Lamtuna

The Lamtuna are a nomadic Sanhaja Berber tribe of the western Sahara. They founded the caravan city of Aoudaghost in the seventh century, and by the ninth century led the Sanhaja confederation that controlled the western trans-Saharan trade between Sijilmasa and the Ghana Empire.

When the confederation dissolved and Aoudaghost passed to Ghana, a Lamtuna chief tried to reunite the desert tribes about 1035. In the 1050s the Lamtuna became the backbone of the Almoravid movement under Abdallah ibn Yasin: they took Sijilmasa in 1054 and Aoudaghost in 1055, while their chiefs Abu Bakr ibn Umar and Yusuf ibn Tashfin founded Marrakesh about 1070 and carried the empire into al-Andalus, winning the Battle of Sagrajas in 1086.

The Lamtuna supplied the Almoravid ruling class and its provincial governors; the Banu Ghaniya, who held the Balearic Islands and Tripoli into the thirteenth century, were their kinsmen.