1134–35), Roger II and his admiral George of Antioch used Ifriqiya’s exploitable dependence on Sicilian grain to their advantage. The Zirids, meanwhile, proved unable to muster sufficient support to assert their larger Mediterranean ambitions. This political fracturing was compounded by a nearly decade-long drought in Ifriqiya—attested in both the medieval sources and the Old World Drought Atlas—that brought hardship, emigration, and death to the Zirids and other local lords. These factors allowed the opportunistic Normans to conquer the littoral of Ifriqiya from Tripoli up to Tunis by 1148, thus forming the Norman kingdom of Africa.

The policies and consequences of Norman governance in North Africa are considered in chapter 5. King Roger II and his successor William I ruled their African coastal cities through local Muslim governors, who were appointed to their positions through traditional Islamic practices like the bestowal of robes of honor. In most of the cities they conquered, the Normans played little role in the day-to-day management of their lands. Nonetheless, they made structural changes in the region that proved consequential. The Norman kings installed garrisons in Ifriqiyan cities, changed the tax structure to benefit Christians, and signed contracts with local governors to ensure their fealty. Jewish merchants, deterred by years of violence between the Zirids and Normans, also forsook the ports of Ifriqiya, which allowed Italian Christian merchants more room to conduct commerce. These changes denigrated the Muslim majority of Ifriqiya and ultimately paved the way for future revolts against Norman rule.

On the death of Roger II in 1154, his son William I faced widespread unrest in southern Italy that occupied his military resources for the first several years of his reign. In Ifriqiya, too, trouble was brewing for the Normans. Chapter 6 explores how local governors, drawing on a regional tradition of holy war against Christians and prevailing legal opinions from Maliki scholars, revolted against Norman rule during the mid-1150s and reduced Norman governance in the region to Mahdia, Zawila, and Sousse. The final blow to Norman Africa came courtesy of the Almohads from the Maghreb, who conquered Mahdia and ended Norman rule in Ifriqiya in 554H (1159–60). The Almohads instituted policies of forced deportation for many Ifriqiyan tribal leaders, which fundamentally realigned the regional political landscape. In Sicily, meanwhile, William I made no effort to reconquer his lost African possessions, and his successors instead forged lucrative trading contracts with the Almohads during the 1180s. Although medieval Christian authors paid little attention to the rise and fall of Norman Africa, Muslim writers like Ibn al-Athir and Ibn Khaldun kept alive the memory of Zirid-Norman conflict by presenting Norman aggression as one theater of a monolithic “Frankish” assault on the lands of Islam that spanned the Mediterranean.

This book examines the interconnected histories of the Zirids and Normans without shying away from its many ambiguities and contradictions. It also challenges long-held narratives about medieval Ifriqiya and Sicily. The study of the Zirid-Norman relationship reveals the extent to which both dynasties were involved in each other’s affairs, and the frequent encounters, both peaceful and violent, this mutual involvement precipitated. By analyzing the history of the Zirids alongside their Norman neighbors, and not seeing the eventual Norman conquests in Ifriqiya as inevitable, this book further demonstrates the importance of the history of the Zirids to Mediterranean history during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

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1. 1. This narrative is derived primarily from the accounts of al-Tijani, Al-Rihla (Tunis: Dar al-Arabiya Books, 1981), 335–39; Ibn ʿIdhari, Al-Bayan al-Mughrib, ed. Bashar A. Marouf and Mahmoud B. Awad (Tunis: Dar al-Gharb al-Islami, 2013), 1:343. This encounter is considered in greater detail in chapter 3.

2. 2. Dynastic history has long been the preferred mode through which historians have categorized polities governed by Muslim rulers, although in the European tradition it has been more common for scholars to write “in terms of states created by dynasties.” Michael Brett, The Rise of the Fatimids: The World of the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the Fourth Century of the Hijra, Tenth Century CE (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 5–7.

3. 3. In the 1970s, Harry Hazard claimed that in “the study of medieval history by modern scholars, North Africa has been a neglected stepchild between Egypt and Spain.” Harry W. Hazard, “Moslem North Africa, 1049–1394,” in A History of the Crusades, vol. 3, The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Harry W. Hazard (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 459. Writing in 2018, Ramzi Rouighi echoed these sentiments when he wrote that “the publication of a new book about the medieval Maghrib (North Africa) is always a special event,” especially when that publication is written in English. Ramzi Rouighi, review of The Near West: Medieval North Africa, Latin Europe and the Mediterranean in the Second Axial Age, by Allen James Fromherz, American Historical Review 123, no. 1 (2018): 340–41.

4. 4. See David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–11; Abdelmajid Hannoum, “Translation and the Colonial Imaginary: Ibn Khaldūn Orientalist,” History and Theory 42, no. 1 (February 2003): 61–81; Alain Messaoudi, Les arabisants et la France coloniale: Savants, conseillers, médiateurs (1780–1930) (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2015); Paul M. Love Jr., “The Colonial Pasts of Medieval Texts in Northern Africa: Useful Knowledge, Publication History, and Political Violence in Colonial and Post-Independence Algeria,” Journal of African History 58, no. 3 (2017): 445–63; Sophie Dulucq, “Writing African History in France during the Colonial Era,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, ed. Thomas Spear, October 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.313.

