ABSTRACT
The North African state to which the eyes of Spanish Muslims turned after the fall of Toledo in 1085 had grown to a vast size in less than half a century. It included not merely the whole of Morocco and Mauritania, but also the basin of the Senegal river in the south and the western part of Algeria in the north. Only meagre accounts have been preserved of the outward history of the religious movement of the Almoravids, and these give little understanding of the fundamental causes of its rapid success. The movement began in a group of camel-breeding, nomadic Berber tribes known collectively as Sanhaja. Their home had been the steppes of the Sahara, but some of them had moved south to the basins of the Senegal and the upper Niger. The power of this Berber dynasty did not long remain at its zenith.
