Almoravid dynasty

The Almoravid dynasty was a Berber Muslim dynasty centred in what is now Morocco, which built an empire over the western Maghreb and al-Andalus from the 1050s until it fell to the Almohads in 1147. The Almoravids grew out of a coalition of the Lamtuna, Gudala and Massufa, nomadic Berber tribes living between the Draa, the Niger and the Senegal rivers, whose movement was driven by a reformist Islamic ideology preached by the religious leader Abdallah ibn Yasin, who demanded a rigorist Maliki Sunni orthodoxy. Expanding across the Maghreb, they founded the city of Marrakesh around 1070 and made it a capital, and the empire was then split into a northern branch in the Maghreb under Yusuf ibn Tashfin and a southern branch in the Sahara under Abu Bakr ibn Umar. In Iberia the Almoravids halted the advance of the Christian kingdoms, most famously at the Battle of Sagrajas in 1086, uniting the Maghreb and al-Andalus politically for the first time and creating the first major Berber-led Islamic empire in the western Mediterranean. Their rulers never took the title of caliph but called themselves prince of the believers while acknowledging the Abbasids, and their age saw the Islamisation of the Sahara and the growth of the western Maghreb's towns. Power in Iberia began to slip after Zaragoza fell in 1118, the Masmuda-led Almohad revolt of Ibn Tumart rose in the 1120s, and the Almohads took Marrakesh in 1147.