Aghlabid Dynasty

At a glance

Who were the Aghlabids?

The Aghlabids were an Arab family of the Tamīm tribe whose fortunes were made in the Abbasid army. Ibn Khaldūn, in the introduction translated by William de Slane, traces them to al-Aghlab ibn Sālim, who served the Abbasids first in Khurāsān and then in Africa. The most detailed narrative of the dynasty, Ibn ʿIdhārī's chronicle al-Bayān al-mughrib, shows al-Aghlab as governor of Ifrīqiya in the 760s, fighting the Ṣufrī Kharijite rebel Abū Qurra while his own troops, the jund, refused to march.

His son Ibrāhīm studied with the jurist al-Layth ibn Saʿd. Ibn ʿIdhārī calls him versed in law and literature, a poet and a skilled general: "Nul ne gouverna l'Ifrik'iyya mieux ni plus sagement" (no one governed Ifrīqiya better or more wisely), in Fagnan's French translation. Before 800 Ibrāhīm governed the Zāb, the steppe province on the edge of the Aurès mountains, while Ifrīqiya itself was torn by revolts of its Arab soldiery.

When was the Aghlabid dynasty founded?

In AD 800. In 799 a Tamīmī officer, Tammām ibn Tamīm, drove the governor Muḥammad ibn Muqātil out of Kairouan; Ibrāhīm marched from the Zāb and restored him. According to al-Nuwayrī, whose history of the Aghlabids William de Slane translated in 1852, the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd then asked his general Harthama ibn Aʿyan for advice. Harthama, who had himself governed Ifrīqiya, told him that nobody there was more devoted or better loved than Ibrāhīm. "Ces mots décidèrent Er-Rechid," al-Nuwayrī writes: these words decided the caliph.

Ibn ʿIdhārī dates the arrival of the diploma of investiture to the second decade of Jumādā II 184, which Fagnan converts to mid-July 800.

The price of the appointment is less certain. A note in de Slane's translation says that Ibrāhīm had offered to give up the 100,000 dinars that the governor of Egypt sent to Ifrīqiya every year, and to pay the caliph 40,000 dinars a year instead. The note does not name its source, so the figures should be read with caution.

Al-Nuwayrī explains what was new. Until then the caliph had appointed and removed governors at will. The Aghlabids formed "une dynastie presqu'indépendante", a nearly independent dynasty, "respectant toutefois la suzeraineté des Abbacides", while still respecting Abbasid overlordship. Each emir chose his successor from among his sons or brothers.

Were the Aghlabids independent of the Abbasids?

In practice yes, in law no. They ruled as governors of the Abbasid Caliphate. The editors of the main modern volume on the dynasty, Glaire Anderson, Corisande Fenwick and Mariam Rosser-Owen, write that the emirs "never ceased to acknowledge the sovereignty of Baghdad" but were "independent in all but name". Like the Abbasid caliphs, they "minted gold dinars, appointed their own officials, and built new royal towns".

The ties with Baghdad were real nonetheless. In 902 the caliph al-Muʿtaḍid ordered Ibrāhīm II to hand power to his son, and Ibrāhīm obeyed. The last emir, Ziyādat Allāh III, still sent the caliph gifts, among them coins of ten times the normal weight inscribed with verses calling himself "l'épée de Dieu", the sword of God, drawn to protect the caliph.

Their coins show the same balance. A gold dinar of AD 808 in the Museum of Islamic Art at Raqqāda keeps the form of Abbasid coinage but adds the emir's name and the word ghalaba, "emblem of the emirate", which stayed on Aghlabid coins until the Fatimids.

Who ruled the Aghlabid emirate?

Eleven emirs ruled in just over a century. Al-Nuwayrī counted "onze princes" and a reign of 112 years and some days; Ibn ʿIdhārī gives 111 years and three months. Dates below follow Ibn ʿIdhārī in Fagnan's translation unless stated otherwise.

Abū l-Gharānīq, "the man of the cranes", owed his nickname to crane hunting. ʿAbd Allāh I imposed a fixed tax of eight dinars on every pair of plough oxen, whatever the harvest. When he died of an abscess, pious men claimed it as the answer to their prayers against him, a legend both chroniclers tell.

What were al-ʿAbbāsiyya and Raqqāda?

