El Rey Lobo: The Wolf King of 12th Century Medieval Murcia

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the study of antiquity and the Middle Ages. As always, I am your host, Nick Barksdale. And we are joined today by Dr. Kyle Lincoln. Dr. Lincoln, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me, Nick. I'm excited to be in the middle of this next episode of our Heroes and Villains in Medieval Iberia series. I think we've got a fun one for today, but I'll let you introduce it to our subscribers. Don't forget to check out the links in the video description below. It's going to take you to our previous episodes, including the introduction and the episode prior to this, so that if you want, you can watch this series in order, but also check out the links that take you to the work of Dr. Lincoln himself so you can give him your full support and really appreciate everything that he's doing to better help people like me and you understand the subjects that we all love. And so without further ado, Dr. Lincoln, who are we going to be focusing on today? So today's video is going to be about a Muslim emir. He sometimes styles himself as a king. But that's that's the sort of fluffy difference in this period. Who's in charge of one of the Taifa kingdoms, Taifa, a word that usually gets translated something like party or faction. The Taifa kingdoms were these breakaway states in the aftermath. First of the Umayyad Caliphate's fitna. The second Umayyad Caliphate's fall in 1031. They divide the whole of the Iberian Peninsula up in a little tributary territory, some very small and some actually quite sizable. The Burkinids in Toledo, for example, had a huge swath of territory. We've already talked about Alfonso the Battler's attempts to take over the Taifa of Zaragoza. We'll, of course, talk more about other Taifa kings in the future. But this guy is usually referred to as Ibn Mardanesh, that's the as is usually the case. Arab Islamic last names are composed of many parts. And so we usually only refer to leaders with only one or two of these parts. He's usually called Abdullah Mohammed Ibn Sa'ad Ibn Mardanesh. And we'll talk more about what his name means in a little bit. But Christian sources, Latin sources in the period, especially those both issued by the royal hand, especially in the Kingdom of Castile, where he actually shows up in some of the charters, the royal charters as a witness, but also in some of the historical chronicles, refer to him by an interesting epithet. They call him Rex Lupus in Latin, which usually translates to Spanish. Modern Spanish is Rey Lobo, which is to say the wolf king, which I mean, it's not the coolest medieval nickname, but it's it definitely belongs in the conversation for a little bit. So I want to actually read you a chunk from a Latin chronicle by a 13th century archbishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, who is widely regarded as one of the more important, if not always most reliable. Sometimes he fudges on some of the facts of sources for the 12th and 13th centuries in medieval Liberia. I hear on a number of works, the most famous of which is his Historia de Rebus Hispaniae, the history of the things of Spain or the matters of Spain, which is to say his sort of history of the Christian kingdoms in the north. But he also being an archbishop of Toledo was very deeply interested in contemporary Muslim culture and in Arabic literacy, especially. We know that he commissioned some translations of important Arabic philosophical, medical, astronomical, historical texts. He was also very interested in the theology of the Almohads, the caliphate in the south of the peninsula that were the usual enemies of his sovereign, the king of Castile. But I want to read you this section from one of his shorter Latin works, a text that in its modern edition is only about 35 pages or so. It's usually titled Historia Arabum, his history of the Arabs, by which, of course, he doesn't mean Arab as an ethnicity, but he actually means history of Muslims and some of their predecessors. So this is me translating on the fly from the Latin. So forgive it if it sounds a little clunky. Indeed, even among the vandals on this side of the city, there was a man of astonishing prudence, of liberality, a strong and benevolent leader who was called Muhammad ibn Sahhat and was afterwards also called the Wolf King. This man obtained the kingdom of Valencia and afterward the kingdom of Morsia. And he was capable of maintaining all things which were within them, including Lorca, Basta, Guadix and many other places within many Christians lived in his place, where afterwards when the Almohads of Africa and the Almoravids had come from the from Vandalia, from the other section of North Africa, he was able to struggle against them. This sort of description betrays a couple of things, I think. First, it says that a 13th century archbishop, given the terms that he's actually using to describe him, actually admires a Muslim