Majeerteen Sultanate

At a glance

Who were the Majeerteen?

The Majeerteen are a Somali clan of the Harti group within the large Darod clan family. The genealogy recorded by the French naval officer Charles Guillain in 1846–1847 runs from Darod through Harti to three founders: Majeerteen, Warsangeli and Dhulbahante, the clans that still live side by side in north-eastern Somalia today. Like other Somali lineages, the Majeerteen traced their ancestry back to Arabia. The British officer Charles Cruttenden, who reported on them in 1843–1844, wrote that their traditions claimed descent from an Arab ancestor "wrecked on this coast".

Nineteenth-century visitors offered different explanations of the name. Cruttenden was told that it meant "the beloved one", while Guillain's interpreter thought it meant "modest, shy". Neither is a linguistic derivation, and both should be treated as folk etymologies.

The Majeerteen country is dry, mountainous and hot. Its interior is the pastureland of camel and goat herders; its coast, from Bosaso in the west past Alula and Cape Guardafui to Hafun in the east, faces the trade routes of the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. The Italian ethnographer Enrico Cerulli recorded traditions that the Majeerteen had won this land by fighting the Oromo (then called Galla), and placed the tombs of their ancestors in the hills inland.

When was the Majeerteen Sultanate founded?

Nobody knows exactly, and the date usually quoted online has no source. Many websites say that Guillain dated the founding to 1420. Guillain's own volumes of 1856 give no such year: what he recorded was a genealogy of twenty-three generations from the eponymous ancestor Majeerteen to the sultan reigning in his day. Cruttenden heard a tradition that "Sultan Mahomed, the last chief who governed the entire country", had died "some 300 years ago" and divided the land among his three sons, Osman, Isa and Omar. That tradition is probably the root of the common claim that the state goes back to the late fifteenth or sixteenth century.

The Italian historian Federico Battera, who has written the most detailed modern study, distinguishes the ruling line from the state. Traditions remember Cali Cumar as the first sultan, twelve generations before Boqor Cismaan Maxamuud, which would place him in the seventeenth century. But Battera thinks it likely that "the sultanate as such" did not predate Maxamuud "Xawaadane", that is, the second half of the eighteenth century. The Library of Congress country study of Somalia (1993) likewise dates its origin to the mid-eighteenth century.

Why the dates differ. Somali political memory is genealogical. A list of ancestors can be counted back for centuries, but it does not tell us when a chief began to rule a territory with the institutions of a state. The safest statement is that the ruling family is old, and that the sultanate as a political unit is attested from the late eighteenth century.

The first firm dates come from the nineteenth century. Maxamuud "Xawaadane" died in 1818–1819 according to Battera; Guillain heard that he had died about thirty years before 1846, and Cruttenden about twenty-five years before his visit. His death split the ruling family: a collateral branch, the Bah Yaaquub, tried to set up a separate sultanate at Alula, a rift that shaped the next century.

What does the title Boqor mean?

Boqor is the Somali title of the Majeerteen ruler. Battera notes that it has no precise translation: it refers to an investiture ceremony called boqran, and the Italian Somalist Enrico Cerulli explained it through a word for a woman's belt, so that the Boqor is the one who "holds the tribe together at the centre". The ruler was invested among the nomads of the interior, in the valley of the Togga Daroor.

Alongside Boqor the rulers used the Arabic title Suldaan (sultan). Battera describes a dual role. The Boqor faced inward, as the mediator who convened and chaired the shir, the assembly of clan elders. The Suldaan faced outward, towards Mukalla in Yemen, Muscat, Zanzibar, Istanbul and later the Europeans; in the Italian treaty of 1889 the ruler appears as "Sultan of all the Migertini", in Somali Suldaan Umum Majeerteen. Battera stresses that the title of Boqor "was never supplanted" by the Arabic one.

