Ibn Khaldun writes the Muqaddimah

Born in Tunis in 1332, Ibn Khaldun lost both his parents to the Black Death as a youth and spent more than two decades in the service of rulers in Tunis, Fez, Granada, Bejaia and Tlemcen, changing masters as their fortunes changed. In 1375, weary of politics, he found refuge with the Awlad Arif, who lodged him in their castle of Qal’at Ibn Salama near present-day Frenda, and he stayed there for more than three years. In a note at the end of the work he says that he completed the composition and draft of this first part ‘in a period of five months ending in the middle of the year 779’, which Franz Rosenthal converts to November 1377.

The Muqaddimah sets out what Ibn Khaldun presented as a new science, the science of umran, human social organization. Reports about the past, he argued, must be tested against what is possible in the nature of society. Desert peoples bound by strong group feeling conquer the cities and found dynasties, are softened by settled luxury and lose their cohesion, so that a dynasty, as a rule, does not outlast three generations. The book also treats economic life, taxation, crafts and the sciences, and it describes the plague of the mid-14th century as ‘a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish’ in the East and the West (tr. F. Rosenthal). Ibn Khaldun went on revising it for the rest of his life: in 1378 he moved to Tunis, where there were libraries for his history, in 1382 he sailed for Egypt, and in Cairo, where he taught and was repeatedly appointed Maliki chief judge, he kept adding to the text. Ottoman historians drew on it from the 17th century; it was printed at Bulaq in 1857 and translated into French by de Slane in the 1860s and into English by Rosenthal in 1958.