king. Right. And now this is not all that unusual, right? We know that Muslims and Christians were at peace more often than they were at war in the medieval world. And then often exchanges of hostages, right, of people to maintain a peace, but also the exchange of trade and tax ritual gifts. Right. This is particularly important. We know, for example, that Harun al-Rashid gives an elephant named Abu Abbas to Charlemagne. Right. And so now we have a German warlord who, yes, can read, but is not exactly a highfalutin man of culture or sophistication who's been given an elephant, which had to be particularly shocking in northern Germany at the time as a gift. And I would submit that when you give someone a gift of an elephant, that's a pretty profound statement. And the material culture of medieval Iberia has tons of these diplomatic gifts. Right. So so to have this sort of respect is unusual. But what is unusual in Rodrigo's text is how much praise he actually gives for Mohammed ibn Sa'ad. He doesn't actually talk about any of his sort of religiosity or his piety, which is interesting. But talks about him in terms of another, a lord that can be respected. And this is not all that dissimilar to the way that Salah ad-Din is portrayed in a lot of the Richard and Salah ad-Din fan fiction. I mean, crusade romance. I mean, contemporary accounts. Right. All of which are probably somewhere in the middle. Right. Salah ad-Din is, as Jonathan Phillips has rightly pointed out, always the subject of legend, as is Richard the Lionheart, even though the two of them to their enemies, especially were particularly brutal. You know, this is the sort of spectrum on which medieval rulership can be. But but why, we might ask, is Rodrigo so praiseworthy of this guy, Ibn Mardanesh, Mohammed ibn Sa'ad, this this wolf king, what makes him so special? We know that his early life seems to have been a part of this widespread movement of the Almoravids, right, which we talked about last time, who were at their heart, a kind of tax reform and legal reform enterprise that morphed into a kind of neocaliphal enterprise, right, which engaged in all kinds of holy war city building, castle building, tax farming, all kinds of the big enterprises that were trying to get people back on the right track. Right. One of these these reform movements. We know that Mohammed ibn Sa'ad, his father, Sa'ad, was an Almoravid governor in the region. It seems likely that he had close ties with some some neighboring warlords who were similarly on the sort of vague Almoravid team. Right. They had sort of said, yeah, we'll participate in this movement because, you know, it's got some of this stuff right, especially with tax policy where we're kind of on board with that. No extra chronicle taxes, you know, we sort of reforming the usual old time religion, if you like. And we know that he was allied with one of the key Muslim power players in the south central part of the peninsula. If we flash a map up, there's a really solid picture that you can get of where Mohammed ibn Sa'ad's kingdom in Morsia and Valencia occupies the sort of southeast part of the peninsula, what Arabic chroniclers will call Sharkalandalus, right, the eastern edge of Al-Andalus of southern Iberia. And his neighbor, Zafadullah, as he's usually called, he's got a way longer name than than even Ibn Mardanish does. But Zafadullah is a close friend and companion of Alfonso VII, a king about whom, if you check the links in the video description, you'll find Nick and I have already talked about quite a bit Alfonso VII as this kind of imperial figure, a figure of considerable importance in the medieval Iberian period, a Christian leader who cultivated Muslim vassals, who got a golden rose from the pope. There's all kinds of interesting stuff going on there. So Zafadullah is an important political ally for Ibn Mardanish's father. And those connections are pretty, pretty tight. Problematically, you know, you can be born at the right time, you can be born at the wrong time, you can be born at both. In this case, Ibn Mardanish and his family are at the height of their power when he's a young man, when the Almoravid state is also at its most fragile. The Almoravids crumble thanks to the Almohad movement, a kind of newfangled attempt to really provoke a really radical reappropriation of a lot of Sunni theology, but also some really interesting, almost pseudo-Shia tendencies, especially with their cultivation of the Mahdi around the figure of Ibn Tumart, the use of his tomb as a site of pilgrimage. They're a sort of weird movement. And so they really clash with the Almoravids. They're also from very different tribal confederations. The Almoravids are usually aligned with the Sanhaja, more coastal peoples and tribes, whereas the Almohads are more allied with the Masmuda, who are up higher in the mountains, in the Atlas especially. And so this conflict that starts out in the Maghreb spills over into Al-Andalus, because there are