Contemporaries noticed that this was unusual. Guillain wrote that among all Somali peoples only the Majeerteen gave their supreme chief the title of sultan. The British officer S. B. Miles, who visited in 1871–1872, agreed: "The Mijjertheyn is the only tribe under the sway of a Sultan", while other clans had chiefs called Gerad or Ugaas. Miles also noted that the Friday sermon in the mosques was read in the name of the Ottoman sultan.

Succession followed fixed rules. The Boqor had to be a son of a mother from the Dir clan family (the Bah Dir line). Miles was told in 1872 that a regent "would have been elected Sultan" but was ineligible because his mother was a Warsangeli.

Where was the sultan's capital?

The sultan had no single capital. Battera describes two seats: one on the coast, which moved between Bargaal, Bender Murayah (Murcaayo) and Bereeda at different times, and one inland that moved with the herds, usually between the Daroor valley and the Qardho region.

Bender Murayah (Murcaayo, "Merâya" to the French) was the main seat from about the 1820s. Cruttenden wrote in the 1840s that it had become the residence of Sultan Osman, who built several fortified houses there. Miles described it in 1872 as "the chief port of the Mijjertheyn tribe", with a population of six or seven hundred, doubled in the trading season, three mosques and a school attended by thirty boys. "The largest and most conspicuous building is the Sultan's," he wrote: a house "of Hadramaut fashion", several storeys high, built about forty years earlier.

Bargaal, on the coast south of Cape Guardafui, grew from a village into the sultan's residence at the end of the nineteenth century. An Italian government survey written in early 1925 called it the "habitual residence of Sultan Osman Mahmud", with about 600 inhabitants, four fortified towers (garese), the sultan's house, sixteen other masonry buildings and about 200 huts.

Alula, often called the capital online, was in fact the town of the rival Bah Yaaquub branch. Battera dates its foundation to about 1800, and it was the base from which Yusuf Ali Kenadid challenged the sultan in 1878. From 1901 it was administered by the Sultan of Hobyo, and from 1914 it was the seat of the Italian commissioner.

How did the sultanate make its money?

From frankincense above all. The hills behind the Majeerteen coast are one of the world's main habitats of Boswellia trees, whose resin is frankincense. Miles recorded the Somali name beyu for olibanum and noted two grades: "bedwi", which went to Bombay "for exportation to Europe", and "mayeti", which went to Jeddah and Yemen. Each owner's frankincense plot was called hijje.

Cruttenden gave the first export figure. Between 1 September 1843 and 1 March 1844 the gum exports came to 7,320 bohars, "which, at ten to the ton, gives 732 tons", in a drought year; in a normal year he estimated 900 to 1,000 tons. The Admiralty's Gulf of Aden Pilot of 1882 put the gum exports of the whole Somali coast at about 1,500 tons a year, adding that after a good season the Majeerteen alone probably exported nearly that much.

The Italian survey of 1925 gives the fullest picture. It estimated the annual exports of the sultanate at about 1,056,400 Indian rupees, of which frankincense, 80,000 frasle worth 640,000 rupees, made up about three-fifths; shark meat, shark fins and mother-of-pearl together made up about a fifth. The Indian rupee was the currency of the coast until the Italian lira was introduced in July 1925. The same survey stressed that the frankincense "fields" were not fenced plots of private land but the collective property of clans.

The sultan's income came from taxes. Guillain recorded a tax of one-twentieth on the harvest, levies on livestock, an export duty on gums, incense and myrrh, and an import duty of five per cent, divided between the town chief, the sultan and his family. Trade went by sea in local sailing ships to Aden, Mukalla, Shihr, Jeddah, Muscat and Bombay.

The coast had one more resource: wrecks. Cape Guardafui lay on the steamer route between Suez and India, and ships regularly ran aground there. Cruttenden described how chiefs who plundered the wrecked British steamer Memnon in 1843 were fined by the clan assembly, one horse each, for taking property cast up by the sea without the consent of "the Sultan's house". The French traveller Georges Révoil found the regent's hut at Bargaal furnished in 1881 with the linen and tableware of "several superb liners of various nationalities, wrecked at Guardafui".

