On Reading The Wolf King

Abigail Krasner Balbale’s The Wolf King: Ibn Mardanīsh and the Contruction of Power in Al-Andalus, delves into the life of Ibn Mardanīsh, a notable twelfth-century ruler of eastern al-Andalus who effectively resisted Almohad dominance for twenty-five years. Balbale meticulously analyzes historical texts to explore how systems of power were constructed during this era. By integrating textual and material sources, she illuminates Ibn Mardanīsh’s aspirations as a leader amid the backdrop of the Islamic Middle Period. This period witnessed a shift of power from the caliphate to regional dynasties, accompanied by significant transformations due to Arabization and Islamization within newly Muslim communities. Balbale’s work challenges conventional dichotomies, such as Islamic/Christian and secularism/religiosity, prevalent in Iberian Peninsula studies. The Wolf King significantly contributes to the scholarly resurgence of interest in medieval Spain and al-Andalus by offering a nuanced reinterpretation of foundational sources and revisiting established perspectives on Ibn Mardanīsh and the era. One of the most impressive aspects of the book for me was Balbale’s mastery of her sources. The discussion of Arabic, art historical, and secondary sources that runs throughout brings these sources into a new light and is an example of excellent historical work. Medieval Arabic sources tend to get telescoped together without chronological distinctions, but Balbale carefully distinguishes between contemporary and later sources. She also analyzes the intent of the sources as much as their content, so that we understand not only how Ibn Mardanīsh is portrayed in each of them, but why. In this way, we see that those written sources closest to Ibn Mardanīsh show him through the eyes of the Almohads. And while those sources highlight his association with Christians, that is only meant to reinforce accusations of impiety against him because of this rejection of the Almohad creed. Balbale also brings in material and art historical sources to analyses of Ibn Mardanīsh in a way that is rarely seen in work on medieval Spain or elsewhere. Although there are no written sources from the point of view of Ibn Mardanīsh, she allows the available material sources to supplement that gap with important information on how he sought to represent himself within his twelfth-century context. Her close analysis of Ibn Mardanīsh’s numismatic production highlights his intent to portray himself as a legitimate Sunni Muslim ruler in direct dialogue with his Almohad rivals and his Christian allies. She further highlights this intent through the art historical sources available. The remaining stucco and pictorial decorations from Ibn Mardanīsh’s palace at Dar al-Sughra show a careful mis-en-scene crafted to situate him in a larger world of Muslim Mediterranean rulers. What struck me most in Balbale’s treatment of her sources was the critical eye that she turns to the later sources on Ibn Mardanīsh. For various reasons, we lack the kind of source critical analyses that are available to most historians of the medieval West. As Balbale points out, Islamic history tends to take a positivist, or almost Rankian approach to Arabic sources, reading them for their content and taking them at face value. This began with the Orientalist historians of the nineteenth century and continues today. Moreover, historians of medieval Spain tend to rely heavily on those nineteenth-century works and their translations, so that something like Gayangos’s adapted translation of al-Maqqarī sits heavily on the historiography of medieval Spain. This is why Balbale’s analysis of Ibn al-Khātib and al-Maqqarī is so important and groundbreaking. She makes these two chronicles products of their times, rather than the neutral compendia they tend to be seen as. She shows us how those authors are writing Ibn Mardanīsh into …