Abu Yaqub Yusuf an-Nasr

Abu Yaqub Yusuf an-Nasr (died 13 May 1307) was a Marinid sultan of Morocco who reigned from 1286 to 1307. The son of Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Abd al-Haqq, he had campaigned in al-Andalus under his father, including at the Marinid victory of Écija in 1275. His reign gave up the Marinid footholds in Iberia one by one and turned east: from 1299 he besieged the Abdalwadid capital Tlemcen from a purpose-built siege city, al-Mansura, and was on the point of taking it when a eunuch assassinated him in the camp in 1307. ^{1 2}

He succeeded his father in March 1286, shortly after the latter's expedition to Spain and his peace treaty with Sancho IV of Castile — the Arabic article dates the father's death to Muharram 685 AH. His accession was contested by relatives, some backed by the Abdalwadid rulers of Tlemcen. One of his first acts was a fresh treaty with the Nasrid ruler Muhammad II of Granada, ceding all Marinid possessions in Spain except Algeciras, Tarifa, Ronda and Guadix. In November 1288 his own son Abu Amir plotted to depose him; the plot was discovered, the conspirators sheltered at Tlemcen, and a Marinid fleet blockaded that city through much of 1290 to little effect. ^{1 2}

When the truce with Castile expired in 1291, Sancho IV, conspiring with Muhammad II of Granada, took Tarifa in October 1292 — and kept it for himself instead of handing it to Granada. Muhammad II then repaired relations with the Marinids: at Tangiers in early 1293 Abu Yaqub agreed to help recover Tarifa, and Muhammad handed him four prized seventh-century copies of the Qur'an said to have been drafted under the Caliph Uthman and brought from Damascus to Cordoba by the fleeing Umayyads. Abu Yaqub crossed the straits in 1293 or 1294 and besieged Tarifa, but Alonso Pérez de Guzmán held the citadel — the siege is remembered for the story that, when the Castilian infante Don Juan threatened to kill Guzmán's captive son, Guzmán threw a knife from the walls and told him to proceed. A Wattasid revolt in the Rif, fomented from Tlemcen, forced the sultan home, and in 1295 he formally handed the last two Marinid citadels, Algeciras and Ronda, to Granada, abandoning the Marinid project in Iberia. ¹

Free of Spain, he turned on the Abdalwadids from 1295, taking Taourirt, Oujda, Taount and Nedroma in successive years and arriving before Tlemcen in May 1299. There he built a siege camp that grew into a city in its own right — al-Mahalla al-Mansura, "the Camp of Victory", with markets, baths, palaces and mosques — and from it conducted the siege for eight years, sending detachments to strip the Abdalwadid sultanate of its coastal possessions as far as Algiers. Tlemcen still refused to fall: the death of its sultan Othman in 1303 raised Marinid hopes, but his successor Abu Zayyan I rallied the defence. In 1306 the Nasrids landed a Marinid pretender, Uthman ibn Abi al-Ula, at Ceuta, where he proclaimed himself ruler and gathered Asilah, Larache and much of the Ghomara; Abu Yaqub, judging Tlemcen near to collapse, ignored the threat and pressed the siege. ^{1 2}

On 13 May 1307 — in Dhu al-Qa'da 706 AH by the Arabic article — the sultan was assassinated in the siege camp by a eunuch, in what the English article calls an obscure harem affair and the Arabic article a conspiracy of the eunuchs. His son Abu Thabit Amir succeeded, abandoned the siege and turned to face the pretender at Ceuta; the Arabic article adds that the succession first set his sons Abu Thabit and Abu Salim at war, with Abu Salim defeated and killed. Twelve years of war against Tlemcen had ended with nothing to show for it. No source read for this record gives his birth year, and none names a religious affiliation for the man himself — Wikidata's structured values (Islam, and Sunni Islam) settle nothing — so his affiliation is carried as unknown, with the Maliki milieu of his court noted as context only. ^{1 2 3}

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