Almoravid possessions that are very wealthy, very important. As well as like some tributary states, which is probably closer to what Sa'ad's region is. He is, yes, a governor. He sort of recognized the Almoravids in exchange for sending some tributes and kind of be left alone through that client kingdom status, although usually the text call him a governor. That's sort of a soft term, especially in the medieval world. And so the revolt that breaks out when the Almoravids and the Almohads are at loggerheads really kind of creates what scholars usually refer to as a second Taifa period, a new breakup of this Almoravid empire into a number of polities in southern Al-Andalus. Zafadullah controls one, and Sa'ad, when he dies, leaves his kingdom to one of his sons, Ibn Mardan, and she actually divides it. And then one of the brothers dies unexpectedly. And so there's this kind of power vacuum, right? And filling that power vacuum that's left, yes, by the collapse of the Almoravids, but also in the region of the long legacy of the Banu Hud, who had recently controlled the Taifa of Zaragoza, which has now collapsed and been absorbed by Aragon. The crown of Aragon, this combination polity in the aftermath of all the shenanigans provoked by the death of Alfonso the Battler, Aragon, the kingdom of Aragon unites with the county of Barcelona and creates this new fusion state, which we usually refer to as Aragon. So they swallowed up Zaragoza. But the stability that was there for the Banu Hud, who rounds out Zaragoza for a long time, is filled in some ways by the Sa'adi dynasty and by Ibn Mardanesh and his family. So there are some real possibilities here, right? The Almoravids are crumbling. And Ibn Mardanesh very quickly builds his territory outward. He invokes the name of the Abbasid Caliphate, interestingly enough, which is in Baghdad, hasn't really been all that politically or militarily relevant for a long time, because, of course, at this point, they're puppets of the Seljuks, a Turkey people who had ridden in and sort of changed the military equation for the Abbasids. But by recognizing the Abbasids, he's also telling the Almoravids where they can stick their claims of political authority because he's choosing to recognize the different authority. It'd be sort of like if I said, well, you know, here I am in Michigan, but I'm closer to Ottawa than I am to Washington, D.C. So I'll recognize Trudeau instead of Biden as a president. That's going to date stamp this video. But, you know, it's I think it's something that will hold up regardless. I don't think Michigan's going anywhere. But this idea of recognizing competing authority also gives him a claim to say, and because you're claiming false authority, I'm going to wage what is essentially a purgative jihad against you because you're being bad Muslims. Right. And we know that historically, jihad are more likely to be waged against other Muslims who have done something dramatically wrong. In this case, the Almoravids are charged with all kinds of doctrinal novelties. And so even Mardanish as a good Muslim is saying, like, well, none of that is really Islam. You guys are doing some weird stuff. So, you know, A, I want this territory. B, you can't stop me. And C, you're being schmucks. So I'm going to recognize the name of the Abbasid Caliphate as a way to not only check your political hegemony in the area, but then also take up the war path. And he does that after securing some alliances, first with the Kingdom of Castile and with the Kingdom of Aragon. He does this in a couple of ways. First, he signed some treaties, some non-aggression pacts, but then he also agrees to provide the parias payments, a sort of traditional stipend given to another kingdom in exchange for the promise of like a sort of standing order for mercenaries. We're going to pay this money every year. And when we need you, we're going to call you in as mercenary help. And this payment contributed substantially to the fortunes of the northern Christian kingdoms, but also helped create a kind of political stability for the Saudi dynasty in Murcia and Valencia, because it really helps cement their ability to to launch a larger standing army than they would otherwise just from their own domestic musters. At the same time that there's a real expansion of those political fortunes, Ibn Mardanesh is also signing a couple of treaties, first with Pisa and Genoa to allow them certain trade privileges. He'll give them a stipend as well. This is a sort of normal like you come in and trade at lower prices. We'll give you lower tax rights. And you you'll get this thing called a funduk, which is like a combination like it's sort of like a truck stop, except if the truck stop had a hotel and wasn't the scene of lots of serial killer dramas. That's what we'd be talking about, right? It's a trade post where you can buy and sell lots of things. You can resupply. You can stay for a while. You can get what you need to move on. These funduk are also