Qalat Ibn Salama

The remote fortress in the Algerian highlands where Ibn Khaldun shut himself away for four years and wrote the Muqaddimah.

After decades of serving and falling out with courts across North Africa and Spain, Ibn Khaldun took refuge with a tribe in the high plateau and stayed in their castle from 1375 to 1379. He said afterward that the words and ideas came to him there in a rush, and that he wrote without a library to check anything against. What came out was an attempt to explain why dynasties rise and decay in cycles of roughly four generations, which is the first work of its kind anywhere.