The Almohade monarchy, following the example of almost every government established under the Moslem polity, was now rapidly hastening to its end. Its territory had been dismembered. Its prestige, founded upon a successful career in arms, had vanished. The polygamous families of the Sultans of Africa furnished, at the decease of every monarch, a formidable number of pretenders to the vacant throne. In Morocco a crowd of hostile claimants, many of whom were not allied to the descendants of Abd-al-Mumen, and whose only titles to sovereignty were military genius and personal popularity, contended with indifferent and varying success for the possession of imperial power. Independent emirates arose at Mequinez and Tlemcen. Al-Maghreb was distracted with sedition, massacre, civil war. The contagion of strife infected every class of the hot-blooded population of Northern Africa. An opportunity for rapine, so congenial to the tastes of the Bedouin and the Berber, was not long neglected by the predatory tribes of the Desert, and the Sahara was again made the scene of organized brigandage and guerilla warfare. The fragments of the great empire founded by the Mahdi were no longer capable of reunion. Their cohesive power, dependent on superstitious awe, individual merit, and popular admiration, was destroyed; the fatal conflicts which for years exhausted the energies of antagonistic factions had extirpated every vestige of national ambition and religious zeal; the noble sentiment of patriotism, always weak in the breast of a barbarian, even when accustomed to civilized life, was now completely subordinated to private enmity; universal discord rendered effective resistance to an enemy impossible; and the last of the Almohades, Edris-Abu-Dibus, perished, a century and a half after the advent of the Mahdi, in a skirmish with the troops of an obscure adventurer.