Morocco is shaped like a broken saucer, with its flat base facing to the Atlantic and its mountainous rim surrounding the coastal plain on every landward side. The plain of Atlantic Morocco rises gently through the undulating foothills of the mountain rim, and supports the settled cultivators and the great cities vital to the country's economy. But until quite recent times it was the wild tribesmen, the herders and high-valley farmers of the great mountains, and the camel people of the desert fringes beyond them, who again and again initiated movements of religious and political renewal which caused the Moroccans to break out of their natural fastness in wars of conquest against their neighbours. During the early centuries of Islam the main direction taken by these wars had been northwards, into the Iberian peninsula, of which the southern tip lay only 9 miles away from Morocco. The original Muslim conquest of Spain, begun in ad 711, had been undertaken as much by Moroccan Berbers as by Arabs. The eleventh-century conquest of Morocco by the Almoravids from the western Sahara had followed through into what had by then become Muslim Andalusia. So had the movement initiated by the Almohads of the High Atlas in the following century.