They were the two royal towns that the Aghlabids built beside Kairouan, the old garrison city founded in AD 670. Ibn ʿIdhārī says that in 185 AH (801) Ibrāhīm I began building "the Old Castle" (al-qaṣr al-qadīm), first called al-ʿAbbāsiyya, three miles from Kairouan, on land bought from the Banū Ṭālūt; al-Bakrī, quoted in Fagnan's note, puts the foundation in 184 AH (800). Al-Nuwayrī describes how Ibrāhīm bought black slaves, secretly stocked the castle with arms and money, and moved there by night with his slaves, servants and family. The new town gave the emirs a base guarded by soldiers who owed everything to them rather than to the restless jund.

Ibrāhīm II founded a second palace city. Al-Nuwayrī dates the start of work at Raqqāda to Ṣafar 263 AH (876) and says the emir moved in within the year; Ibn ʿIdhārī says the palace called al-Fatḥ was finished in 264 AH (AD 877). Al-Nuwayrī's source gave its circuit as 14,000 cubits and added that at Raqqāda, "the sleeper", one smiled without reason, a piece of folk etymology.

Very little of either town has been excavated, and less published. In a 2020 survey of the archaeology, Corisande Fenwick reports that Georges Marçais' limited excavations at al-ʿAbbāsiyya in the 1920s found only a mound of pisé and mud brick and a basin. At Raqqāda, excavations in the 1960s, published by Chabbi, revealed a square fortified complex of about 109 rooms, courtyards and annexes, probably the Qaṣr al-Ṣaḥn palace, with a large reservoir and a brick kiln. Medieval texts, she notes, describe at least five palaces with gardens, a congregational mosque, baths, markets and barracks for the 10,000 enslaved Sudanese soldiers "with which Ibrahim II is said to have surrounded himself". Fenwick compares the plan to the Abbasid palace city of Samarra in Iraq.

Ibn ʿIdhārī writes that after the first Fatimid caliph moved to Mahdia in AD 920, Raqqāda declined until its last remains vanished.

Why did the army revolt against the Aghlabids?

Because the jund, the Arab soldiery that had conquered and held Ifrīqiya, did not accept a dynasty that ruled over it. The great crisis came under Ziyādat Allāh I (817–838). Al-Nuwayrī says that, unlike his father, who had overlooked the jund's excesses, Ziyādat Allāh treated it without consideration and shed its blood, above all "dans ses moments d'ivresse", in his moments of drunkenness.

After the emir had a rebel officer, ʿAmr ibn Muʿāwiya, killed in prison with one of his sons, Manṣūr al-Ṭunbudhī raised the jund of Tunis. At the height of the rising, Ibn ʿIdhārī writes, the emir held only Gabès, the Sāḥil coast, Nefzāwa and Tripoli; Manṣūr struck coins in his own name, and the jund invited Ziyādat Allāh to leave Ifrīqiya. Al-Nuwayrī says that peace returned only "après une guerre civile de treize ans", after a civil war of thirteen years, just before the rebuilding of the Great Mosque in AD 836.

The invasion of Sicily in AD 827 fell in the middle of these years. The book of Anderson, Fenwick and Rosser-Owen summarises the historian Annliese Nef's view that Sicily "formed the heart of their ambitious campaign against Byzantium", and the war certainly gave the jund booty and employment overseas. How far that was the emir's purpose the chronicles do not say.

Who were the Mālikī judges of Kairouan?

They were the scholars of the Mālikī school of law who served the emirs as qāḍīs, and who did not always obey them. Two names stand out.

Asad ibn al-Furāt was, in Ibn ʿIdhārī's words, one of the "auditeurs de Mâlek ben Anas", who had heard Mālik teach. Ziyādat Allāh I made him qāḍī of Kairouan beside the existing judge, although "jamais on n'avait vu deux kadis exercer simultanément" (never before had two judges sat at once). In 827 he also became commander of the Sicilian expedition, an unprecedented combination according to a contemporary chronicler quoted by Amari.

Saḥnūn ibn Saʿīd al-Tanūkhī, whose name was ʿAbd al-Salām, became qāḍī of Ifrīqiya in 233 AH (AD 847) under Muḥammad I. Ibn ʿIdhārī says he refused the post for a whole year and accepted only when the emir swore to leave him free to judge members of the ruling family, their relatives and servants. His predecessor Ibn Abī l-Jawād, whom he called "le Pharaon", was accused of denying a deposit of 500 dinars, given ten lashes every Friday and died in Saḥnūn's prison. Saḥnūn died in 240 AH (854).