5. 5. Idris titles his chapter on the reigns of the last three Zirid emirs “Agony.” He argues that the Zirid and Hammadid dynasties had been “struck to death by the anarchy born of the Hilalian invasion” and that their fall had an “inevitable dynamic.” H. R. Idris, La Berbérie orientale sous les Zīrīdes: Xe–XIIe siècles (Limoges: A. Bontemps, 1962), 1:303, 405–6.

6. 6. This perspective and its early refutation is summarized in John Wansbrough, “The Decolonization of North African History,” Journal of African History 9, no. 4 (1968): 643–50.

7. 7. To Carette, the devastation caused by the Banu Hilal was such that he barely even considered Zirid history after their arrival into Ifriqiya. Ernest Carette, Recherches sur l’origine et les migrations des principales tribus de l’Afrique septentrionale et particulièrement de l’Algérie (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1853), 412–13.

8. 8. Georges Marçais, Les arabes en Berbérie du XIe au XIVe siècle (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1913), 119. See also Georges Marçais, La Berbérie musulmane et l’Orient au moyen âge (Paris: Éditions Aubier-Montaigne, 1946). Chapter 2 considers the Sanhaja tribal confederation.

9. 9. E. F. Gautier, L’islamisation de l’Afrique du nord: Les siècles obscurs du Maghreb (Paris: Payot, 1927), 388. A second edition of this text was released posthumously as E. F. Gautier, Le passé de l’Afrique du nord: Les siècles obscurs (Paris: Payot, 1942).

10. 10. Charles-André Julien, Histoire de’Afrique du nord: Des origines à 1830, ed. Roger le Tourneau, 2nd ed. (Paris: Grande Bibliothèque Payot, 1994), 414. Translation is from Charles-André Julien, History of North Africa, trans. John Petrie (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 73.

11. 11. See, for example, Harry Hazard, The Numismatic History of Late Medieval North Africa (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1952), 9–10, 54–56; S. D. Goitein, “Medieval Tunisia: The Hub of the Mediterranean,” in Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden: Brill, 1966), 310–11; E. W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Hazard, “Moslem North Africa,” 457–85; David Abulafia, “The Norman Kingdom of Africa and the Norman Expeditions to Majorca and the Muslim Mediterranean,” Anglo-Norman Studies 7 (1985): 26–49.

12. 12. Pierre Amédée Jaubert translated al-Idrisi in 1836, Alphonse Rousseau translated al-Tijani from 1852 to 1853, Edmond Fagnan translated Ibn ʿIdhari from 1901 to 1904, and William McGuckin de Slane translated Ibn Khaldun from 1852 to 1856 (in addition to translations of Ibn Khallikan and al-Bakri). Many of these texts have since been republished. Al-Idrisi, Géographie d’Édrisi, trans. Amédée Jaubert, 2 vols. (Paris: Libraire de la Societé, 1836); al-Tijani, Voyage du scheikh et-Tidjani dans la régence de Tunis pendant les années 706, 707 et 708 de l’hégire (1306–1309), trans. Alphonse Rousseau (Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, 1994); Ibn ʿIdhari, Histoire de l’Afrique et de l’Espagne intitulée al-Bayano’l-Mogrib, trans. E. Fagnan (Algiers: Imprimerie Orientale Pierre Fontana, 1901–4); Ibn Khaldun, Histoire des Berberes et des dynasties musulmanes de l’Afrique septentrionale, trans. William McGuckin de Slane (Algiers: Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1852–56); al-Bakri, Description de l’Afrique septentrionale par el-Bekri, trans. William McGuckin de Slane (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1859); Ibn Khallikan, Ibn Khallikan’s Biographical Dictionary, trans. William McGuckin de Slane (Paris: Bernard Quaritch, 1843–71).

13. 13. Hannoum, “Translation and the Colonial Imaginary,” 71. The English translation of the Muqaddima of Ibn Khaldun by Franz Rosenthal is similarly problematic. Aziz al-Azmeh argues that it is a “systematic misreading” of which the only saving grace is a comprehensive index. Aziz al-Azmeh, Ibn Khaldūn: An Essay in Reinterpretation (New York: Frank Cass, 1982), 167; Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, ed. Franz Rosenthal, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

14. 14. Patricia Lorcin, “Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Colonial Algeria’s Latin Past,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 295–329.

15. 15. Scholars like Ramzi Rouighi have since shown that this interpretation of ethnogenesis is untrue, as the term “Berber” was cultivated across numerous sites and chronologies during the Middle Ages. Ramzi Rouighi, Inventing the Berbers: History and Ideology in the Maghrib (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

16. 16. Idris, Berbérie orientale. As its name implies, this work adopts the format and scope (albeit with a different dynasty) of the seminal work of Idris’s doctoral advisor: Robert Brunschvig, La Berbérie orientale sous les Hafsides, des origines à la fin du XVe siècle (Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1940–47).

17. 17. Idris’s work surpasses in detail (by a substantial margin) the earlier work of Lucien Golvin, Le Maghrib central à l’époque des Zirides: Recherches d’archéologie et d’histoire (Paris: Arts et Métiers Graphiques, 1957).

