The Norman ‘Kingdom of Africa’

Sicily and Ifriqiya were bound by trade. Ifriqiya, whose countryside had been ravaged by famines and by the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym, depended on Sicilian grain, and Sicily bought the gold brought across the Sahara and cloth. Roger II took the island of Djerba in 1135, and by 1142 the Zirid emir of Mahdia, al-Hasan ibn Ali, unable to pay for his grain, had become in effect his protégé. In 1146 a Sicilian fleet under George of Antioch — a Greek Christian who had once served the Zirids — took Tripoli. In June 1148 George sailed against Mahdia itself; off Pantelleria he intercepted a Mahdian ship carrying carrier pigeons and sent the birds home with false news that the fleet was bound for Byzantium. On 22 June al-Hasan and his court fled the unprepared city, Sousse surrendered on 1 July and Sfax fell on 12 July.

Norman rule was pragmatic and modelled on that of the former emirs. The inhabitants received a royal guarantee of safety (aman); George released food to bring back refugees, appointed qadis acceptable to the population and left local Muslim notables in charge under Sicilian garrisons. The Muslims paid a poll tax lighter than that of the Muslims of Sicily, and gold dinars with Arabic legends were struck at Mahdia in the names of Roger and his son William. The dominion stretched from Tripoli to the borders of Tunis and inland towards Kairouan, and in 1153 Bône was added. Whether Roger officially styled himself king of Africa is disputed: his charters never use the title, though a private charter and an epitaph of 1148 from Palermo do, and a later verse, said to have been inscribed on his seal or his sword, boasts that the Apulian, the Calabrian, the Sicilian and the African serve him.

The Muslim population generally preferred Muslim rule. After Roger's death in 1154, as the Almohads advanced eastwards, the towns rose one after another and turned to them; Tripoli was lost in 1158. In 1159 the Almohad caliph Abd al-Mu'min took Tunis and laid siege to Mahdia, and in January 1160 the city fell. The Norman garrison negotiated its withdrawal and was allowed to sail for Sicily, while the Christians and Jews who remained were, by one account, given the choice of Islam or death. Bishop Cosmas of Mahdia fled to Palermo, and the old native church of Ifriqiya is rarely heard of afterwards. Sicily and the Almohads concluded a lasting peace only in 1180.