What did the Aghlabids build in Kairouan?

Most of what survives of their century: the Great Mosque in its present form, the great reservoirs and the Mosque of the Three Doors, which UNESCO lists among the city's ninth-century monuments.

The Great Mosque. The mosque stands on the site of the first Muslim oratory in the Maghreb, built by ʿUqba ibn Nāfiʿ in AD 670 and enlarged several times in the eighth century. According to the Discover Islamic Art database of the Museum With No Frontiers, it "was totally rebuilt by the Aghlabid prince Ziyadat Allah I in 221 AH (836), when it assumed its current dimensions". Al-Nuwayrī reports that Ziyādat Allāh hoped for God's mercy for four deeds, of which the first was spending 80,000 gold pieces on the Great Mosque of Kairouan. His de Slane translation prints the year as 224, but gives the Christian date as May–June 836, and Fagnan dates the rebuilding to 221; the printed 224 is evidently a misreading.

The building is about 125 by 75 metres, with a prayer hall of 17 naves. Its reused antique columns form "the largest collection of Roman and Byzantine capitals in any Muslim monument or museum", and its square minaret rises 32 metres. Al-Nuwayrī credits Abū Ibrāhīm Aḥmad (856–863) with the wings he added to the building and the dome with which he crowned it.

The mihrab and its tiles. The mihrab dates from Abū Ibrāhīm Aḥmad, in 247 AH (AD 862). Its niche has 28 carved marble panels, and the wall around it is covered with lustre tiles, long thought possibly to be local work. In 2003 a team led by O. Bobin analysed eight samples of the Kairouan tiles against Mesopotamian lustreware and concluded that the tiles "probably came from Mesopotamia, from a major production centre, possibly Baghdad, Samarra or Basra". The editors of the 2018 Aghlabid volume go further: 139 lustre tiles were brought for the refurbished mihrab, and "recent scientific analyses have definitively established the Iraqi provenance of these tiles". The teak for the minbar came from Iraq too. In the same volume Jonathan Bloom considers whether the marble panels and their carver came from al-Andalus.

The minbar. The pulpit beside the mihrab, also of the ninth century, is made of more than 300 pieces of Indian teak carved with Byzantine and Mesopotamian motifs. The Discover Islamic Art database calls it "the oldest Muslim preacher's chair that we possess".

The reservoirs. Kairouan had no river, so the Aghlabids stored rain and floodwater in open basins outside the walls; two survive of about fifteen. The larger basin, from around AD 862, measures 128 metres across and 4.8 metres deep, holds 57,000 cubic metres, and has a central pillar that once carried a pavilion. Al-Nuwayrī says that Abū Ibrāhīm, falling ill as his last cistern was finished, asked daily whether water had flowed in. When it had, he drank a cup and said, "Louanges soient à Dieu: j'ai pu vivre pour achever cet ouvrage" (praise be to God, I have lived to finish this work). He died soon after.

In news from July 2025, Tunisie Numérique reported the start of a 24-month restoration of the basins, funded from a Saudi donation, with the site closed during the works.

What were the ribats of Sousse and Monastir?

A ribāṭ was a fortified coastal building where volunteers prayed and kept watch against Byzantine raids. The two famous examples are older than the dynasty.

Monastir is the older of the two famous ribats, and it is not Aghlabid. Al-Nuwayrī says that the Abbasid governor Harthama ibn Aʿyan built "le Grand Château" at Monastir in 180 AH (AD 796–797), and the Discover Islamic Art database dates it to 181 (796), citing a now effaced inscription. The Aghlabids enlarged it on the north side.

Sousse became the dynasty's naval base. Fenwick writes that in the mid-ninth century Sousse "became the main naval base for expeditions to Sicily", with an arsenal, a kasbah, a congregational mosque and a wall enclosing 32 hectares. Its ribat existed in the eighth century, according to the Tunisian heritage agency AMVPPC, and was "completely refurbished" by Ziyādat Allāh I in 206 AH (AD 821); a plaque names his freedman Masrūr as overseer. Al-Nuwayrī quotes the emir counting among his good deeds a fortress built at Sousse for those who wished to fight the unbelievers.

The Great Mosque of Sousse dates from AD 851–862; its façade inscription naming the freedman Mudām is, according to Discover Islamic Art, the oldest surviving epigraphic frieze on a façade. UNESCO describes Sousse as "an important commercial and military port during the Aghlabid period (800–909)" and part of a coastal defence system.