18. 18. Despite some similarities in how French scholars approached medieval Ifriqiya, it would be an oversimplification to say that academics from Carette to Idris had uniform approaches to the history of medieval Ifriqiya. These individuals emerged from unique circumstances and specific intellectual communities that informed their research. The so-called École d’Alger, for example, comprised scholars like Marçais and Gautier, who tended to approach North African history from the perspective of successive invasions that rendered Algeria a nationless region. Charles-André Julien, however, was part of a more liberal wing of historians who provided agency for Algerian sovereignty and long-term contexts for the histories of colonized peoples (in keeping with the tenets of the Annales school). Prochaska, Making Algeria French, 1–6. Julien’s collaborations with Lucien Febvre (who cofounded the journal Annales with Marc Bloch and was a tutor of Fernand Braudel) were particularly fruitful. Dulucq, “Writing African History in France.”

19. 19. Idris, Berbérie orientale, 1:3, 39, 127, 205, 249, 303.

20. 20. See, for example, Mohamed Sahli, Décoloniser l’histoire: Introduction à l’histoire du Maghreb (Paris: François Maspero, 1965); Mohamed Talbi, Ibn Khaldun et l’histoire (Tunis: Maison Tunisienne de d’Édition, 1973); Yves Lacoste, Ibn Khaldoun: Naissance de l’histoire, passé du tiers-monde (Paris: François Maspero, 1966); Michael Brett, “Fitnat al Qayrawan: A Study of Traditional Arabic Historiography” (PhD diss., London University, 1970); Abdallah Laroui, L’histoire du Maghreb: Un essai de synthèse (Paris: François Maspero, 1975); Abdallah Laroui, The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Radhi Daghfous, “De l’origine des Banu Hilal et des Banu Sulaym,” Cahiers de Tunisie 23, no. 91–92 (1975): 41–68; Radhi Daghfous, “Aspects de la situation économique de l’Égypte au milieu du Ve siècle/milieu du XIe siècle: Contribution à l’étude des conditions de l’immigration des tribus arabes (Hilāl et Sulaym) en Ifrīqiya,” Cahiers de Tunisie 25, no. 97–98 (1977): 23–50.

21. 21. Some of these scholars disagree about whether surviving quantities of Zirid gold are indicative of relative Zirid wealth. Maurice Lombard, “Les bases monétaires d’une suprématie économique: L’or musulman du VIII au XI siècle,” Annales 2, no. 2 (1947): 143–60; Michael Brett, “Ifriqiya as a Market for Saharan Trade from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century AD,” Journal of African History 10, no. 3 (1969): 350; Jean Devisse, “Routes de commerce et échanges en Afrique occidentale en relation avec la Mediterranée,” Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 50, no. 1 (1972): 42–73.

22. 22. Poncet and Idris debated the catastrophic nature of the Hilalian invasions in Jean Poncet, “Le mythe de la ‘catastrophe’ hilalienne,” Annales 22, no. 5 (1967): 1099–120; H. R. Idris, “De la réalité de la catastrophe hilâlienne,” Annales 23, no. 2 (1968): 390–96; Jean Poncet, “Encore à propos des hilaliens: La ‘mise au point’ de R. Idris,” Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 23, no. 3 (1968): 660–62; H. R. Idris, “L’invasion hilālienne et ses conséquences,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 1968, 11–43.

23. 23. Brett, “Ifriqiya as a Market,” 350. Recent scholarship by Diana Davis has further shown how the saga of the Banu Hilal in Ifriqiya was part of a larger French colonial project that aimed to glorify the supposed “breadbasket” of Roman Africa at the expense of subsequent Islamic dynasties. Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 56–60.

24. 24. Scholars further recognize the need to contextualize Ibn Khaldun in the times in which he wrote, rather than homogenizing his work with other Muslim scholars who wrote centuries apart or transposing modern European intellectual ideas onto his own theories. Gabriel Martinez-Gros, “Que faire d’Ibn Khaldûn?,” Esprit 319, no. 11 (2005): 155–66. The corpus of scholarship written about the work of Ibn Khaldun and its reception is vast. See, for example, Walter Joseph Fischel, Ibn Khaldūn in Egypt: His Public Functions and His Historical Research, 1382–1406: A Study in Islamic Historiography (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967); Ahmed Abdesselem, Ibn Khaldun et ses lecteurs (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983); Maya Shatzmiller, L’historiographie merinide: Ibn Khaldun et ses contemporains (Leiden: Brill, 1982); Abdesselam Cheddadi, Ibn Khaldūn: L’homme et le théoreticien de la civilisation (Paris: Gallimard, 2006); Gabriel Martinez-Gros, Ibn Khaldûn et les sept vies de l’Islam (Arles, France: Actes Sud, 2006); Allen Fromherz, Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 162–203.

25. 25. Al-Tijani, Al-Rihla, 239–41.

26. 26. Michael Brett, “The Zughba at Tripoli, 429H (1037–8 A.D.),” Libyan Studies: Annual Report of the Society for Libyan Studies 6 (January 1974): 41–47; Michael Brett, “The Ifrīqiyan Sijill of Al-Mustanṣir, 445 H/1053–4 CE,” in Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras VI (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2010), 9–16.

27. 27. Michael Brett, “The Way of the Nomad,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 58, no. 2 (1995): 258. The medieval genealogies of this episode as they relate to Ibn Khaldun (including the works of Ibn Bassam, Ibn Sharaf, and Abu al-Salt) are summarized in Michael Brett, “Ibn Khaldun and the Invasion of Ifriqiya by the Banu Hilal (5th Century AH/11th Century AD),” in Actes du Colloque International sur Ibn Khaldoun, Alger 21–26 Juin 1978 (Algiers: Société Nationale d’Édition et de Diffusion, 1982), 289–98.