big sites of commerce, right? Pisa and Genoa are bringing goods in, selling stuff that's produced in Murcia. We'll talk more about his economic productivity later, but that provides a sort of more stable trade base. So he's got some economic productivity with his trees in Genoa. Of course, two of the really big maritime republics at the time. He's got more military resources with his alliances with Castile and Aragon. And he's also established a political check to play by recognizing the ambassadors against the Almohads. Right. So all of these things sort of give them a backdrop so that even if someone might doubt his claims of being a real Mujahideen, that he might still be able to use that as a tool to say, like, I'm legit because of all these other reasons, in addition to my religious claims. Right. So it really starts to push on the territories that the Almohads are trying to take over, that the Almoravids had to have a hold of and that are adjacent to his regime. He also cedes some territory. What is now Alborazin, the site of a kind of breakaway independent lordship under the Azafra family, which remains independent well into the 13th century, really fascinating stuff. And I want someone to do some work on them. But there hasn't been a ton of great scholarship yet about it. So fingers crossed in the next couple of years, one of my friends will make one of their grad students do their dissertation on Alborazin. And then I can learn some more stuff about it without doing the work. But all of this legitimacy allows him to really kind of open the floodgates to attempt to attack a lot of territories that will not only increase his expansive control in the eastern part of Iberia, but will also allow him to launch more provocative campaigns against the Almohads. He takes high end in 1159, Guadif and Carmona in 1160. Right. And if we flash those on a map, you'll see that these are actually in the way. If you sort of rioting southwest towards the heart of both Almoravid and later Almohad regional power. Right. We know that although the Mayans had chosen Cordoba because of its site in the Guadalquivir as their capital, the Almohads are a little bit further downstream and Sevilla, where the Almoravids had also had an important side of power. Right. So if we've got Cordoba and Sevilla and you're sort of riding in that direction, you can also see the value of attacking Granada, which at this point is not the stunning metropolis that it would be in the 13th and 14th centuries. It would be the sort of crown jewel of Islamic civilization in medieval Iberia. Still to this day, of course, the Alhambra provokes all kinds of awestruck responses from anyone that goes and wanders around that kind of relief and then goes to the palaces itself. But without a court of the lions, it's still nevertheless an important city. And it's a part of this larger ring of territories in the southern part of the peninsula. And after taking high end Guadalquivir and Carmona, what Ibn Mardanesh is able to do from there is launch provocative cavalry raids. Right. Which usually in Spanish are referred to as a Cabal Haba, a cavalry raid to steal a bunch of livestock, to take a bunch of loot and tribute. Come back and say, no, no, no, no, no. I attacked you all Mohawks. What are you going to do about it? This kind of provocative action suggests that Ibn Mardanesh really has a sense that he is in in in every real sense, the most important political figure in the in the peninsula right now. I say that as somebody who normally works on Castile and on the Crusades in the later 12th century in the Iberian Peninsula. So it's not that I don't have skin in the game for like, hey, Alfonso VIII. Right. I mean, I could literally pull a book from my shelf with my name on it that says Alfonso VIII on it. But, you know, even if I were to do that, which, you know, is on sale from Fordham University Press, there would still nevertheless be a real reason why I'm going to back up and say Ibn Mardanesh is the guy. Right. And as if all of his military and political achievements, building his own separate kingdom and really kind of pushing the boundaries of what he's able to do in this period weren't enough stars aligned in his favor. There's also a number of really important kind of nuts and bolts achievements that he's up to. We've already mentioned his his trade agreements with Pisa in general on the 1150s. It really helped jumpstart his economy and create real mercantile progress that lasted well into the later part of his reign. And he dies in 1172, 1173. There's a huge power vacuum, right, which we know creates a huge opening for a lot of people in the region. But we also know that all of that same time, he's establishing what's often referred to as the one of the most stable and one of the most important coinages in the Mediterranean. This is usually in Spanish referred to as a more of a Tino Lupino, a wolffish. Madhavi is usually the way it's weirdly transliterated. It's it's a