What agreements did the sultanate make with Britain?

Two, according to the official British collection of treaties edited by C. U. Aitchison. Neither is the "1839 agreement" mentioned on many websites; 1839 is the year Britain took Aden.

• 20 February 1866: an engagement against the slave trade, signed at Bender Murayah by "Sultan Mahmood bin Yoosoof" and the British Political Resident at Aden, Lieutenant-Colonel W. L. Merewether. It was confirmed by the Governor-General of India in Council on 16 May 1866.
• 1 May 1884: an engagement on shipwrecks, signed at Bender Murayah by "Othman Mahmood, Sultan of the Mijjerteyn tribe", and the elders of the ruling family. The sultan promised to protect wrecked ships "belonging to the British Government, or to a British subject, or to any other power", to guard their cargo and send their crews to Aden. In return he would receive "a yearly stipend of 360$" and a share of salvage. It was ratified by the Governor-General of India in Council at Simla on 29 July 1884.

Aitchison noted that Britain had no treaty relations with any people east of its Somali protectorate except the Majeerteen. Battera also mentions an earlier wreck agreement of 1862 in the Italian archives; its text has not been published.

Who was Boqor Cismaan Maxamuud?

Cismaan Maxamuud (Osman Mahmud, also written Osman Mahamuud) was the last independent ruler of the sultanate, and the most famous. The usual statement that he reigned "for almost 70 years, from 1860 to 1927" needs correcting. Révoil learned in 1881 that his father Mahmud Yusuf had died in 1866, leaving three sons and a daughter, and that "Osman, the present sultan, was only five years old". Miles, in 1871–1872, found "a boy of ten years of age" on the throne and the country under a regency. Battera puts the start of his reign at about 1860.

For many years real power lay with his regents. Révoil, who met Osman in 1880–1881 as a young man of about twenty, called his uncle Nuur Cismaan "the real chief of all the Majeerteen". Miles named the regent as Muuse Cismaan, with three great-uncles; the sources disagree on this point.

The table follows Battera's dynastic list and the nineteenth-century travellers. Online versions, including Wikipedia's, give dates that conflict with the treaty texts: Mahmud Yusuf, for example, was demonstrably sultan in February 1866.

Who was Yusuf Ali Kenadid, and how did Hobyo begin?

Yusuf Ali Kenadid (Yuusuf Cali Keenadiid) belonged to the Bah Yaaquub, the branch of the ruling family that had tried to set up its own sultanate at Alula after 1819. Older than the boy sultan, he returned to Alula in 1878 after a career as a merchant, with armed men from Mukalla in Yemen, and was elected sultan by an assembly of his own lineages. Révoil, who had seen the siege of Alula in 1878, found the town transformed three years later: Yusuf Ali had "declared himself independent of the sultan of the Majeerteen" and built white, crenellated three-storey forts flying the flag of the Khedive of Egypt.

Yusuf Ali won in the field but was cut off from the interior. In 1882 the conflict was settled by the marriage of his daughter Caasha to the young Boqor Cismaan. Yusuf Ali then moved far to the south, to the Mudug coast, where according to Battera he founded Hobyo in April 1884. The new Sultanate of Hobyo was born out of the Majeerteen family quarrel, and relations between the two sultanates stayed tense for the next forty years. The common statement that Hobyo was founded in 1878 confuses the bid for power at Alula with the founding of the new state.

How did the sultanate become an Italian protectorate?

Through two treaties signed a few weeks apart in 1889, negotiated by the Italian consul in Zanzibar, Vincenzo Filonardi.