28. 28. Ibn Khaldun’s focus on dynasties that form states (dawla) and continuities/breaks between them is the “cohesive conceptual glue” that holds together his narrative. Al-Azmeh, Ibn Khaldūn, 19.

29. 29. Irwin, Ibn Khaldun, 52–55.

30. 30. Jamil Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 85.

31. 31. Ferdinand Chalandon, Histoire de la domination normande en Italie et en Sicile (Paris: Librairie Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1907); Charles Homer Haskins, The Normans in European History (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1915); Davis Charles Douglas, The Norman Achievement, 1050–1100 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).

32. 32. Haskins argues broadly that “wherever [the Normans] went, they showed a marvelous power of initiative and of assimilation; if the initiative is more evident in England, the assimilation is more manifest in Sicily.” Haskins, Normans in European History, 247.

33. 33. The popular history of Norwich, which echoes the arguments this crop of scholars, remains influential as well. John Julius Norwich, The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130–1194 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

34. 34. Michele Amari, Biblioteca arabo-sicula (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1857); Michele Amari, Le epigrapfi arabiche di Sicilia (Palermo, Italy: Stabilimento Tipografico Virzi, 1879); Michele Amari, Biblioteca arabo-sicula: Versione italiana (Turin, Italy: Ermanno Loescher, 1880); Michele Amari, Storia dei musulmani di Sicilia, 2nd ed. (Catania, Italy: Romeo Prampolini, 1938).

35. 35. The corpus of literature on this topic is substantial. See, for example, Graham Loud, “How ‘Norman’ Was the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy?,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 25 (1981): 13–34; Graham Loud, “The Gens Normannorum: Myth or Reality?,” in Proceedings of the Fourth Battle Conference on Anglo-Normans Studies, ed. R. Allen Brown (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1982), 104–16; Stefan Burkhardt and Thomas Foerster, eds., Norman Tradition and Transcultural Heritage: Exchange of Cultures in the “Norman” Peripheries of Medieval Europe (New York: Ashgate, 2013); David Bates and Pierre Bauduin, eds., 911–2011: Penser les mondes normands médiévaux (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2016). For an overview of this historiography, see Sarah Davis-Secord, “Medieval Sicily and Southern Italy in Recent Historiographical Perspective,” History Compass 8, no. 1 (2010): 61–87.

36. 36. Graham Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest (New York: Longman, 2000); Alex Metcalfe, The Muslims of Medieval Italy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

37. 37. Hubert Houben, “Le royaume normand de Sicile était-il vraiment ‘normand’?,” in Bates and Bauduin, 911–2011, 325–60. Roger II did borrow some iconography from Capetian France, however, as seen most explicitly in the fleur-de-lis in his regalia at the Martorana. Dawn Marie Hayes, Roger II of Sicily: Family, Faith, and Empire in the Medieval Mediterranean World (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2020), 139–70.

38. 38. Hiroshi Takayama, The Administration of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily (Leiden: Brill, 1993); Pierre Aubé, Les empires normands d’Orient: XIe–XIIIe siècle (Paris: Perrin, 1999); Jeremy Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal Dīwān (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Annliese Nef, Conquérir et gouverner la Sicile islamique aux XIe et XIIe siècles (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2011); Sarah Davis-Secord, Where Three Worlds Met: Sicily in the Early Medieval Mediterranean (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 174–241.

39. 39. Karen Britt, “Roger II of Sicily: Rex, Basileus, and Khalif? Identity, Politics, and Propaganda in the Cappella Palatina,” Mediterranean Studies 16 (2007): 21–45; Annliese Nef, “Pluralisme religieux et État monarchique dans la Sicile des XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” in Politique et Religion en Méditerranée: Moyen âge et époque contemporaine, ed. Henri Bresc, Georges Dagher, and Christiane Veauvy (Aubervilliers, France: Éditions Bouchène, 2008), 235–54; Umberto Bongianino, “The King, His Chapel, His Church: Boundaries and Hybridity in the Religious Visual Culture of the Norman Kingdom,” Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies 4, no. 1–2 (2017): 3–50.

40. 40. Nef, Conquérir et gouverner, 67–176; Karla Mallette, The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100–1250: A Literary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

41. 41. Annliese Nef, “L’histoire des ‘mozarabes’ de Sicile: Bilan provisoire et nouveaux matériaux,” in Existe una identidad mozárab? Historia, lengua y cultura de los cristianos de al-Andalus (siglos IX–XII), ed. Cyrille Aillet, Mayte Penelas, and Philippe Roisse (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2008); Joshua Birk, Norman Kings of Sicily and the Rise of the Anti-Islamic Critique: Baptized Sultans (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

42. 42. Julie Anne Taylor, Muslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony at Lucera (New York: Lexington Books, 2003); Annliese Nef, “La déportation des musulmans sicilens par Frédéric II: Précédents, modalités, signification et portée de la mesure,” in Le monde de l’itinérance en Méditerranée de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne: Procédures de contrôle et d’identification, ed. Claudia Moatti, Wolfgang Kaiser, and Christophe Pébarthe (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 2009), 455–77.

43. 43. Giosuè Musca, ed., Il mezzogiorno normanno-svevo visto dall’Europa e dal mondo mediterraneo: Atti delle tredicesime giornate normanno-sveve, Bari, 21–24 ottobre 1997 (Bari: Edizioni Dedalo, 1999); Philippe Gourdin and Gabriel Martinez-Gros, eds., Pays d’Islam et monde latin: 950–1250 (Neuilly-sur-Seine, France: Atlande, 2001).

