Hafsids of Béjaïa

The Ḥafṣids were a house of Almohad shaykhs who inherited the shrinking Almohad dominion in Ifrīqiya; in Ibn Khaldun's chapter on them, Abū Zakariyyā "master of Bijāya" stands out as a pillar of the house among its people in Tunis, Bijāya and Constantine ¹.

Ibn Khaldun describes the house's base: the shaykh Abū Ḥafṣ was among the Almohads' elders and memorisers, and ʿAbd al-Muʾmin made him vizier after the disaster of ʿAbd al-Salām al-Kūmī ². He then records that Abū Zakariyyā, master of Bijāya, moved out of Ifrīqiya in 562, and that the Almohad al-Manṣūr besieged Ibn Ghāniya and marched out of Marrakesh when his seizure of Qafṣa was reported ³. As authority contracted he records al-Sayyid Abū Zakariyyā at Bijāya and Muḥammad b. Abī Ḥafṣ at Tunis, in stages by which the Almohad centres slipped eastward ⁴.

• Text from the harvested Ibar of Ibn Khaldun (Heliopolis 1957): the Banū Ḥafṣ section, pp. 1675–1680 and following. The card is filed as "the Hafsids of Bijāya," a partial frame for the wider Tunis-centred Ḥafṣid state; only the passages touching Bijāya and Constantine were used here, and the rest of the house's kings (al-Mustanṣir, al-Muʿtamad) in the later pages of the same chapter await a more controlled reading of the scan.