The Almohad chapters give a brisk dated narrative of al-Mansur's death and burial, al-Nasir's accession and the Banu Ghaniya troubles, with the kind of detail (coinage, public works at Fez and Rabat, prices, plagues) that a Fez compiler cared about, and the annals of Fez supply the city's governors and markets. For 1200 it is a secondary witness: Ibn Abi Zar wrote 125 years later under the Marinids, who had replaced the Almohads, and his Almoravid and Almohad sections are the least reliable in the book, with dates that often disagree with Ibn Idhari. Use it for Fez and for cross-checking, not as the base text.
About this source
- Title
- al-Anis al-mutrib bi-rawd al-qirtas fi akhbar muluk al-Maghrib wa-tarikh madinat Fas
- Author
- Ibn Abi Zar al-Fasi
- Author's dates
- died after 1326
- Written
- completed in 1326 at Fez, for the Marinid sultan Abu Said Uthman
- Language
- Arabic
- Covers
- 788 to 1326
- Kind
- Chronicle
Some manuscripts attribute the work to Salih ibn Abd al-Halim of Granada, now thought an abridger; Ibn Khaldun names Ibn Abi Zar. Huici Miranda's annotated Spanish translation (1964) is the standard version and is under copyright; a copy circulates online without licence and is not linked here. Beaumier's French is free but faulty.
Where to read it
Editions
- C. J. Tornberg (ed. and tr.), Annales regum Mauritaniae, 2 vols (Uppsala, 1843 to 1846), Arabic text with Latin translation (not freely online)
- Rawd al-qirtas (Rabat, Dar al-Mansur, 1972), Arabic (not freely online)
Translations
- A. Beaumier (tr.), Roudh el-Kartas: histoire des souverains du Maghreb (Espagne et Maroc) et annales de la ville de Fès (Paris, 1860), French
- The same 1860 translation, digitised by the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle
- A. Huici Miranda (tr.), Rawd al-qirtas, 2 vols (Valencia, 1918; 2nd annotated ed. 1964), Spanish (not freely online)