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Barbary had never been much attached to the caliphate, and for a century it had been practically independent under the Aglabite dynasty, the barbarous excesses of whose later sovereigns had alienated their subjects. Alides, moreover, had established themselves, in the dynasty of the Idrisides, in Morocco since the end of the eighth century.
They were governed in the name of the Bagdad caliphs; but for nearly a century they had been growing into independence, under rulers usually known, from the name of their progenitor, as the Aglabite dynasty. Early in the ninth century, the throne of Mauritania, Massilia, and Carthage was seized by Obeidollah, whose successors assumed the title of Mihidi, or directors of the faithful.
The land was in every respect ripe for revolution, and the success of Abu-Abdallah esh-Shii, the new missionary, was extraordinarily rapid. In a few years he had a following of two hundred thousand armed men, and after a series of battles he drove Ziyadat-Allah, the last Aglabite prince, out of the country in 908.
Ibrahim, the son of Aglab, the lieutenant of the vigilant and rigid Harun, bequeathed to the dynasty of the Aglabite the inheritance of his name and power. The indolence or policy of the caliphs dissembled the injury and loss, and pursued only with poison the founder of the Edrisites, who erected the kingdom and city of Fez on the shores of the Western ocean.
The Aglabite, who reigned in Africa, had inherited from his father a treasure and an army: a fleet of Arabs and Moors, after a short refreshment in the harbors of Sardinia, cast anchor before the mouth of the Tyber, sixteen miles from the city: and their discipline and numbers appeared to threaten, not a transient inroad, but a serious design of conquest and dominion.
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