The Zaytūna mosque of Tunis, often called an Aghlabid foundation, is older. The Discover Islamic Art database says the mosque "was entirely rebuilt by the Aghlabid amirs in 248 / 863", and an inscription at the base of the mihrab dome attributes the work to the Abbasid caliph al-Mustaʿīn, not to the emir. Fenwick writes that the great mosques of Kairouan, Tunis, Sousse, Sfax and Monastir "all survive today in their ninth-century form", although parts, such as the Sousse mihrab, are later. The coast also served trade: Antonia Bosanquet, studying ninth-century legal opinions, finds that "naval trade was well established between the Ifrīqiyan coastline and Egypt, Sicily, and Andalusia".

How did the Aghlabids conquer Sicily?

Slowly, over three quarters of a century. The invasion began with a Byzantine rebel. Euphemius, a tourmarchēs (district commander) in Byzantine Sicily, rose against the emperor and fled to Ifrīqiya. The Byzantine chronicle known as Theophanes Continuatus, as Amari reports it, says that he had carried off a nun to marry her, and that the emperor ordered his nose cut off; a Salernitan chronicle instead says the governor had stolen his fiancée, Omoniza. Both are romantic explanations, and Amari treated them with suspicion. What is certain is that Euphemius offered Ziyādat Allāh I Sicily: he would hold it with the title and insignia of emperor and pay tribute.

In Kairouan many thought war unjust while a truce of AD 813 was in force, but Asad ibn al-Furāt argued that the Sicilians were holding Muslim prisoners, and won. The army was, in Amari's figures, 700 horse and 10,000 foot: Arabs, Berbers, refugees from Spain and the jund, with "molti uomini di dottrina", many men of learning. Ibn ʿIdhārī gives 70 ships; others said 100. The fleet sailed from Sousse on 15 Rabīʿ I 212, which Amari converts to 13 June 827, and the first ships landed at Mazara on 16 June.

In July Asad defeated the Byzantine commander. Some Muslim chroniclers gave the enemy 150,000 men, a figure Amari dismissed as inflated. Asad then besieged Syracuse, but he died in the summer of AD 828, of an epidemic in the camp or, some said, of wounds. Euphemius was killed by two brothers outside Castrogiovanni while its citizens pretended to submit to him. In the spring of AD 829, according to Amari, the army struck a silver dirham reading "in the name of God this dirham was struck in Sicily in the year 214".

The main steps of the conquest, in Amari's dates:

• Palermo, 831. After a year's siege the city surrendered between 13 August and 11 September 831, with lives and property spared. Ibn al-Athīr claimed that of 70,000 inhabitants fewer than 3,000 survived; Amari added "che che ne sia delle cifre", whatever the truth of the figures. Palermo became the capital of Muslim Sicily.
• Messina, 842–843. Al-Faḍl ibn Jaʿfar took it with the help of Naples.
• Castrogiovanni (Enna), 859. Guided by a captive, al-ʿAbbās ibn al-Faḍl's men crept in through a conduit under the walls at dawn on 24 January 859, and a mosque was inaugurated at once.
• Syracuse, 878, and Taormina, 902, are described below.

What happened at Syracuse in 878?

Syracuse, the capital of Byzantine Sicily, fell after a siege of about nine months, and an eyewitness described it. Theodosius, a monk of Syracuse, wrote a letter from prison in Palermo, which Amari paraphrased. He describes the famine: a modius of grain cost 150 gold bezants; people chewed hides and ground bones, and finally, in Amari's rendering, "dettero di piglio ai bambini", laid hands on the children. On the morning of 21 May 878, while the garrison was eating, the attackers stormed the tower at the breach.

Amari fixed that date; Ibn ʿIdhārī gives 14 Ramaḍān 264, which Fagnan converts to 19 May. Ibn ʿIdhārī says more than 4,000 were killed and the booty was greater than any taken from a Christian city. The victors spent about two months dismantling the fortifications before burning the city.

The captives were carried to Palermo, which seemed to Theodosius to hold "the whole Saracen race from east to west". In its underground prison he met the bishop of Malta in fetters. The prisoners were ransomed around AD 885.

Did the Aghlabids sack Rome?