44. 44. Giles Constable, “The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries,” Traditio 9 (1953): 213–79; Paul Chevedden, “A Crusade from the First”: The Norman Conquest of Islamic Sicily, 1060–1091,” Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 22 (2010): 191–225; Luigi Russo, “Bad Crusaders? The Normans of Southern Italy and the Crusading Movement,” in Anglo-Norman Studies XXXVIII: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2015, ed. Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2016), 169–80; Paula Z. Hailstone, Recalcitrant Crusaders? The Relationship between Southern Italy and Sicily, Crusading and the Crusader States, c. 1060–1198 (New York: Routledge, 2019).

45. 45. See, for example, Jeremy Johns, “Malik Ifrīqiya: The Norman Kingdom of Africa and the Fāṭimids,” Libyan Studies; Annual Report of the Society for Libyan Studies XVIII (1987): 89–101; Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily, 2–10.

46. 46. Jeremy Johns and Alex Metcalfe, “The Mystery at Chùrchuro: Conspiracy or Incompetence in Twelfth-Century Sicily?,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 62, no. 2 (1999): 226–59; Alex Metcalfe, “The Muslims of Sicily under Christian Rule,” in The Society of Norman Italy, ed. Graham Loud and Alex Metcalfe (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 289–317; Timothy Smit, “Commerce and Coexistence: Muslims in the Economy and Society of Norman Sicily” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2009); Alex Metcalfe, Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily: Arabic Speakers and the End of Islam (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003). See also Brian Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050–1614 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Allen Fromherz, The Near West: Medieval North Africa, Latin Europe and the Mediterranean in the Second Axial Age (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

47. 47. On archaeology, see Annliese Nef and Vivien Prigent, “Per una nuova storia dell’alto medioevo sicïliano,” Storica 12, no. 35–36 (2006): 9–63; Lucia Arcifa, Alessandra Bagnera, and Annliese Nef, “Archeologia della Sicilia islamica: Nuove proposte di riflessione,” in Histoire et archéologie de l’Occident musulman (VIIe–XVe siècle): Al-Andalus, Maghreb, Sicile, ed. Philippe Sénac (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2012), https://books.openedition.org/pumi/25333; Annliese Nef and Fabiola Ardizzone, Les dynamiques de l’islamisation en Méditerranée centrale et en Sicile: Nouvelles propositions et découvertes récentes (Rome: Edipuglia, 2014). On toponyms, see Annliese Nef, “La nisba tribale entre identification individuelle et catégorisation: Variations dans la Sicile des Xe–XIIe siècle,” L’identification des origines de l’islam au XIXe siècle 127 (2011/2010): 45–58; Leonard Chiarelli, A History of Muslim Sicily (Santa Venera, Malta: Midsea Books, 2011). On Jewish merchants documented in the Cairo Geniza, see S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); S. D. Goitein, “Sicily and Southern Italy in the Cairo Geniza Documents,” Archivio Storico per la Sicilia Orientale 67, no. 1 (1971): 9–33; S. D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973); Shlomo Simonsohn, The Jews in Sicily: 383–1300 (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Annliese Nef, “La Sicile dans la documentation de la Geniza Cairote (fin xe–xiiie): Les réseaux attestés et leur nature,” in Espaces et réseaux en Méditerrannée (Vie–XVIe siècle): La configuration des réseaux, ed. Damien Coulon, Christophe Picard, and Dominique Valérian (Saint-Denis, France: Éditions Bouchène, 2007), 1:273–92; Shlomo Simonsohn, Between Scylla and Charybdis: The Jews in Sicily (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Jessica Goldberg, “The Use and Abuse of Commercial Letters from the Cairo Geniza,” Journal of Medieval History 38, no. 2 (June 2012): 127–54; Jessica Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and Their Business World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Marina Rustow, “Fatimid State Documents,” Jewish History 32 (2019): 221–77; Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

48. 48. Nef goes further than most scholars in showing connections between the Zirids and Normans during and after the latter’s conquest of Sicily. Nef, Conquérir et gouverner, 34–38.

49. 49. Idris’s bibliography of sources that pertain to the Zirid dynasty is valuable, though dated. Idris, Berbérie orientale, 1:xiii–lii.

50. 50. Al-Tijani, Al-Rihla; Ibn Khaldun, Kitab al-ʿIbar, 8 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 2000); Ibn al-Athir, Al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh, 13 vols. (Beirut: Dar Sadir, 2009); Ibn ʿIdhari, Al-Bayan al-Mughrib. Other Arabic works to use Zirid authors include those of Mamluk scholars al-Nuwayri and al-Maqrizi, as well as the biographical dictionary of Ibn Khallikan. Al-Nuwayri, Nihayat al-Arab fi Funun al-Adab, 33 vols. (Cairo: Wizarat al-Thaqafa, 1923–97); Ibn Khallikan, Wafayat al-Aʿyan wa-Anbaʾ Abnaʾ al-Zaman, 8 vols. (Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1977); al-Maqrizi, Kitab al-Muqaffa al-Kabir, ed. Muhammad al-Yaʿlawi, 8 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Gharb al-Islami, 1991).

51. 51. The lives of these Zirid authors are considered in Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily, 85–90. See also Mercè Comes, “Abū al-Ṣalt: Umayya ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Abī al-Ṣalt al-Dānī al-Andalusī,” in The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, Springer Reference, ed. Thomas Hockey (New York: Springer, 2007), 9–10.