gold coin of about two ounces that's so solid, so pure that it was referred to as a currency of record. Right. That doesn't just mean that it was used when you had the physical coins, but that was the sort of reference point for other things. Right. Five French gold, two were worth. Right. So you sort of use it as a conversion point. Right. It's a standard currency in the same way that the dollar, the British pound, the euro and the yen become these sort of market currencies on the global currency market. So, too, is the the the Mardanish more of a Tino that much of an important record? And if you look at a picture of one of the Mardanish coins, and you compare it with the later gold coin issued by Alfonso VIII, you can actually see here, Nick, the difference is very small and very subtle. Right. There are some changes. But what Alfonso VIII essentially does the same. Actually, the Almoravid gold dinar that that Ibn Mardanish made even better. That's the standard we're going to use. And the coins are so similar that the analysis of numismatists like Professor Jim Tedesca has shown pretty substantially that Alfonso VIII is directly imitating the currency of Ibn Mardanish and of the Almoravids, specifically because they're that reputable as currencies. And even if the coinage part weren't significant, one of the things that's actually been shown by Abbie Krasner-Balbale, who's now at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, is that the already historical evidence, the evidence from Ibn Mardanish's palace complexes, from the textile production and from the ceramic production in his kingdom was so significant that it was imitated in the Fatimid court. It was imitated in Sicily. The textiles were imitated in Castile. And some of the remnants actually show a pretty broad ranging art historical legacy. Right. And this isn't just in the sort of zoomorphic and vegetal art that's usually associated with Islamic courts, but also figural art, anthropomorphic art showing people in polychrome with faces. Right. All of these things are normally the things that we don't associate with Islamic art. We usually think of of calligraphic and mosaic, vegetal and zoomorphic ornamentation, perhaps. But one of the things that we do know especially is that his palace complexes were so highly regarded, were so impressive to contemporaries that their style was imitated at other courts long after his death. So once the Almohads wax and wane in their power, they're sort of essentially gone from the peninsula by the 1250s. In the 1220s and 30s, it's Ibn Mardanish's palace culture that in a lot of ways is imitated by both Alfonso VIII and his cousin, Alfonso IX, by also sorry, there's more Alfonso's by Alfonso II of Aragon, by Peter of Aragon, by his son, Jaume, who eventually conquers most of the Valencia kingdom. Most of Murcia eventually ends up in Castilian hands under Fernando III. All of this legacy suggests a really potent attempt to create a self-sustaining unit, a unit that really says this is a kingdom that will last, that is valuable and that has an impact. The Wolf King part is the part that becomes most interesting then, right? Like, why do you give someone the name Wolf King? On the one hand, you might say because he's cunning, because he's shrewd, because he runs with a pack. Maybe he's got funny ears. Probably not that last one, but you never know. So unless he was particularly her suit as an individual, I think it unlikely they actually resemble the wolf. But rather, what we're talking about is someone who's cunning. Who's capable of withstanding quite a lot, right? If we think about pushing back on neighboring territories that might have tried to attack him, if we think about pushing back on the Almohads, who are far more likely to provoke the scorn of Christian figures in the period, it's the Almohads who ceremonially burned some of Ibn Rushdie's books. This is a big deal and it's part of their larger public legacy. But also because the extent in the Mediterranean commercial world of how big his kingdom was, it suggests that this is a guy that's got it going on. In part, there may also have been some lost legend, right? We know that Fernando III's sword is called Lobera, the wolf killer. And there's not really a good reason ever given for that, right? It's one of those sort of like, he must have at some point killed a wolf. But which wolf when, where, what's the story there is unknown, right? So nicknames can be tricky that way. And so can names, right? There are a lot of people that will say that Mardanish, which is a really unusual name in Arabic, is derived from Martinez, right? From Martinus, from the Latin name Martin, right? So at some point, he had a Visigothic or a sort of late Navarrese ancestor who was named Martin. Cool, he's from a convert legacy. There are others that will ascribe the etymology to Mardonius, perhaps a corruption of the word, I mean, the closest modern comparison is Mierda. So he could quite literally be