- As Michael Brett has argued, North Africa was a crucial part of Mediterranean trade during the central Middle Ages, both for routes heading west from Fustat and Alexandria, as well as being a supply of gold from sub-Saharan Africa (Brett, “Ifriqiya as a Market”). The centrality of the area of Ifriqiya in the Mediterranean meant that it was an incredibly important hub for overseas and inland trade during the high Middle Ages. S.D. Goitein went so far as to describe the area of modern-day Tunisia as the “Hub of the Mediterranean” during the tenth and eleventh centuries (Goitein, “Medieval Tunisia: Hub of the Mediterranean”). In particular, Mahdia and Qayrawan served as major hubs in the sub-Saharan gold trade, which they traded for Sicilian grain. Qayrawan, whose name derives from the word “caravan,” was a center for land-based trade that spanned across North Africa as well as parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Mahdia, acting as Qayrawan’s port, was a hub for primarily maritime commerce. However, one of the traditional turning points for the history of North Africa comes in the form of the Banu Hilal, an Arab tribe that was supposedly let loose by the Fatimid rulers of Egypt in the middle of the 11th century as punishment for the regional rulers of North Africa declaring their independence. Two distinct historiographical schools have formed with regard to the Banu Hilal. The first, led by French historians of the early-mid twentieth century, argues that the economy of Ifriqiya was prosperous in the tenth and eleventh centuries (see citation group #2 on attached comment). To them, the invasion of the Banu Hilal in 1057 brought incredible devastation and destruction to the region, which would devolve into a series of ethnic conflicts between the Sanhaja and Zenata Berber tribes. However, a second historiographical school considers the invasions of the Banu Hilal in a different light. This perspective, adopted by most historians from the 1970s onwards, argues that the economy of Ifriqiya began to decline following the Fatimid relocation of their capital from Tunisia to Egypt in 969. Various groups competed with each other over control of key trade routes and the Banu Hilal were merely one of these many groups that sought economic control. At worst, the Hilalian invasions sped up an economic process that was already well underway. Regardless of these two historiographical schools, it is generally accepted that there was decline in Ifriqiya following the Hilalian Invasions of the mid-11th century.
- During the 11th and 12th centuries, there was an intricate relationship between the powers on the Italian peninsula and the regional Muslim rulers of North Africa. Following the Hilalian invasions, power in North Africa became increasingly fragmented and subject to incursions. A Pisan-Genoese coalition sacked Mahdia and its suburb of Zawila in 1087 and the Normans, based in Sicily, seized multiple cities along the African coast during the middle of the 12th century (Cowdrey, “The Mahdia Campaign of 1087”). Even before the Norman invasions, the regional rulers of North Africa had been forced to accept unfavorable treaties with the Normans in order to ensure that they could feed their people. A series of devastating droughts meant that the rulers of North Africa were reliant upon Sicilian grain, a dramatic reversal of the economic situation in ancient Rome. Also see: Trade and North Africa: Brett, Michael. “Ifriqiya as a Market for Saharan Trade from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century AD.” The Journal of African History 10, no. 3 (1969): 347–64. Brett, Michael. The Rise of the Fatimids: The World of the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the Fourth Century to the Hijra, Tenth Century CE. Boston: Brill, 2001. Goitein, S.D. A Mediterranean Society. Vol. 1. 6 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Goldberg, Jessica. Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and Their Business World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. The Banu Hilal (mostly from the traditionalist French school): Gautier, E.F. Sahara: The Great Desert. Translated by Dorothy Mayhew. New York: Columbia University Press, 1935. Julien, Charles-André. History of North Africa. Translated by John Petrie. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Laroui, Abdallah. The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Lézine, Alexandre. Mahdiya: Recherches d’Archaéologie Islamique. Librarie C. Klincksieck, 1965. Marcais, Georges. La Berbérie Musulmane et l’Orient au Moyen Age. Aubier: Éditions Montaigne, 1946. Europe and North Africa: Abulafia, David. “The Crown and the Economy Under Roger II and His Successors.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 37 (1983): 1–14. Cowdrey, H.E.J. “The Mahdia Campaign of 1087.” The English Historical Review 92, no. 362 (January 1977): 1–29. Johns, Jeremy. Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal Diwan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Johns, Jeremy. “Malik Ifriqiya.” Libyan Studies; Annual Report of the Society for Libyan Studies XVIII (1987): 89–101.
- In his new book Peter Heather (Restoration of Rome, Oxford UP 2014) makes the argument that the spectacular agricultural prosperity of Roman North Africa was a product of the unique position it held inside the trade networks of the western Mediterranean, and how so much of its trade was done with and by the Roman state itself. Certainly, North Africa continued to be prosperous and a source of agricultural wealth long after the end of Roman (or Byzantine) rule, but with its big customer (the state) gone, that prosperity was muted. As Heather puts it (pp. 171ff.): “But North Africa’s Roman prosperity had come from the fact that it was tied into a broader system of west Mediterranean exchange which was actually dependent in a series of ways on the West Roman state, not least because it [= the roman state subsidized transport costs [of NA agricultural products] for its own purposes…It [= NA] exported [after the Roman period], therefore, but on a much smaller scale, and the general level of wealth in the region seems to have settled back into a more modest prosperity.
How did North Africa go from a wealthy Roman region to a regional backwater?
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