The secular phase of Berber life in these ages is vividly
illustrated in the person and career of Yarmorâsen Ben Zeiyân,
the founder of the first kingdom of Tlemcen. He belonged to the
tribe of Abd el-Wâd, who, with their cousins, the Beni-Mérin,
under the pressure of the Arabs of the second invasion, came up
from the desert and took possession of the coast, the former about
Tlemcen and the latter in Morocco. For many years these tribes,
under the Almohades, had exercised feudal rights over the country;
they came north in the spring and summer, and collected tribute
from the agriculturalists and townsmen, and returned in winter to
their desert homes with the supplies they had thus obtained. Their
rise has been termed, not inaptly, a renaissance of the Berber race
power, as, indeed, the entire history of the Berbers was a series of
explosions of national force, succeeding each other in one or another
place at long intervals, but impotent to found a permanent political
state. Yarmorâsen was of the type of Tamburlane; a simple Berber,
he was unable to speak Arabic, but he had military and organizing
genius, became chief and conqueror, and founded the dynasty with
which the glory of Tlemcen began. At the moment the Almohades
were nearing their fall. The country is described as in anarchy:
everywhere the spirit of revolt broke out, the people refused to
pay taxes, brigands infested the great routes, the officials were
shut up in the towns, the country people were without protection;
the region was at the mercy of its nomad masters. It was then that
Yarmorâsen found his opportunity, seized independent power, and
established order such as was known to that civilization. He was
a great man of his race, brave, feared, honored, who understood
the interests of his people, political administration, and the art
and ends of rule. He reigned forty-four years, amid continuous war;
he was defeated early in his career by the ruler of Tunis, but the
victor could find no better man on whom to devolve the government
than the foe he had overthrown; and it is an interesting point to
observe that his ambassador of state, on this occasion, who made
the treaty, was his mother. He was respectful of the rights of
courtesy, at least, and won applause by his kind treatment of the
sister and women of the Almohad prince he overthrew, sending them
back to their own land under escort.
In the battle which marked the fall of the Almohades and the
independence of Tlemcen there were characteristic incidents. The van
of the march of the old princes was led by the Koran, one of the
earliest and most famous copies, which the Almohades had captured
from the Moors of Grenada and rebound and incrusted with jewels;
it was borne on a dromedary, and enclosed in a silk-covered coffer
surmounted by a beautiful palm; small flags fluttered from the
corners, while before it floated a great white banner on a long
staff. It was thus that the Almohades always went out to war. When
the two armies stood in battle order, the women on both sides ran
through the ranks with uncovered faces and by their cries, gestures,
and looks animated their warriors to fight. A similar scene is
described by a modern author in writing of a Kabyle village feud;
the battle-field, he says, was the dry bed of a torrent, between two
slopes; on the heights of the ravine on either side stood the women,
barefooted, bare-armed, uttering sharp cries which crossed over
the heads of the fighters. “They are all there, their mothers,
their wives, their sisters, their daughters, serried one against
another like the flowers of a crown; even the widows whose husbands
were killed in the last spring combat, even the _révoltées_ who had
left their husbands declaring they would no longer serve them,—all
adorned and painted for the battle. Rich or poor, young or old,
beautiful as idols or disfigured by age and suffering, they are
all together, their arms interlaced, their eyes wide and full of
fire, at the foot of each village, a confused mass of ornaments,
bright colors and miserable rags, lifted by one movement, erect
with hate and terror.” The men charge, fire point-blank, engage
hand to hand with their yatagans—“better a hundred times die
here than go back to the village, because their women will that
they should die.” It was such a scene when Yarmorâsen fought
with the Almohad prince, Es-Saïd.
Yarmorâsen was more than a fighter; he was an enlightened governor.
