CHAPTER  THE FIFTH
THE  EXTENSION   OF   EMPIRE

(MUWAHHADI  PERIOD)
I149-1269

GREAT as had been the effect of the Murabti
invasion, and wide as under them had grown the
limits of the Empire of which they were practically the
constructors, there had been for some time rising in
the Atlas mountains a religious force, whose destiny
it was to stretch the Moorish Empire far beyond the
dreams of Yusef bin Tashfin. At its head was
Ibn Tumart         Mohammed   ibn   Tumart,   perhaps   the   most

the Mahdt.                                                                            ^    r          r

remarkable   of  all   the   figures   which   appear
upon the stage of Moorish history.

A native of Sus—although a member of the Hargha
tribe^ of Masmuda Berbers—he laid claimf not only to
Arab descent, but also to descent from Mohammed, either
through a family which came to Morocco with Musa,i or
through Sulaiman the brother of Idrees, whose family had
settled in those parts.J^ As a youth he visited the East
for purposes of study, and acquired a great reputation for
strictness in religious duties, by the fearless way in which

* Since lost sight of.

t By a holograph genealogy, declared by Ibn Khaldun to be a forgery
(vol. i., p. 251). Ibn Khallikan says that the first Muwahhadis acknowledged
the Abbasi Idialifas.              X See p. 39.

1 Ra6d el KartAs, p. 242; 5^bd el WAhhId, p. 128 ('92, p. 205); Ibn KHALLiKAhSfc
vol. iii., p. 206.               2 Ibn &haldi>n, vol. ii., pp. 163-4.

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