For a few years longer all North Africa remained loosely connected with the Khalifs (Caliphs) of Baghdad; then Idris, a descendant of Ali, and consequently of Muhammad, established himself in Morocco as an independent sultan, afterwards asserting his claim to be Khalif and Imam, though he and his successors were of the Sunni, not the Shia faith. At his death he was succeeded by his son Idris II; and his blood is supposed to have filtered down through many generations and devious ways to the present ruling family in Morocco. Until about 800 A.C. Eastern Barbary, at any rate, was ruled by an Arab governor from Baghdad; but soon after that date Harun-al-Rashid appointed a brave Berber-Arab soldier, Ibrahim-bin-Aghlab, to be his viceroy in Ifriqiah (as the Arabs called “Africa,” i.e. Tunisia). Ibrahim-bin-Aghlab founded a dynasty which ruled over Tunis and Tripoli for a hundred and ten years. Concurrently with the Aghlabite viceroys or sultans in Roman “Africa,” there was the independent Moorish kingdom of the Idrisites with its capital at Fez (near the Roman Volubilis); a Berber principality of the Beni-Midrar at Sigilmessa in Tafilalt (S.E. Morocco); and another of the Beni Rustam at Tiaret (Western Algeria). These two last were Khariji or heretic states. Spain had remained from 715 till about 760 an appanage of the Abbaside Khalif of Baghdad. But in 758 there arrived in southern Spain a refugee prince of the rival house of Omar, Abd-ar-rahman bin Mūawiya, who after thirty years of almost incessant warfare wrested all Spain from the Baghdad Caliphate and founded the most splendid of the Arab dynasties in Spain, that of the Omaiyads, which lasted till about 1020. The Omaiyad Amirs or Khalifs frequently invaded Morocco and derived thence numbers of negro slaves, who, together with Slav prisoners bought in Germany through the Jews, made up their powerful mercenary armies. As Mamluks or slave-soldiers, quite a number of Slavs from Germany and Austria—made prisoners and sold to the Moslems of Spain by Charlemagne and his successors—settled in North Africa from the 8th to the 10th century.