Yusuf Ali moved first. In December 1888 a delegation from Hobyo formally asked for Italian protection at Zanzibar, and on 8 February 1889 Yusuf Ali signed a protection treaty at Hobyo. Boqor Cismaan was more reluctant. An Italian naval officer reported in March 1889 that the sultan had answered that he could accept "neither our flag nor the protectorate", since all his ancestors had always refused such proposals, and that if his coast were attacked he would withdraw inland. The treaty was preceded, Battera writes, by a shir at Bargaal attended by all the notables of the region, Yusuf Ali among them.

The treaty was signed at Bender Alula on 7 April 1889 (6 Shaʿbān 1306). In the English translation printed by the British diplomat Edward Hertslet, "Sultan Osman Mahmud Jusuf, Sultan of all the Migertini", placed "our country and all our possessions, from Ras Auad to Ras-el-Kyle (Uadi-Nogal being the farthest limit), under the protection and government of His Majesty Umberto I, King of Italy". He promised to hoist the Italian flag and not to make treaties "with any other Governments or persons". The treaty was countersigned by "Jusuf Ali Jusuf, Sultan of Oppia", and for Italy by Filonardi and the captains of the warships Rapido and Staffetta. The Italian collection of treaties records the price: an annual payment of 1,800 Maria Theresa thalers to the Majeerteen sultan and 600 to the Sultan of Hobyo.

Italy notified the Powers that had signed the Berlin Act of the new protectorate on 1 November 1889. On the ground little changed. "In the years immediately after 1889," the Italian survey of 1925 admits, "our protectorate was more nominal than effective": contact was kept by occasional visits of warships, and wreck plundering and the slave trade went on unpunished. Battera reads the treaty as "in reality not very binding" for the sultanate.

What happened between 1889 and 1925?

The Boqor played the powers against one another, and Italy answered with gunboats and new conventions.

• Seeking other protectors. According to the 1925 Italian survey, Osman Mahmud even offered his protectorate to France and Germany. There were rumours in 1899 that he sought British protection.
• 1901. After the wreck and plundering of the German steamer Asturia, the Italian navy bombarded Majeerteen coastal villages, and on 10 April 1901 Italy handed the ports of Alula, Bender Filuk and Bender Qasim (Bosaso) to the "provisional administration" of the Sultan of Hobyo. On 18 August 1901, at Bandar Ollok near Cape Guardafui, Osman signed a new and much stricter convention with the Italian commissioner Giulio Pestalozza. He placed "his own person, his sultanate, and the entire territory of the Mijurtines" under Italian protection and flag, promised not to plunder wrecks, banned the import of arms and allowed Italy to build lighthouses at Cape Guardafui.
• The Dervishes. In the same years Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, the leader of the Dervish movement that fought the British in Somaliland, was a neighbour, client and enemy by turns. British accounts say that Osman sold the Dervishes rifles imported through Djibouti and helped the Sayyid escape in 1904; Italian sources say that the Majeerteen often supplied him with food and cloth. From about 1905, after Italy gave the Sayyid the Nugaal valley under the Illig agreement of 5 March 1905, Dervish raids fell on the Majeerteen and Osman turned against him. In December 1910 the Majeerteen and Warsangeli formed an alliance against the Dervishes with British and Italian help.
• Italian presence. Governor Giacomo De Martino visited Bargaal in 1911. Osman resisted an Italian residency until 1914, when it was set up at Alula, "very far from where the Boqor used to reside", as Battera puts it. Even then the sultanate kept what he calls "an unthinkable degree of autonomy". Italian investment came only in the 1920s: a salt works at Hurdiyo from 1921, and lighthouses at Alula, Hafun and Guardafui in 1924.

On the eve of the conquest the Italian authorities estimated that Osman could field six to seven thousand fighters, four to five thousand of them armed with rifles. The survey's author nevertheless called him "weak, procrastinating and conservative".

Was it a real state?

