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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Libya
Index
Cyrenaica lay outside the orbit of the Maghribi dynasties, its
orientation on Egypt. From the time when Saladin displaced the
Fatimids in 1171 until the Ottoman occupation in 1517, Egypt was
ruled by a succession of Mamluk (caste of "slave-soldiers," in
Egypt often Kurds, Circassians, or Turks) dynasties that claimed
suzerainty over Cyrenaica but exercised little more than nominal
political control there. The beduin tribes of Baraqah, as Cyrenaica
was known to the Arabs, willingly accepted no authority other than
that of their own chieftains. In the fifteenth century, merchants
from Tripoli revived the markets in some towns, but Cyrenaica's
main source of income was from the pilgrims and caravans traveling
between the Maghrib and Egypt, who purchased protection from the
beduins.
Turbulent chieftains of the Bani Khattab dominated Fezzan.
Their importance, like that of the Garamentes, derived from their
control of the oases on the trade route over which caravans carried
gold, ivory, and slaves from the western Sudan to markets on the
Mediterranean. In the thirteenth century the king of Bornu, a
Muslim state in the Lake Chad Basin, invaded Fezzan from the south
and established a client regime that for a time commanded the trade
route. Fezzan was always a target for adventurers, one of whom, the
Moroccan Muhammad al Fazi, displaced the last of the Bani Khattab
early in the sixteenth century and founded a line at Marzuq that
remained as undisputed rulers of the region under Ottoman
suzerainty.
Data as of 1987
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