6

The Banū Ghāniya

520–99/1126–1203

The Balearic Islands

The founder of this petty Ṣanhāja Berber dynasty, which controlled the Balearic Islands for eighty years and also played a significant role during the period of later Almohad rule in the eastern Maghrib, was an Almoravid descendant on the female side, deriving his name Ibn Ghāniya from the name of an Almoravid princess, the wife of ‘Alī b. Yūsuf. ‘Alī’s son Yaḥyā defended the Almoravid possessions in Spain against the incoming Almohads (see below, no. 15), and then remnants of the Ibn Ghāniya family withdrew to the Balearic Islands. There they founded their own independent line as a post-Almoravid principality which grew rich on, inter alia, piracy against the Christians. One member of the family, ‘Alī b. Isḥāq, decided to leave the Balearics and carry on the struggle against the Almohads in the eastern Maghrib. He and his successor there, Yaḥyā b. Isḥāq, were for several decades destabilising influences in the affairs of Ifrīqiya and what is now eastern Algeria until ‘Alī’s defeat and death in 633/1227 and Yaḥyā’s loss of Ifrīqiya and subsequent death in 635/1236; the activities here of the Banū Ghāniya were a potent factor in the decline of Almohad power in the eastern Maghrib. Meanwhile, the Almohad caliph al-Nāṣir had invaded Majorca and installed his own governor there, ending the rule of the Banū Ghāniya in the Balearics; the Almohads and their epigoni held the islands for nearly thirty years until James I of Aragön conquered Majorca, with Ibiza and Minorca following it into Christian hands by 686/1287.

Zambaur, 57.

EI² ‘Ghāniya, Banū’ (G. Marçais); ‘Mayūrka’ (J. Bosch-Vilá).

A. Bel, Les Benou Ghânya, derniers représentants de 1’empire almoravide et leur lutte contre l’empire almohade, Publications de l’Ecole des Lettres d’Alger, Bull. de Correspondance Africaine, XXVII, Paris 1903, with a genealogical table at p. 26.