Historians disagree on how to describe it. Some popular accounts claim that the sultanate had "all the organs of an integrated state": a bureaucracy, a professional army and written records. Battera is more cautious. "To call it a State at that time was too much," he writes; in its final phase the sultanate "was not more than a tribal group, which recognized the Sultan as a legitimate representative of the group in its external relations". Its unity was built "mainly without coercion", through kinship, the Arabian trade and shared customary law (xeer).

The Boqor did have instruments of power. He had a guard of about four hundred men, the "Midgo of the Sultan", frontier commanders (naacib) and fortified towers along the coast. But the defence of the country rested on the armed clans, and the Boqor's authority depended on his role as mediator in the clan assemblies. Battera notes that the neighbouring Sultanate of Hobyo, founded by a merchant with a paid force of musketeers, was more centralised.

How did Italy conquer the sultanate?

In the "Campaign of the Sultanates" of 1925–1927, ordered by the Fascist governor of Italian Somaliland, Cesare Maria De Vecchi. De Vecchi, one of the four leaders of Mussolini's March on Rome, arrived as governor in 1923 and regarded indirect rule through the sultans as a display of weakness. A royal decree of 10 July 1925 authorised the reorganisation of the northern protectorates "to exercise more effectively the authority of the State". Italian forces landed at Hafun on 1 October 1925 and at Alula two days later, and began seizing the Majeerteen sailing ships.

Boqor Cismaan called a shir of all the Majeerteen at the wells of Dhur and chose resistance. When De Vecchi demanded his complete disarmament, he answered, according to the official Italian account: "Let the Government take the sailing ships; I keep the weapons." De Vecchi telegraphed back that if he did not obey he would take the ships, the fighters, the weapons, all the Majeerteen chiefs "and you too".

The war was fought along the coast and then in the interior:

• 28–29 October 1925: an Italian landing party at Bargaal, the sultan's residence, met more than 400 armed men and held out for 22 hours in the minaret of the mosque under the guns of the cruiser Campania. When reinforcements landed, "Bargal was levelled, burned and sacked". The 1925 survey adds simply: "Bargal no longer exists: it was bombarded and razed to the ground on 28 and 29 October 1925."
• 2 December 1925: the Boqor's son Xirsi Boqor (Hersi Boqor) attacked the Italian post at Hurdiyo with several hundred men and burned the pier and the salt-works village. Even the official account conceded that "the victory was his". Italy abandoned Hurdiyo, sent Eritrean colonial battalions and formed a naval division for the Indian Ocean, which fortified Hafun. Hafun itself, which some accounts say Xirsi retook, stayed in Italian hands.
• 1926: fighting moved inland to Qardho and Karin. On 28 October 1926 Mussolini proclaimed the end of the sultanates and direct Italian rule.
• December 1926 – January 1927: irregular columns raised from rival clans raided the Majeerteen interior with orders of "destruction and plunder of everything that would be found". On 20 January 1927 Xirsi was defeated at Iskushuban; Battera adds a final defeat of the Boqor himself at Hiddo, near Qardho. On 28 February 1927 De Vecchi declared the occupation complete.

The official Italian figures, published in 1933, are for the whole campaign against the northern sultanates, including Hobyo and the Nugaal. They give more than 12,000 men on the Italian side, most of them Somali and Eritrean colonial troops, of whom 553 were killed; the opponents lost 1,236 killed and 737 wounded, and 6,500 camels, 8,000 cattle and 210,000 sheep and goats. Battera concludes that De Vecchi did his work "with brutality", prompting fierce resistance and prolonging the conquest.

What happened to Boqor Cismaan and Xirsi Boqor?

Both went into exile. The Boqor crossed into British Somaliland in January 1927 and tried to negotiate through the British authorities. He surrendered in the autumn of 1927, on 21 November according to Battera (in October according to the official Italian account of 1933), and was confined to Mogadishu. His brother Yuusuf Maxamuud, one of the most determined leaders of the resistance, had handed his sword to De Vecchi at Bargaal on 3 March 1927.

