Almoravid Empire

The Almoravid Empire was a Berber Muslim empire that grew out of a religious reform movement among the Sanhaja (Lamtuna) confederation of the western Sahara, galvanised by the jurist Abdallah ibn Yasin and his austere, Maliki Sunni interpretation of Islam.

Traditionally dated from 1056, the movement united Saharan and Maghrebi tribes through jihad under leaders such as Yahya ibn Umar, Abu Bakr ibn Umar, and above all Yusuf ibn Tashfin, who founded Marrakesh (c. 1062-1070) as the imperial capital. At its height around 1120 the empire stretched roughly a million square kilometres across present-day Morocco, Mauritania, Western Sahara, and parts of Algeria, and after the victory at the Battle of Sagrajas (Zallaqa) in 1086 it absorbed Muslim al-Andalus, halting Christian advances in Iberia. To the south the Almoravids drove the Islamisation of the Sahara and disrupted the trans-Saharan gold trade, with their pressure on the Soninke contributing to the decline of the Ghana Empire and the fall of Koumbi Saleh around 1076. The empire was overthrown in 1147 when the rival Almohads, a Masmuda-led movement founded by Ibn Tumart, captured Marrakesh and supplanted Almoravid rule.