52. 52. Michele Amari compiled portions of these texts (and others) in his Biblioteca arabo-sicula, but only those parts that he thought had relevance to Sicily. His work, while invaluable for its thoroughness, nonetheless divorces texts from the contexts in which they were written.

53. 53. Sumaiya Hamdani, “Worlds Apart? An Andalusi in Fāṭimid Egypt,” Journal of North African Studies 19, no. 1 (2014): 56–67; Chedley Bouyahia, “La vie littéraire en Ifriqiya sous les zirides (362–555 de l’H./972–1160 de J. C.)” (PhD diss., Paris-Sorbonne, 1972), 165–75.

54. 54. Parts of the chronology of Abu al-Salt’s life are disputed. His move to Ifriqiya, for example, could also have happened during the reign of Yahya’s successor ʿAli. Idris, Berbérie orientale, 1:xvii–xviii; Comes, “Abū Al-Ṣalt,” 9.

55. 55. One of Abu al-Salt’s surviving works is a letter written to the Zirid emir ʿAli about Egypt. Abu al-Salt, “Al-Risala al-Misriyya,” in Nawadir al-Makhtutat, ed. ʿAbd al-Salam Harun (Cairo: Lajnat al-Taʾlif wa-l-Tarjama wa-l-Nashr, 1951), 1:1–56.

56. 56. Abu al-Dawʾ was a scholar, poet, and notary in the Norman administration. Metcalfe, “Muslims of Sicily,” 298; Nadia Jamil and Jeremy Johns, “A New Latin-Arabic Document from Norman Sicily (November 595 H/1198 CE),” in The Heritage of Arabo-Islamic Learning: Studies Presented to Wadad Kadi, ed. Maurice Pomerantz and Aram Shahin (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 129–30. See also Adalgisa de Simone, Nella Sicilia araba tra storia e filologia (Palermo: n.p., 1999), 3–15; Barbara Graille, “Le livre des simples de Umayya b. ’Abd al-’Azīz b. Abī al-Ṣalt al-Dānī al-Išbīlī,” supplement, Bulletin d’Études Orientales 55 (2003): 3–280.

57. 57. Al-Tijani, Al-Rihla, 337–39.

58. 58. Mohamed Talbi, “Ibn 2ẖaddād,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. Peri J. Bearman, Thierry Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, Emeri van Donzel, and Wolfhart P. Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005), https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2 (hereafter cited as EI2); Brett, “Fitnat al Qayrawan,” 402–4; Michael Brett, “Muslim Justice under Infidel Rule: The Normans in Ifriqiya, 517–55H/1123–1160AD,” Cahiers de Tunisie 43 (1995): 334–35; Idris, Berbérie orientale, 1:xviii–xix.

59. 59. Michele Amari argues that Ibn Shaddad was an eyewitness to the Almohad conquest of Mahdia. Idris and Johns (among others) now think that he was simply reporting the testimony of someone who was an eyewitness to the city’s capture. Amari, Storia dei musulmani di Sicilia, 3:486; Idris, Berbérie orientale, 1:xviii–xix; Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily, 87–88.

60. 60. Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily, 87.

61. 61. This theme, especially as it applies to the works of Ibn al-Athir and Ibn Khaldun, is considered in chapter 6. On the development of jihad ideology in the Levant, see Suleiman Mourad and James Lindsay, The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period: Ibn ʿAsākir of Damascus (1105–1176) and His Age, with an Edition and Translation of Ibn ʿAsākir’s The Forty Hadiths for Inciting Jihad (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Michael Köhler, Alliances and Treaties between Frankish and Muslim Rulers in the Middle East: Cross-Cultural Diplomacy in the Period of the Crusades, trans. Peter Holt (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Kenneth A. Goudie, Reinventing Jihād: Jihād Ideology from the Conquest of Jerusalem to the End of the Ayyūbids (c. 492/1099–647/1249) (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

62. 62. Brett, “Fitnat al Qayrawan,” 387–425.

63. 63. Ibn ʿIdhari does not record this speech in his chronicle.

64. 64. Ibn al-Athir, Al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh, year 551H, 11:100.

65. 65. Al-Tijani, Al-Rihla, 75.

66. 66. Ibn Khaldun, Kitab al-ʿIbar, 5:238.

67. 67. Martinez-Gros uses the phrase “stone of re-use” to refer specifically to the work of Ibn Khaldun and its relationship to the work of Ibn al-Athir, but this idea of chronicles being constructed on the foundations of earlier works applies here as well. Martinez-Gros, “Que faire d’Ibn Khaldûn?,” 157.

68. 68. In this discussion of Arabic sources, one source is intentionally absent: the seventeenth-century Al-Muʾnis fi Akhbar Ifriqiya wa-Tunis (The emergence of the events of Ifriqiya and Tunis) by Ibn Abi Dinar. Some scholars who have previously considered the writings of Ibn Abi Dinar have largely treated him as if he were an eyewitness to the events of the Norman conquests rather than an author writing centuries later. Even Brett, who acknowledges that Ibn Abi Dinar might have written with an eye toward the events of the seventeenth century, uses his chronicle extensively to narrate his history of Norman involvement in Ifriqiya. The evidence suggests that Ibn Abi Dinar used the works of medieval Muslim authors in his own writings but intensified their anti-Norman vitriol. Ibn Abi Dinar, Al-Muʾnis fi Akhbar Ifriqiya wa-Tunis (Tunis: Matbaʿat al-Dawlat al-Tunisiya, 1869); Abulafia, “Norman Kingdom of Africa,” 33–35; Brett, “Muslim Justice under Infidel Rule,” 335–39, 362–63.