Xirsi Boqor fled to Ethiopia and fought on with other exiles; at Iglale in the Ogaden on 30 November 1927 they were defeated by Italian border troops. In April 1929, seriously ill and wishing to return, he gave himself up to the Italian legation in Addis Ababa, but he had contracted smallpox and died a few days later. Boqor Cismaan Maxamuud died in exile in Mogadishu on 25 May 1932, according to Battera (in August 1932, according to the 1933 account).

Xirsi is often called the heir to the throne, and the Italians described him so. According to Battera he could not have succeeded: his mother was not of the Dir, so under the Majeerteen xeer he was ineligible. The title passed to the line of the Boqor's grandson Muuse Yuusuf.

What became of Migiurtinia under Italian rule?

The sultanate became an Italian province. In September 1926 De Vecchi divided the former sultanates into three districts (commissariati): Hobyo, Nugaal and Migiurtinia. In the 1930s the commissariato of Migiurtinia was organised into four residenze, at Hafun, Alula, Bosaso and Qandala. The colonial authority kept the Boqor office "although only nominally", Battera writes, paying the Boqor as a salaried chief, while the Hobyo dynasty lost all formal office.

The war left the region impoverished. In the mid-1930s, Battera writes, the coast was still suffering from the long blockade and the seizure of the Majeerteen fleet, and the frankincense trade had declined. Italy built a large salt works at Hafun between 1922 and 1929, which the Italian press of 1930 described as the largest in the world; it was destroyed during the Second World War. According to a 2008 report on Puntland, more than 25,000 pastoralists from the region were conscripted for Italy's war against Ethiopia in 1935–1936.

After the British conquest of Italian East Africa in 1941, the territory was under British military administration. In Resolution 289 (IV) of 21 November 1949, the UN General Assembly decided that Italian Somaliland should become independent after ten years of Italian trusteeship, which began on 1 April 1950. On 1 July 1960 the trust territory united with British Somaliland to form the Somali Republic, today's Somalia.

What is the link between the Majeerteen Sultanate and Puntland?

The former sultanate lies at the heart of Puntland, but the two are not the same. Puntland State of Somalia was created at a constitutional conference in Garowe that ran from 15 May to 23 July 1998, in the years after the collapse of the Somali state. It declared itself an autonomous state within Somalia, not an independent country. Puntland is based on the Harti clans as a whole, the Majeerteen, Dhulbahante and Warsangeli, and its territory is much larger than the old sultanate.

Puntland's constitution does not name the Boqor. It recognises "traditional leaders" in general as "the most senior titled elders among their communities" and bars them from party politics. Puntland's own historical accounts remember the Majeerteen resistance to Italian rule as part of the region's history.

Is there still a Boqor of the Majeerteen?

Yes. The office survived the colonial conquest as a traditional title. The current holder, Boqor Burhaan Boqor Muuse, was inaugurated at Qardho on 25 May 2014, succeeding his brother Boqor Cabdullaahi Boqor Muuse, who had died a year earlier. Somali news reports described the ceremony as attended by more than six thousand people, among them the President and Vice-President of Puntland. His supporters style him the "34th king of the Darod".

That claim to speak for all the Darod is the family's own. Battera notes that in theory the Boqor was the representative not only of the Majeerteen but of the whole Darod family, but that this "was far from the political reality" even in the nineteenth century, and is all the more so today. News reports show the Boqor active in Puntland politics as a mediator into 2026.

Common myths about the Majeerteen Sultanate

Timeline of the Majeerteen Sultanate

What the map shows next

The border data draws the Majeerteen Sultanate only from 1856 to 1889, the years in which its source shows it as an independent polity; at 1873 on the map it sits at the tip of the Horn of Africa. From 1880 the map also shows its southern offshoot, the Sultanate of Hobyo. After 1889 the data folds the region into the Italian sphere, drawn at Italian Africa, although on the ground the sultanate kept its independence until 1925–1927. The independent Federal Republic of Somalia covers the area today.