Tlemcen was then a double city—Agadir and Tagrart, not an arrow’s
flight between them. Tagrart had been the “camp” of the invading
Almoravides, who had taken Agadir, and as victor it was now the
city of the functionaries and government, while the people—the
old inhabitants—continued to live in Agadir. Yarmorâsen cared
for both, and built the minaret of Agadir, and also that of the
grand mosque of Tlemcen, but he declined to inscribe his name upon
them, saying: “It is enough that God knows.” He built other
public works and the city grew into a thriving capital, not only
of war, but of residence and trade, and also became famous for its
schools. Among other learned men whom his reputation as a protector
of the liberal arts attracted to his court was one, brilliant in
that century, Abou Bekr Mohammed Ibn Khattab, whose story especially
interested me. He was a poet, and commanded not only a fine hand,
but a beautiful epistolary style. Yarmorâsen made him the first
secretary of state, and he wrote despatches to the lords of Morocco
and Tunis so elegantly composed that, says the Arabian historian
Tenesi, they were still learned by heart in his day; and he adds that
with this poet the art of writing diplomatic despatches in rhymed
prose ceased. The Berber prince deserves grateful memory among poets
as the last patron of a lost grace of the art, not likely to find
its renaissance ever; and they must read with pleasure the starry
and flowery titles with which the chroniclers adorn his glory—the
magnanimous, the lion-heart, the bounteous cloud, the shining rose,
the kingliest of nobles, the noblest of kings, the well-beloved,
the sword of destiny, the lieutenant of God, crown of the great,
Emir of the Moslems, Yarmorâsen Ben Zeiyân.
He left a line of strong and brilliant rulers who were warriors
first of all, for the glorious age of Tlemcen was a period of intense
life, and the little city had often to battle for its existence. It
suffered reverses; not long after the death of Yarmorâsen a
contemporary Arabian traveller thus depicts it: “This city is
very beautiful to see, and contains magnificent things; but they are
houses without inhabitants, estates without owners, places that no
one visits. The clouds with their showers weep for the misfortunes
of the town, and the doves on the trees deplore its destiny with
their moaning cry.” Its recovery, however, must have been rapid,
for in the next reign Tachfin found time in the intervals of war to
build the Great Basin and a beautiful college, and he reared also
the minaret of the great mosque at Algiers. These were the years of
the life-and-death struggle with the Beni-Mérin, of which Mansourah
is the monument. The great siege had been sustained and the peril
beaten back; but now the enemy returned, and from a new Mansourah
on the same site they directed their attack so well that they took
Tagrart, old Tlemcen—Tachfin, the king, falling in battle. The
victor, Abou’l-Hasen, was a worthy conqueror and the founder of
the artistic Mansourah, that I have described, with its palace, its
mosque, and its columns; he made the new city his royal residence,
over against Tagrart as Tagrart had stood over against Agadir, and he
adorned the suburbs of the old city; he built the mosque and college
of Sidi bou-Médyen, and his son the mosque of our good Saint Bonbon;
he was an art-loving prince and a wide victor, magnificent in royal
presents which he exchanged with the Sultan of Egypt, and in all
ways glorious; but I remember him best as the conqueror who, after
he had swept the coast of Africa to the desert limit, returning,
stood on that solitary beach at Mahdia, that so impressed me, and
“reflected on the lot of those who had preceded him, men still
greater and more powerful on the earth.” But this domination of
the Beni-Mérin, who after all were cousins, lasted only a score
of years; and the line of Yarmorâsen came to its own again, in
the person of Abou-Hammou, of the younger branch. He had been born
and bred in Andalusia, and was an accomplished prince. He wrote a
book upon the art of government for the education of his son, which
may be read now in Spanish, and he was a great patron of learning;
he built a beautiful college, adorned with marble columns, trees
and fountains, for his friend, the sage Abou-ben-Ahmed, attended
the first lecture and endowed the institution with sufficient
property for its maintenance. He, too, labored in war; but the
remarkable trait of these princes of the rude Berber stock is that,
notwithstanding the state of instant and long-continued warfare in
which they held their lives and power, they were as great builders
as warriors, and unceasing in their patronage of learning and the
arts. This was the great age of the city in the reigns I have
touched on. A score of descendants carried on the rule through
another century to the scene of trade, war, and study that Leo
the African portrays in the city. He describes the various aspects
of this great market of the desert, its buildings, and especially
its four classes of citizens, merchants, artisans, soldiers, and
students. Of these last he says: “The scholars are very poor and
live in colleges in very great wretchedness; but when they come to
be doctors, they are given some reader’s or notary’s office,
or they become priests.” Alas, the scholar’s life! Doubtless it
was the same in Yarmorâsen’s time. It is a pathetic thing to me to
think of those thousands of poor free scholars, through generations,
seeking the light as best they could in this university city,
for such it was—what a record of self-denial and deprivation,
of belief in the highest, of living on the bread of hope! But it
was all to end—the old Tlemcen—with the coming of the Turk;
he came in the peculiarly atrocious form of the pirate, Aroudj,
master of Algiers, who gathered all the young princes of the old
blood royal, a numerous band, and drowned them in the Great Basin.