Muslim raiders plundered St Peter's in AD 846, but that the Aghlabid emir sent them is not proven. The Frankish Annales Bertiniani record that in August 846 "Saraceni Maurique", Saracens and Moors, came up the Tiber and plundered the basilica of St Peter, carrying off the altar over the apostle's tomb; the party that went for St Paul's was destroyed by the country people. The papal Liber Pontificalis says a warning had spoken of 73 ships and about 11,000 men, but its account, as its editor Louis Duchesne noted, is "mutilé juste à l'endroit le plus intéressant", broken off at the most interesting point.

Neither text names the raiders' ruler. Amari called them "Africans" acting with the fleet of Muslim Sicily, and the introduction to the 2018 Aghlabid volume says the Aghlabids "sailed up the Tiber and sacked Rome in 846". Other historians stress that independent Muslim warbands were active in Italy. The raiders never entered the walled city, and the Papal States answered by walling in St Peter's as the civitas Leoniana of Pope Leo IV.

Bari shows the same uncertainty. The ninth-century historian al-Balādhurī, translated in 2025 by Theresa Jäckh, says that a client of al-Aghlab failed to take it, and that Khalfūn, a Berber, captured it early in the caliphate of al-Mutawakkil (847–861); his successor asked Baghdad directly for a letter of appointment. The traditional date is 847, but Lorenzo Bondioli has argued for 840, and several historians see Bari's rulers as independent adventurers. The emperor Louis II took Bari on 2 February 871.

How did the Aghlabids take Malta?

In 869–870, when Malta was a Byzantine outpost. Amari writes that African ships under Aḥmad ibn ʿUmar, of the ruling family, occupied Malta in AD 869, and that after the army of Sicily relieved the besieged garrison the island stayed in Muslim hands on 29 August 870. The Maltese scholar Joseph Brincat notes that two chronicles give 28 and 29 August 870.

The geographer al-Ḥimyarī, translated in Brincat's study, says a commander "known for the building of mosques, bridges and cisterns" died during the siege, and that his successor took the fortress, captured its ruler ʿAmros and demolished it. Stone from Malta's churches went to build a castle at Sousse.

Al-Ḥimyarī adds: "After that, the island of Malta remained an uninhabited ruin" until Muslims resettled it after 1048. Stanley Fiorini and Martin Zammit (2016) argue against total abandonment: at Mdina, amphorae are "even more intensely attested for the later 9th and early 10th century".

Who was Ibrāhīm II?

The most powerful and the most feared of the Aghlabids. Ibrāhīm ibn Aḥmad, a brother of Muḥammad II, was governor of Kairouan when his brother died in AD 875. Muḥammad had made him swear fifty times to respect the succession of his own son, but the people of Kairouan pressed Ibrāhīm to take power, and he did.

He founded Raqqāda and reformed the coinage. Ibn ʿIdhārī describes a "revolt of the dirhams" when he banned clipped fragments of metal; crowds closed the shops and marched on Raqqāda. Afterwards he struck coins called ʿāshirī, ten dirhams to the dinar. In 880 al-ʿAbbās, the rebel son of Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn, the Tulunid governor of Egypt, invaded and besieged Tripoli, but Berber warriors of the Jabal Nafūsa routed him.

Ibn ʿIdhārī says his first six years were as good as his ancestors', but that he then grew greedy and cruel, struck by a "maladie noire" that disordered his mind; he lists the killing of a chamberlain, his pages, his black guard, his own son and eight brothers. Fagnan warns that al-Nuwayrī and Ibn al-Athīr judge Ibrāhīm much less harshly.

The worst episode came in AD 893. Ibrāhīm invited about 700 of the bravest men of Balazma, a town in the Aurès, to Raqqāda, lodged them in a building with a single exit and had them massacred. Ibn ʿIdhārī calls this one of the causes of the dynasty's fall, because the Balazmans had kept the Kutāma Berbers in check. The same year Tunis and other towns rose against him. Ibrāhīm settled 5,000 black soldiers by his palace and took Tunis by storm in March 894.

In 902 the caliph al-Muʿtaḍid, after complaints from Tunis, ordered him to hand power to his son. Ibrāhīm abolished uncanonical taxes, remitted the land tax for "the equitable year" and went to Sicily to fight the holy war. On 1 August 902 he took Taormina, when his black infantry climbed a cliff path the defenders had left unguarded. Vuk Samčević calls its fall "the real loss of Sicily for Byzantium", though outposts held out for decades.