son of poop. I don't want to get you demonetized, so I won't say what Mierda usually connotes. But I'm sure the comment section is going crazy with, he said poop. But leaving aside the logical etymologies or convert etymologies on the other hand, right? This is very clearly a unique individual, right? And sure, all individuals are unique, right? I've seen the life of Brian, you've seen the life of Brian, everybody's seen the life of Brian. But leaving that individualism aside, one of the things that's particularly interesting about, I think, Ibn Mardanus is how he is this expansive figure, right? One of the problems though, is that most of the sources that actually describe his reign in Arabic are actually Almohad sympathizing sources, or at the very least, sources that are a little bit more friendly to the Almohads as this potential movement that could have taken over. The same thing is true for Almoravids, right? They're partisan sources on both sides. There's not really any pro-Saudi sources other than the Christian Latin ones. What that suggests is that this is a guy who is just as likely to make allies with Muslims as he is with Christians, he's a pragmatist in that regard. But also that he's not particularly doctrinally interested, right? This is not a guy who's making a very specific Muslim push, right? So to some contemporary Muslims, he's a hero, to some, he's a villain, right? The same thing is true for Christian kings. For some, he's a hero, and for some, he's a villain, right? He's proof that this is a Muslim leader who could be great, and so he's a sort of bogeyman. Especially for the Leonese kingdom, who are at this point separated from Castile because of a division of the territory amongst two sons, he is the one thing that might be keeping Castile together. That might be one of the things that really sort of keeps Navarre from taking over more territory during the minority of Alfonso VIII. So that incidentally, the alliance with Ibn Mardanesh becomes less important at the time when Alfonso VIII announces that he's marrying a Plantagenet princess. And so this is a sort of the thing that guarantees Christian power was both the provocation of scorn from both Muslim and Christian sources alike because of who he was on good terms with. So if we get to this big question that we've been asking through this series so far that we'll continue to ask for the next handful of videos, was he a hero or a villain? As is usually the case, it depends on who you ask. For some, he's very clearly a hero. He's very clearly the thing that keeps Islam alive in the peninsula. He's the proof that Muslims and Christians can be allies, that there can be some kind of working detente. He's also a villain because he sides with Christians and he fights against other Muslims. So he does have this sort of mixed legacy, especially in the variety of sources in the period. But I think the real question is, why don't we have more cool nicknames like the Wolf King? That's what I want to know. So, Nick, are there any questions that you want to ask? So to my audience today, and I'm sure you will be commenting your thoughts in the thread below. As far as the YouTube channel is concerned, I'm actually going to rank the Wolf King as a hero. I have a thing for personalities like that. I find him to be absolutely fascinating and I'll be curious to know your thoughts as well. But let's actually talk questions here. My question is, we have a man who is obviously no stranger to Christianity and to Christians. He has no issue getting along with them, allying with them, so on and so forth. This is a guy who can work with pretty much anybody that's reasonable. He's viewed by Europeans as someone you can work with as well. He's not radical like some of his other neighbors. And this is a guy that really everyone can get along with as long as you don't cross him per se, right? And so my question is, let's actually talk about his childhood. Do we know of any particular figures, whether Muslim or Christian, that would have played a role in his life that may have been influential? So that's a good question, Nick. I mentioned above that his dad was an Almoravid-aligned governor. We don't know how close his ties were to the Almoravid court. It does seem that he sort of uses the Almoravids as a stamp of political legitimacy. So it might be a kind of symbiosis, right? He's a kind of border governor who takes some credibility but also has to do a lot on his own. We know that he is married to one of his neighbor's daughters as his first wife. And so when that marriage alliance is strong, there is a kind of mutual respect and influence there. We also know that he is coming up at the same time as guys like Safadullah, as well as many of the other Muslim kings like Ibn Khaniya, who are at the court of Alfonso the Emperor, Alfonso VII. So it's entirely possible that what we're seeing is somebody who is influenced by a number of magnates, all of whom are necessarily pragmatists, right? Alfonso