Almohad Caliphate

The Almohad Caliphate was a Berber Muslim empire that dominated North Africa and Muslim Iberia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, at its height uniting the entire Maghreb and al-Andalus under a single ruler for the first time.

The movement originated with Ibn Tumart, a religious reformer of the Masmuda Berber tribes of the Atlas Mountains, who around 1121 was acclaimed by his followers as the Mahdi and preached a rigorous, puritanical doctrine emphasising the absolute oneness of God (tawhid), from which his followers took the name al-Muwahhidun, 'those who affirm the unity of God,' rendered in European languages as Almohads. After Ibn Tumart established his base at Tinmel and challenged the ruling Almoravids, leadership passed on his death to his able disciple Abd al-Mu'min, who founded the ruling Mu'minid dynasty, took the title of caliph, and conquered the Almoravid capital Marrakesh in 1147. Abd al-Mu'min and his successors built a powerful and centralised empire stretching across all of North Africa from the Atlantic to the borders of Egypt and across the strait into southern Spain and Portugal. The Almohad period was one of cultural and architectural achievement, producing magnificent monuments such as the Giralda of Seville and the Koutoubia mosque of Marrakesh, and patronising thinkers including the great philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and the physician and philosopher Maimonides, although the regime's religious rigor at times brought persecution of Jews and Christians. The empire's decline was triggered by the catastrophic defeat of the caliph al-Nasir's army by a coalition of Christian kingdoms at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, which broke Almohad power in Iberia and accelerated the Christian Reconquista. In the following decades the empire disintegrated under internal revolts, dynastic disputes, and the rise of rival Berber dynasties. The last Almohad ruler was killed at Marrakesh in 1269, when the Marinids seized the city and ended Almohad rule over the western Maghreb.

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