Ibrāhīm crossed into Calabria and besieged Cosenza, but he had dysentery. He died in a small church on 23 October 902, in Amari's reckoning; Fagnan's conversion of Ibn ʿIdhārī gives a day earlier. His body was buried in Palermo according to al-Nuwayrī and Ibn ʿIdhārī, in Kairouan according to others. Byzantine hagiography credited his death to the prayers of St Elias of Enna.

How did the Aghlabid dynasty end?

At the hands of a missionary and a Berber people. The Ismaili dāʿī Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Shīʿī met Kutāma pilgrims at Mecca and went home with them. Ibn ʿIdhārī says he concluded that of all the tribes of Ifrīqiya the Kutāma were "la plus nombreuse, la plus puissante et la moins soumise", the most numerous, the most powerful and the least submissive. He reached their country in the mountains west of the Aghlabid lands around AD 893, in the same year as the Balazma massacre, though other authors date his arrival to 288 (901).

The last emirs could not stop him. Ibrāhīm II's son ʿAbd Allāh II imprisoned his own son Ziyādat Allāh, and on 26 July 903 two pages killed ʿAbd Allāh in his sleep; some said on Ziyādat Allāh's orders. The new emir had his uncles shipped to an island off Tunis and beheaded.

Abū ʿAbd Allāh's Kutāma army took one town after another. On Saturday 23 Jumādā II 296 (19 March 909) it stormed Laribus, where the last Aghlabid army stood. The survivors crowded into the Great Mosque and were massacred; "Trente mille hommes, dit-on", thirty thousand, it is said, according to Ibn ʿIdhārī. The figure is a chronicler's round number.

When the news reached Raqqāda, Ziyādat Allāh III packed his jewels and money and fled at night on 20 March 909 towards Egypt. Ibn ʿIdhārī tells that a slave girl sang him verses of parting, hoping to be taken along; he wept but left her. The next morning the people plundered Raqqāda.

On 1 Rajab 296 (25 March 909) Abū ʿAbd Allāh entered Raqqāda, preceded by a man reciting Qurʾānic verses about the gardens and springs the unbelievers had left behind. He had promised the Kutāma Kairouan as plunder, but held them back. In Dhū l-Ḥijja 296 (August–September 909) his master ʿUbayd Allāh was proclaimed at Sijilmāsa, and he came to Raqqāda in the winter of AD 909–910 as the first caliph of the Fatimid Caliphate.

Ziyādat Allāh III waited in Egypt for help that never came. Al-Nuwayrī says he lost his hair to a sickness rumoured to be poison, went to Jerusalem and died there. De Slane added a note from Ibn al-Athīr: the Aghlabid princes used to say, "Nous irons en Egypte et nous attacherons nos chevaux aux oliviers de la Palestine", we shall go to Egypt and tie our horses to the olive trees of Palestine, without knowing how the prophecy would come true.

What did the Aghlabids leave behind?

Their buildings, their coinage and the model of a North African state. The Great Mosque of Kairouan, in the words of the Discover Islamic Art database, "was used as the architectural model for most of the mosques built in Ifriqiya before the arrival of the Ottomans". UNESCO, which inscribed Kairouan on the World Heritage List in 1988, writes that Kairouan "flourished under the Aghlabid dynasty in the 9th century".

Raqqāda left a technical legacy too. Fenwick writes that the first glazed pottery in Ifrīqiya, the mustard-yellow jaune de Raqqada, was made there in the late ninth century, and that its likeness to the earliest glazed wares of Palermo suggests craftsmen carried the technique to Sicily.

The emirate's conquests outlived it. Sicily passed to the Fatimids with the rest of Ifrīqiya and stayed in Muslim hands as the Emirate of Sicily until the Norman conquest of the eleventh century.

Common myths about the Aghlabid Dynasty

Timeline of the Aghlabid Dynasty

What the map shows next

The border data draws the Aghlabid emirate from AD 800 to 910; AD 855 on the map shows it at the height of its building programme. To the west lies the Rustamid imamate of Tāhart, and beyond it the Idrisids of Morocco. When the Tulunids ruled Egypt they were the Aghlabids' eastern neighbours, and Ibrāhīm II fought off their invasion. By 905 the map shows the Emirate of Sicily, which survived its founders. After 909 Ifrīqiya belongs to the Fatimid Caliphate, and the Aghlabid heartland is now the Republic of Tunisia.