VII will launch crusades against the Almoravids against territories that are usually held by them or by their partisans. But he's just as likely to sort of pick opposite sides, both in probably an attempt to divide and conquer, but also perhaps less ambitiously and more pragmatically in an attempt to sort of secure his borders. I think it's likely that Safadullah is a kind of model for Ibn Mardanish's attempt to create a kingship, right? Not a way that he himself would have understood it, but as a kind of way to understand the trajectory there. One of the things that I think is particularly noticeable about what Abby Krasner has done, what Professor Krasner has done with her work, has been to show that he's really trying to show legitimacy in a lot of different ways. And that the art historical and material evidence suggests that even though he's imposing some pretty harsh taxes, he's being very strict about import taxes, doing so with an attempt to guarantee the security of his kingdom, right? And so, in a certain sense, he's a kind of break a few eggs to make an omelet character, which fits with the wider pragmatism of the era. On the other hand, I think one of the challenges with his work as a leader is that the archaeological evidence doesn't give us enough significance to say, here's where he was raised, right? And the texts that survive, of course, we have to remember that a lot of the sort of historical texts were the victims of, not least of which of Philip II's purge, the 16th century of Arabic texts, but generally of the historical happenstance that sealed a lot of our primary sources. And so, it's entirely possible that some of the poetry cultivated in his kingdom or nearby might have given us a better window. We have very few fragments for a lot of this stuff, but it does seem to be the case that he is a sort of model of some of these Taifa kingdoms, both in the first type of period and the second, that are really trying to set up courts that are militarily and economically secure, and that are more likely to compete against one another in cultural and political terms. I'm sorry, that are military and politically significant, so they can compete in cultural and economic terms. And I think the fact that his coins, as you mentioned earlier, and the images make very clear, are so widely imitated is a sign of how significant his impact is in the wider region. This is a guy that the material culture suggests is in the middle of an economic boom period that is really successful in that regard. So, I think the earlier Taifa kingdoms have an impression in terms of the trajectory that he follows. But I would imagine that his father's experience as an Amoravid governor, as well as some of his allies, his father-in-law and Safatullah, give him this template for independent Muslim lordship that is allied with Christians to secure the northern front, and that chooses its targets very carefully for what will get the most people outside. And I think when it comes to the Almohads, and the Amoravids, and the sort of breakaway and reshuffling of the southern geography, I think really suggests how significant the internal political fractures are within the Islamic world of the southwestern Mediterranean, and the ways in which the Maghrebi context influences that. Lastly, I want to approach mortality and the Wolf King. Do we know how he died? And what are some of the Christian reactions to his death? One of the things that can be particularly difficult, right, as we've discussed before, is the problem of sorting out exactly what the cause of death is, right? Unless we have their remains, it's particularly difficult to sort out where and how those defeats happen. In this case, it seems pretty likely that he's trying to secure his kingdom at the end of his life, and dies essentially as an old man. And, you know, if we sort of try to put a pin when his birth is, he's probably born somewhere around the 1120s, the middle 1120s, and we know that he really kind of comes into his own in the 1140s, right? So he's not very old when he's taking over. One of the challenges for guys like Ibn Mardanish is exactly the fact that they are living by the sword also means they're going to be dying by it, which is a particularly difficult thing because we know that he's constantly, right? Every time he gains a success against the Almohads, they're also going to launch a counter attack. And one of the ways that's very clear about this is that we know the Almohad army is in the region in the 1170s. We know that Ibn Mardanish is defeated in one of these battles. Now he dies later trying to secure a treaty, but it's one of the things that makes this question difficult to answer, Nick, is he's 48, which is not old by our standards. It's not old by medieval standards, but it's old enough to where the cumulative stress of a longstanding injury plus fatigue, plus exhaustion, plus maybe an illness is a real thing, right? One of the great takeaways, I think, of