Zayyanid dynasty

The Zayyanids, or Abd al-Wadids, were a Berber Zenata dynasty that ruled the Kingdom of Tlemcen in today's north-west Algeria from 1235 to 1557. When Almohad rule collapsed about 1236, Tlemcen stood independent under Yaghmurasen Ibn Zyan, who held off the rival Berber houses and, against the Marinid threat, allied with Granada and with Alfonso X of Castile. After an eight-year Marinid siege of Tlemcen ending in 1307, the reigns of Abu Hammu I and Abu Tashufin I brought a second apogee with a firm hold on the central Maghreb, before the Marinids occupied the city from 1337 to 1359 and tried repeatedly to retake it until 1370 without ever holding it. Under the long reign of Abu Hammu II the state enjoyed a third age of strength. Eastward ventures in the fifteenth century went badly, and for two centuries the kingdom lived as a vassal by turns of Hafsid Ifriqiya, Marinid Morocco or Aragon, until in the early sixteenth century Spain and Ottoman Algiers fought over Tlemcen with Zayyanid sultans as puppets of one side or the other; the Ottomans took the city by 1551, the last ruler Hasan fled to Spanish Oran and died soon after, and Zayyanid rule ended.