69. 69. Al-Bakri, Al-Masalik wa-l-Mamalik (Beirut: Dar al-Kotob al-Ilmiyah, 2003); al-Idrisi, Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi Ikhtiraq Akhbar al-Afaq, 2 vols. (Cairo: al-Thaqafa al-Denia, 2002); Ibn Hamdis, Il canzoniere di Ibn Ḥamdîs, ed. Celestino Schiaparelli (Rome: Topografia della Casa Editrice Italiana, 1897); Ibn Rashiq, Al-ʿUmda fi Mahasin al-Shiʿr wa-Adabih wa-Naqdih (Algiers: Asimat al-Thaqafa al-ʿArabiya, 2007); al-Wansharisi, Al-Miʿyar al-Muʿrib, ed. Muhammad Hajji, 13 vols. (Rabat: Nashr Wizarat al-Awqaf wa-l Shu’un al-Islamiyah, 1981); Évariste Lévi-Provençal, Trente-sept lettres officielles Almohades (Rabat: Institut des Hautes-Études Marocaines, 1941); Pascal Buresi and Hicham El Aallaoui, Governing the Empire: Provincial Administration in the Almohad Caliphate (1224–1269): Critical Edition, Translation, and Study of Manuscript 4752 of the Ḥasaniyya Library in Rabat Containing 77 Taqādīm (“Appointments”) (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

70. 70. These documents come from a collection of some three hundred thousand manuscript fragments that were placed in the genizah (storeroom) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, a suburb of Cairo. An overview of the Cairo Geniza can be found in the online archive for one of its largest modern collections, the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection, which is housed at Cambridge University Library (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/genizah/1).

71. 71. Lotfi Abdeljaouad’s study of the epigraphy of Monastir, Kairouan, Sfax, Sousse, and Tunis unfortunately did not unearth any relevant inscriptions for this study, as most surviving Zirid inscriptions are from the eleventh century or earlier. Lotfi Abdeljaouad, “Inscriptions arabes des monuments islamiques des grandes villes de Tunisie: Monastir, Kairouan, Sfax, Sousse et Tunis” (PhD diss., Université de Provence Aix-Marseille, 2001).

72. 72. Jean-Louis Ballais, “Conquests and Land Degradation in the Eastern Maghreb during Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” in The Archaeology of Drylands: Living at the Margin (New York: Routledge, 2000), 125–36; Jeremy Johns, “Islamic Archaeology at a Difficult Age,” Antiquity 84 (2010): 1187–91; Corisande Fenwick, “From Africa to Ifrīqiya: Settlement and Society in Early Medieval North Africa (650–800),” Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 25, no. 1 (2013): 9–33; Lamia Hadda, “Zirid and Hammadid Palaces in North Africa and Its Influence on Norman Architecture in Sicily” (paper presented at Le Vie dei Mercanti, 16th International Forum of Studies—World Heritage and Knowledge, Naples, June 2018), 323–32; Corisande Fenwick, “Ifriqiya and the Central Maghreb,” in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology, ed. Bethany J. Walker, Timothy Insoll, and Corisande Fenwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 243–66.

73. 73. Alexandre Lézine, Mahdiya: Recherches d’archaéologie islamique (Paris: Librarie C. Klincksieck, 1965); Abdelkader Masmoudi, Mahdia, étude de géographie urbaine (Tunis: Université de Tunis, 1984). The recent topographic overview provided by Belhareth is useful for its images but does not add much to our understanding of the medieval city. Taoufik Belhareth, “Mahdia: Structure urbaine et enjeux de croissance,” in Workshop Tunisie: Invention paysagère des carrières de Mahdia, ed. Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2008), 26–33.

74. 74. Medieval sources often approximate the sizes of armies and navies to suit their respective narratives. Even within sources there are problems, as is the case with Ibn Khaldun, who writes of the same encounter between the Zirids and Normans on two occasions, but says the fleet of Roger II was 250 ships in one but 300 ships in the other. Ibn Khaldun, Kitab al-ʿIbar, 5:233, 6:214. The Zirid and Norman militaries are explored in Michael Brett, “The Military Interest of the Battle of Haydaran,” in War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, ed. Vernon Parry and Malcolm Yapp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 78–88; John Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649–1571 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Michael Brett, “The Armies of Ifriqiya, 1052–1160,” Cahiers de Tunisie 48 (1997): 107–25; Charles Stanton, Norman Naval Operations in the Mediterranean (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2011).

75. 75. Edward Cook et al., “Old World Megadroughts and Pluvials during the Common Era,” Science Advances 1, no. 10 (November 2015): 1–2. Before the OWDA, studies on the climate of medieval Ifriqiya only stretched back to the thirteenth century. See Ramzi Touchan et al., “Long Term Context for Recent Drought in Northwestern Africa,” Geophysical Research Letters 35 (2008); Ramzi Touchan et al., “Spatiotemporal Drought Variability in Northwestern Africa over the Last Nine Centuries,” Climate Dynamics 37, no. 1 (2011): 237–52. The utility and limits of the OWDA is examined in Matt King, “The Sword and the Sun: The Old World Drought Atlas as a Source for Medieval History,” Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 29, no. 3 (2017): 221–34.

