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The brief Almoravid dynasty left no monuments behind it. Of the Almoravid Fez and Marrakech the chroniclers relate great things; but the wild Hilalian invasion and the subsequent descent of the Almohads from the High Atlas swept away whatever the first dynasties had created. The Almohads were mighty builders, and their great monuments are all of stone.
The Almoravid princes who founded Marrakech came from the black desert of Senegal, themselves were leaders of wild hordes. In the history of North Africa the same cycle has perpetually repeated itself.
His living he made not from his verses, but like many others of his day by practicing the art of medicine. Later in life he visited Cordova, already in its decline through the illiberal government of the Almoravid dynasty.
Arab conquerors always destroy as much as they can of the work of their predecessors, and nothing remains, as far as is known, of Almoravid architecture in Morocco. But the great Almohad Sultans covered Spain and Northwest Africa with their monuments, and no later buildings in Africa equal them in strength and majesty.
In 1086, at Zallarca, Youssef gave battle to Alphonso VI of Castile and Leon. The Almoravid army was a strange rabble of Arabs, Berbers, blacks, wild tribes of the Sahara and Christian mercenaries. They conquered the Spanish forces, and Youssef left to his successors an empire extending from the Ebro to Senegal and from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the borders of Tunisia.
It is not often that the birth of a mediæval Jewish writer is handed down with such minute detail. Usually we do not even know the year, to say nothing of the day and the hour. Cordova had long fallen from its high estate. It was no longer the glorious city of the days before the Almoravid conquest.
It is usual to speak of Fez as very old, and the term seems justified when one remembers that the palace of Bou-Jeloud stands on the site of an Almoravid Kasbah of the eleventh century, that when that Kasbah was erected Fez Elbali had already existed for three hundred years, that El Kairouiyin is the contemporary of Sant' Ambrogio of Milan, and that the original mosque of Moulay Idriss II was built over his grave in the eighth century.
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