Roll over image to zoom in Click on image to zoom

The Wolf King

Name: The Wolf King
Brand: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
SKU: 9781501781384
Price: 78.99 AUD
Availability: InStock

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESSISBN: 9781501781384

Ibn Mardanish and the Construction of Power in Al-Andalus

Price:

$78.99

Stock:

Temporarily out of stock. Order now & we'll deliver when available

Quantity:

By Abigail Krasner Balbale
Imprint: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Release Date: June 13, 2025
Format: PAPERBACK
Dimensions: 229 x 152 mm
Weight: 910 g
Pages: 277

Share this product

Button Actions

Please copy the ISBN for submitting review copy form

Winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Winner of the Dionisius A. Agius Book Prize The Wolf King explores how political power was conceptualized, constructed, and wielded in twelfth-century al-Andalus, focusing on the eventful reign of Muhammad ibn Sad ibn Ahmad ibn Mardanish (r. 1147-1172). Celebrated in Castilian and Latin sources as el rey lobo/rex lupus and denigrated by Almohad and later Arabic sources as irreligious and disloyal to fellow Muslims because he fought the Almohads and served as vassal to the Castilians, Ibn Mardanish ruled a kingdom that at its peak constituted nearly half of al-Andalus and served as an important buffer between the Almohads and the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. Through a close examination of contemporary sources across the region, Abigail Krasner Balbale shows that Ibn Mardanish's short-lived dynasty was actually an attempt to integrate al-Andalus more closely with the Islamic East-particularly the Abbasid caliphate. At stake in his battles against the Almohads was the very idea of the caliphate in this period, as well as who could define righteous religious authority. The Wolf King makes effective use of chronicles, chancery documents, poetry, architecture, coinage, and artifacts to uncover how Ibn Mardanish adapted language and cultural forms from around the Islamic world to assert and consolidate power-and then tracks how these strategies, and the memory of Ibn Mardanish more generally, influenced expressions of kingship in subsequent periods. Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Abigail Krasner Balbale is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University and the coauthor of The Arts of Intimacy.

Introduction: Ibn Mardanish as Historical Figure and Historiographic Subject 1. Caliph and Madhi: The Battle over Power in the Islamic Middle Period 2. Rebel against the Truth: Almohad Visions of Ibn Mardanish 3. Filiative Networks: Lineage and Legitimacy in Sharq al-Andalus 4. Material Genealogies and the Construction of Power 5. Vassals, Traders, and Kings: Economic and Political Networks in the Western Mediterranean 6. Renaissance and Assimilation after the Almohad Conquest 7. The Reconquista, a Lost Paradise, and Other Teleologies

The Wolf King is an important work of interdisciplinary and comparative history that employs an array of textual, visual, and material evidence to reincorporate al-Andalus into the broader world of the medieval Mediterranean. (Mediterranean Historical Review) This meticulous exploration of the figure of Ibn Mardanish allows us to reformulate the understanding we have of the history of Islam in the West in one of the last phases of Muslim supremacy in the Iberian Peninsula, showing the plurality of strategies adopted by the political authorities of the time to respond to the changing times. (Studi Magrebini) In this richly sourced, nuanced, and insightful study of the twelfth-century Wolf King Ibn Mardanish, Abigail Balbale has given us the gift of a rigorous and methodologically innovative historical study that deepens our understanding not just of the subject of her study but the subfield to which he belongs as well. (Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies)

The Wolf King

Request Academic Copy

Description

You may also like

Recently viewed