Kyle Harper's recent book, The Fate of Rome, is to push on, immediately in the late antique context, on this sense that there are lingering health effects, right? Malaria happens all over the place, right? We know that it kills the Queen of Castile in 1214. And even if malaria doesn't kill you, it does create a lasting immunodeficiency, right? It creates a real stressor. So we don't have, he died in battle, he got his arm cut off, right? Any sort of impressive, brilliant legacy question there. What seems quite likely is that he's losing these allies, and he's trying to make this treaty in the early part of 1172 CE. Obviously, not 1172, that's still a ways away. There's instead this kind of question that, okay, is he making a treaty because he thinks he's dying, right? He's trying to secure his legacy for his son, who's supposed to take over. His son, sadly, eventually has to go over to the Almohad side and has to agree to be an Almohad vassal, which would have broken his heart, I think. But 48 is old enough to where that, coupled with injuries from battle in the previous year, coupled with a lifetime of stress, coupled with other mortality rates, is probably a death by 1,000 paper cuts, or at least five or six in this period. Unfortunately, it's not a cool story. If you're looking for a cool death, the next episode is gonna be the spot where you get that one for sure, when we talk about a Portuguese swashbuckler who buckles too many swashes. But yeah, Ibn Mardan seems to have died, an old man trying to make peace with some of his enemies to secure the fortunes of his children, which is at the very least a kind of noble way to go out. As to your other question about Christian sources, so the passage that we opened up with from the Historia Arabum of Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada makes pretty clear that there's a kind of sadness there. And while we have, in things like the Chronicle of Alfonso the Emperor, this great lament for the death of Zafabila, there aren't any good contemporary Christian sources that talk that much about Ibn Mardanish. Now, in part, that's because there's a royal minority in Castile. The King of Leon is constantly battling his own rear guard, and contemporary Aragonese and Catalan sources in the 1170s are more worried about the internal friction of the kingdom. Although they're not disinterested with what's going on with Ibn Mardanish. What is noticeable is that he does show up in some analystic sources of this is the year when the Wolf King dies. And a few years later, his territories have been sort of divided and subdivided amongst both Almohad partisans. Some of the territories like Teruel are taken by the Aragonese. The Castilians show up and eventually take Cuenca with its massive citadel on top of a rocky hilltop between two rivers. And so there are certainly lasting legacies that suggest some of these things. But he disappears from Christian sources in the charter records around this time. He doesn't show up that often. It's not every day. But what is clear is that he's an important part of their world as a political stabilizer. And so even if we loop back to this section, Historia Arabum, where, I mean, he's called, these are the adjectives, right? A man of astonishing prudence, of generosity, liberality, so of liberality. He was strenuous, which is physically strong, usually, and benign, benevolent. Muhammad ibn Sa'ad, afterward called the Wolf King, right? This is a really positive portrait for someone who presents really a political threat. If he changed sides, that would have been a real problem for Aragon, for Navarre and Castile. He doesn't. His territories are divided up. Eventually, Murcia ends up in the hands of Castile in the next century, and Valencia in the hands of Aragon. But I think it suggests how big of an impact he has, that even, you know, I mean, when Rodrigo is writing, it's 60 years after his death, maybe? Maybe longer? And for someone to be remembered 60 years after their death with this kind of positive and glowing treatment suggests that he was still talked about, and that he was still a figure of memory in the area for long after his death. We explore the life and times of a kingdom builder known as the Wolf King, remembered long after his death for the things that he achieved and the things that he attempted to keep together. And so don't forget, comment your thoughts in the thread below. Let us know what you think. Please go and check out all the awesome work by Dr. Lincoln. Buy a copy of his book. I highly recommend it. I own it myself. And really just take advantage of the awesome insights that he has to offer. If you love crusades, if you love medieval Spain, medieval Iberia in general, he is the expert for you. And so without further ado, Dr. Lincoln, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me, Nick. I'll see you for our next adventure, which takes place in Portugal. It's a slight difference from the first two. I'll see you then.