Almoravid Army

The army of the Almoravid dynasty grew out of nomadic Sanhaja Berber tribes of the western Sahara, above all the Lamtuna, whose desert warriors were organized into a unified fighting force in the early 1050s under the joint leadership of Yahya ibn Umar and the religious reformer Abdallah ibn Yasin. Initially composed of camel-mounted Sanhaja tribesmen, the Almoravid military was reshaped under Yusuf ibn Tashfin, who built a personal guard of slave soldiers including some 5,000 black African and 500 white recruits, giving the dynasty a more centralized fighting force as it conquered Sijilmasa and Awdaghust in 1054 to 1055, took Aghmat in 1058, founded Marrakesh as its capital in 1070, and pushed east to Tlemcen, Oujda and Algiers by the early 1080s. Called into Iberia to aid Muslim rulers against Christian expansion, the Almoravid army won a major victory over Alfonso VI of Castile at the Battle of Sagrajas in October 1086, and by the 1090s and 1100s had taken direct control of Granada, Cordoba, Seville, Valencia and, in 1110, Zaragoza, the last independent Muslim taifa kingdom in Iberia, bringing the empire at its height around 1120 to roughly one million square kilometers spanning Mauritania, the western Maghreb and much of Muslim Spain. Almoravid military dominance declined after the loss of Zaragoza to Christian forces in 1118 and the deaths of key commanders, and mounting pressure from the rival Almohad movement in the Maghreb brought the dynasty's collapse by 1147.