Abigail Krasner Balbale, Bard Graduate Center, New York, “Contesting the Caliphate: Ibn Mardanīsh's fight with the Almohads in Twelfth-Century Iberia”

Abigail Krasner Balbale, Bard Graduate Center, New York, “Contesting the Caliphate: Ibn Mardanīsh's fight with the Almohads in Twelfth-Century Iberia”

Muḥammad Ibn Sa'd Ibn Mardanīsh (r. 1145-1172 CE) was the single most important rival of the Almohad caliphate in Iberia, ruling nearly half of al-Andalus for thirty years from his capital in Murcia, and fighting Almohad armies alongside his Christian allies. Off the battlefield, he contested Almohad claims to absolute authority through poetry, diplomatic letters, coinage and architecture. This talk explores how Ibn Mardanīsh argued against the messianic conception of the caliphate presented by the Almohads by adapting phrases and motifs from the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates in the east. I will focus particularly on Ibn Mardanīsh's palace in Murcia, Dār al-Sughrā, his fortress in Monteagudo, and his gold dinars, all of which present elements never before seen in Andalusī contexts. Ibn Mardanīsh's cultural production highlights the question of the "exceptionality" of al-Andalus, both in relation to North Africa and to the eastern Islamic world. I shall explore the connectivities and ruptures these spaces and objects suggest, and close by considering the reverberations of the themes introduced by Ibn Mardanīsh after his death, including in the gold dinar of Alfonso VIII. 

Co-sponsored by the Departments of History of Art, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Spanish and Portuguese at Penn, and the Middle East Center