76. 76. Alexander of Telese, Alexandri Telesini abbatis Ystoria Rogerii regis Sicilie Calabrie atque Apulie, ed. Ludovica de Nava (Rome: Instituto Palazzo Borromini, 1991); Amatus of Montecassino, The History of the Normans by Amatus of Montecassino, trans. Prescott N. Dunbar and Graham Loud (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2004); Falco of Benevento, Chronicle Beneventanum: Città e feudi nell’Italia dei Normanni, ed. Edoardo D’Angelo (Florence: Sismel, 1998); Geoffrey Malaterra, De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis et Roberti Guiscardi ducis fratris eius, ed. L. A. Muratori and Ernersto Pontieri (Bologna, Italy: Nicola Zanichelli, 1949); Geoffrey Malaterra, The Deeds of Count Roger of Calabria and Sicily and of His Brother Duke Robert Guiscard, trans. Kenneth Baxter Wolf (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Geoffrey Malaterra, Histoire du Grand Comte Roger et de son frère Robert Guiscard, trans. Marie-Agnès Lucas-Avenel (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2016); Hugo Falcandus, La historia o liber de regno Sicilie e la epistola ad Petrum Panormitane ecclesie thesaurarium, ed. G. B. Siragusa (Rome: Tipografi del Senato, 1897); Hugo Falcandus, The History of the Tyrants of Sicily by “Hugo Falcandus,” 1154–69, trans. Graham Loud and Thomas Wiedemann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Robert of Torigni, Chronicle of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II., and Richard I: The Chronicle of Robert of Torigni, Abbot of the Monastery of St. Michael-in-Peril-of-the-Sea, ed. Richard Howlett (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1889); Romuald of Salerno, Chronicon, ed. Carlo Garufi (Città di Castello, Italy: S. Lapi, 1935); William of Apulia, Guillaume de Pouille: La geste de Robert Guiscard [gesta Roberti Wiscardi]: Édition, traduction, commentaire et introduction, trans. Marguerite Mathieu (Palermo: Istituto Siciliano di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici, 1961).

77. 77. Many of these documents are assembled (albeit with numerous errors) in Salvatore Cusa, I diplomi greci ed arabi di Sicilia pubblicati nel teto originale (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1982). An ongoing project sponsored by the European Research Council, Documenting Multiculturalism: Coexistence, Law and Multiculturalism in the Administrative and Legal Documents of Norman and Hohenstaufen Sicily, c.1060–c.1266, aims to assemble updated critical editions and translations of all administrative and legal documents from Norman and Hohenstaufen Sicily written in Arabic, Latin, and Greek. Details about this project are at https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/787342. See also Horst Enzensberger, “Chanceries, Charters, and Administration in Norman Italy,” in The Society of Norman Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 117–50; Graham Loud, “The Chancery and Charters of the Kings of Sicily (1130–1212),” English Historical Review 124, no. 509 (August 2009): 779–810.

78. 78. Among these sources, the chronicle of William of Tyre is the most detailed. It can be found in the original Latin in William of Tyre, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1853), 201:209–1068 (http://patristica.net/latina/) (hereafter cited as PL), and translated into English in William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done beyond the Sea, trans. Emily Babcock and August Krey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943).

79. 79. Joseph Busuttil, Stanley Fiorini, and Horatio C. R. Vella, Tristia ex Melitogaudo: Lament in Greek Verse of a XIIth-Century Exile on Gozo (Valletta: Best Print, 2010).

80. 80. Ernst Kitzinger, The Mosaics of St. Mary’s of the Admiral in Palermo (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1991); Arcifa et al., “Archeologia della Sicilia islamica,” section 4.1; Thomas Dittelbach, “Counter-Narratives in 12th Century Norman Art and Architecture,” in Urban Dynamics and Transcultural Communication in Medieval Sicily, ed. Theresa Jäckh and Mona Kirsch (Paderborn, Germany: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017), 141–57; Allesandra Molinari, “Sicily,” in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology, ed. Bethany J. Walker, Timothy Insoll, and Corisande Fenwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 335–54.

81. 81. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300–900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3; Davis-Secord, Where Three Worlds Met, 25.

82. 82. König argues that these categories “can only serve as terminological tools to circumscribe permeable cultural spheres subject to constant change.” Daniel König, Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1.

83. 83. The proliferation of scholarship on the Normans when compared to the Zirids has led me to emphasize the latter over the former at times, especially with regard to dynastic origins (chapter 2). At the same time, the more substantial corpus of contemporary sources from Norman Sicily necessitates increased scrutiny of Norman perspectives on occasion, such as when discussing the Norman kingdom of Africa (chapter 5). My emphasis on trans-dynastic connections at times precludes detailed discussions of internal politics in Ifriqiya and Sicily, although I have attempted to include them insofar as they are relevant to this overarching narrative of Zirid-Norman history. This trend in the field of Mediterranean studies of focusing almost exclusively on geographically disparate connections has fallen under scrutiny in recent years. Ramzi Rouighi, “A Mediterranean of Relations for the Medieval Maghrib: Historiography in Question,” Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 29, no. 3 (2017): 201–20. See also W. V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Brian Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita, eds., Can We Talk Mediterranean? Conversations on an Emerging Field in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).