Not that this “influence” was an abstraction. It was tied to the ability to accumulate wealth and raise armies. Political and financial considerations were inextricably linked. The pledges of allegiance the dynasty received from urban elites, “small” dynasties, and Bedouins engaged all these groups either militarily, financially, or both. For this reason, no analysis of politics can be complete without an examination of the system of land tenure, agricultural production, and taxation through which the Ḥafṣids exercised their power in Ifrīqiyā. To discern the contours of the dynasty’s influence, one must understand the extent to which it was able, through its political leadership, to engender regional integration on an economic level.
CHAPTER 2
Taxation and Land Tenure
The Ḥafṣid dynasty was not able to keep all of Ifrīqiyā under its political control in the fourteenth century. However, there is nothing preventing the local configuration of Ḥafṣid rule from fostering the development of a regional economy. Political unity and economic integration needed not go hand in hand. But the activities of the ruling elite and its allies did nothing to encourage, promote, or support the types of specialization in production and circulation that would have made Ifrīqiyā an economic unit. Instead, the range of their intervention outside cities narrowed over time and became mostly extractive and predatory and, in effect, undermined the cause of economic integration.
Agriculture and animal husbandry were the two most important economic sectors in Ifrīqiyā, dwarfing both commerce and manufacturing.1 Most people in Ifrīqiyā worked the land or tended animals, and often did both. By itself, however, the preponderance of these two activities did not amount to regional specialization or integration: the organization of agricultural production did not follow a single mode. Throughout the fourteenth century, a number of economic arrangements prevailed, maintaining markedly different types of land tenure, labor contracts, and legal and fiscal regimes. When the Ḥafṣid dynasty levied taxes, rents, and even ransoms, it brought these economic zones together, but there were limits on the degree of integration this produced. The treasury took the economic surplus and redistributed it to generate, maintain, and reproduce political, rather than economic, ties.
This had been the situation for a long time. The Almohads (1130–1269) had tried to bring together the pieces of this economic mosaic by force and implement a coercive fiscal system. But their political situation empowered semi-independent allies and enemies, especially Bedouins, and local Ḥafṣid emirs ruled independently of, and often in conflict with, one another. Ultimately, the Ḥafṣids (1229–1574) undid important components of the Almohad system or, to put it more accurately, remade them in the process of imposing their rule in its local or regional form. The involvement of the urban Ḥafṣid dynasty and its supporters in agriculture became increasingly limited to the perimeters of cities such as Bijāya. Concurrently, the remaking of politico-economic relations in the country, through mechanisms and institutions not fully controlled by the urban elite, led to the formation of novel social relations. These processes further consolidated the disengagement of the urban dynasty from the affairs of the country and strengthened economic zones that were often only partly tied to other zones, sometimes fully autonomous, and only rarely tied to an Ifrīqiyā-wide economy.
Besides commerce, which will be the subject of the following chapter, taxation and forceful expropriation of surplus were the most consistent mechanisms of economic integration. The Ḥafṣids utilized military and legal force to secure sources of revenue. Like the Almohads, the Ḥafṣids and those who benefited from the land grants they distributed, urbanites and Bedouins, tried to retain control over these lands by legal means. All contemporaries, regardless of their political orientation or social standing, recognized this. This basic fact of politics weakened the ownership and control of land and made the role of the judiciary particularly prominent.2
The Ḥafṣids utilized at least three legal regimes, or ways of legitimizing their fiscal actions. First, they claimed taxes that were regulated by Islamic law and due from all Muslims, such as the ‘ushr (tithe). In Ifrīqiyā and the entire Maghrib, al-Andalus included, the Mālikī school of jurisprudence was predominant. The Ḥafṣids mobilized Mālikī law especially in areas where urban influence was greatest. Then, there were a number of other levies for which Muslim jurists had a hard time finding a rationale in their authoritative books and that Mālikī jurists considered extra-legal or illegal. These formed part of an individual ruler’s laws and tended to vary from one ruler to the next even if rulers drew on prevailing custom, old and new. Third, the dynasty received contributions from Bedouin sheikhs or village leaders who collected excises based on the customs of their locality. These contributions or tributes were not technically taxes. However, to collect them, the sheikhs used similar means and arguments to those used to collect taxes. When the Ḥafṣids brought under their domination Bedouins who possessed a body of organized customary laws (qānūn), they levied taxes or tributes based on rates of taxation the Bedouins had established. But for the most part, this last type of law predominated in areas not under Ḥafṣid rule (arḍ al-qānūn).
The reach and efficiency of the Ḥafṣid fiscal system varied with political and military circumstances. The more visible changes drew the attention of contemporaries and made their way into chronicles. Contemporary sources were less well aware of the impact of the incremental transformation of the tax structure itself, a “subterranean” and slower change that undermined the ability of the dynasty to collect legal taxes. Since agricultural taxes were assessed based on the status of land, a modification of the type of land tenure could have serious fiscal implications. Although the character of the sources makes it difficult to appreciate the short-term effects of strategies to evade the dynastic fiscal system, they gain significance in the longer term, shedding light on a process of fiscal resistance that can only be sketched imprecisely from the inconsistent and often contradictory references found in collections of legal opinions.3
Together with land tenure and taxation, contractual relations between laborers and farmers, landowners and tenants, or owners and shepherds determined the rate of profit. They also shed light on the homogenization of labor relations and may have been an important site of regional integration. The types of labor contracts were, however, tied to local customs and the ways the Almohads and the Ḥafṣids dealt with land—especially when it came to land grants (iqṭā‘āt, sing. iqṭā‘). In terms of prevailing relations between parties involved in agricultural production, Ifrīqiyā did not exhibit a homogeneous or homogenizing set of contractual relations.
To make my arguments about the lack of regional integration, I will utilize two types of sources: collections of legal opinions and literary sources. Both include very useful information about the period but also have their limitations. The legal opinions provide us with the basis for a typology of agricultural relations and allow us to determine which practices were accepted. But the opinions included in these compilations are not representative of all the legal cases that emerged at any given moment or place.4 In addition, jurists had the tendency to frown upon legal innovation and tended to privilege precedent, which further skewed the sample. On the other hand, information found in literary sources, such as the historical narratives and travelogues used here, tend to be anecdotal and inconsistent. However, they are informative about the activities of the ruling dynasty and, for instance, allow us to show that the Almohads used land expropriations and land grants as ways of securing their rule. They also demonstrate the continued existence of a multiplicity of economic arrangements well into the fifteenth century.
The coexistence of various types of land tenure, taxes, and labor contracts can make for a knotty discussion of their combined, but not always synchronic, evolution over time. The fragmentary and inconsistent character of the evidence magnifies the problem by making it difficult to draw a map of either the distribution of land or labor contracts. This is not necessarily a setback, however, because the focus here is not on geographic location, but on the impact of the Ḥafṣid fiscal system in fostering regional integration.