Saadi Sultanate

A better claim

Drafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)formation

Morocco at the start of the sixteenth century was ruled by a dynasty whose only claim was possession, and it was visibly losing possession of its coast to Portugal. What replaced it was a family with the two things the Wattasids lacked: a genealogy and a war.

The Saadis were shurafa — sharifs, claiming descent from the Prophet through Ali and Fatima — settled since the fourteenth century at Tagmadert in the Draa valley and later in the Sous, on the southern side of the Atlas. The Idrisids had built the first state in the far Maghreb on Alid descent seven hundred years earlier, and sharifian blood had been the strongest credential in Moroccan politics ever since. This is where it becomes decisive.

Descent alone would not have done it. What made the family a political force was that in 1510 the tribes of the Sous recognised Muhammad al-Qa'im as their leader against the Portuguese, who held Agadir and were raiding inland. For thirty years the Saadis were the war: they organised it, financed it from the sugar of the Sous, and fought it while the sultan in Fez signed truces with the same enemy.

That is a legitimacy argument made in the field rather than in a chancery, and it is the same argument the Almoravids and the Almohads had each made against the rulers they replaced — that the existing government has failed in the one duty that justifies a government. The difference is that neither of those movements had a genealogy and this one did.

Marrakesh was taken in 1525. Agadir was taken back from the Portuguese in 1541, and the Portuguese then abandoned Safi and Azemmour rather than defend them — the first reversal of a century of European advance on that coast. Fez fell in 1549 and again, finally, in 1554.

A family with the Prophet's descent that had beaten the Christians where the government could not was, at that point, the obvious ruler of Morocco. Every dynasty since has claimed the same descent.

The world belongs to whoever can take it

Drafted from al-Ifrani, Nozhet-elhâdi: histoire de la dynastie saadienne au Maroc, 1511-1670 (1889)expansion

Al-Ifrani says that Muhammad al-Shaykh, the man who finished the Saadi conquest of Morocco, knew the whole Quran by heart and understood it admirably, wrote marginal glosses on its interpretation, and argued so well with judges about their own judgements that he often obliged them to admit he was the only one in the right. He had also memorised the collected poems of al-Mutanabbi, and a line he quoted often:

Men resemble one another and circumstances are identical; fate is the same for all, and the world belongs to whoever knows how to conquer.

That is not the ordinary register of a holy family from the Draa valley. It is also, exactly, what the Saadis did.

The oath at Tedsi

The rise began not with a conquest but with a petition. In 1510 the jurists of the Masmuda and the chiefs of the tribes sent a deputation to Abu Abdallah al-Qaim in the Draa, asking him to put himself at their head and offering to place the conduct of all their affairs in his hands. He agreed, met them at a village called Tedsi near Taroudant, and received the oath of allegiance from a people who were, from that moment, of one heart with him and unanimously disposed to make war on the Christians.

He called on them at once to march against the port the Portuguese held near Agadir, and they did, and they won.

That sequence is the whole political argument of the dynasty in one paragraph. A sharifian family is invited to lead; it accepts on condition of a war; it wins the war; and everyone concludes it was born under a fortunate star.

Splitting a country between two brothers

Al-Qaim then did something that looks careless and was not. He went north into Haha with his eldest son, on the invitation of chiefs there who were being raided by the same enemy, and left his younger son in the Sous with orders to organise the country, lay the foundations of a state, and harass the enemy night and day.

Two fronts, two sons, one claim. The elder eventually held Marrakesh and the younger the south, and in due course the younger took everything from the elder — which is how sharifian dynasties usually settle their internal questions, and did not damage the argument at all, because the argument was about blood and not about which brother had it.

Agadir

The decisive act came in 1540, when Muhammad al-Shaykh drove the Christians out of the place called Founti near Agadir and then laid out a port of his own there. Al-Ifrani calls the founding of that port an act of real perspicacity, and it was: the point was not to take a fortress but to replace it, so that the Atlantic trade of the Sous ran through a Moroccan harbour instead of a Portuguese one.

It worked so well that the Portuguese gave up Safi and Azemmour rather than defend them. It is the first reversal in a century of European advance on that coast, and it was managed by a man whose family had no army eighty years before and no city at all.

Fez

The last piece took two attempts, in 1549 and 1554, and it was contested by an Ottoman intervention from Algiers before it stuck.

But by then the case was closed. Every quality the Wattasids lacked, the Saadis had demonstrated in public over forty years: descent from the Prophet, a victory over the Christians, ports recovered rather than surrendered, and a sultan who could out-argue the qadis of Fez on their own ground.

The world belongs to whoever knows how to conquer, the sultan liked to say, and his own family had spent two generations proving it in the one theatre where the government of Morocco had refused to fight.

Three kings in an afternoon

Drafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)peak

On 4 August 1578, on the Wadi al-Makhazin near Ksar el-Kebir, a Portuguese army was destroyed and three kings died in a single day.

The circumstances are a Saadi succession dispute that got out of hand. Abd al-Malik had taken the throne from his nephew Muhammad al-Mutawakkil with Ottoman help; the nephew went to Lisbon and asked for an army. Sebastian of Portugal, twenty-four, unmarried, and personally committed to a crusading idea that his own advisers regarded as ruinous, gave him one and came with it — perhaps twenty thousand men, a large part of the Portuguese nobility, and the treasury behind them.

They were caught between two rivers with the Saadi army in front and cut to pieces. Sebastian was killed. Al-Mutawakkil drowned in the river. Abd al-Malik, who had been ill before the battle, died in his litter during it, and his brother Ahmad took the field and the throne, and afterwards the epithet al-Mansur, the victorious.

The consequences for the loser are the largest. Portugal had lost its king, its heir-presumptive prospects, a great part of its nobility and its army in an afternoon. Sebastian's elderly great-uncle reigned two years and died, and in 1580 Philip II of Spain claimed the throne — the Iberian Union, which lasted sixty years and put the Portuguese empire under Spanish direction. The belief that Sebastian was not dead and would return became a durable Portuguese messianism with a name, Sebastianismo, that outlived the union by centuries.

The consequences for the winner are money and standing. The captured Portuguese nobility were ransomed at enormous sums; al-Mansur struck the proceeds into gold coin and was called al-Dhahabi, the Golden. He built El Badi at Marrakesh — a reception palace of imported Italian marble, said to have been paid for with Songhai gold and Portuguese ransom, and stripped to the walls a century later by the dynasty that followed. He modernised the army on Ottoman lines with firearms and artillery. He dealt with Elizabeth of England over saltpetre and sugar, and the correspondence survives.

Gunpowder had already settled the eastern end of the Mediterranean at Otlukbeli, Chaldiran and Ridaniya. This is the western end of the same lesson, and the army it paid for is the one that crossed the Sahara twelve years later.

The salt mine

Drafted from al-Sadi, Tarikh es-Soudan (1900)peak

The best account of the Moroccan conquest of the Niger was written in Timbuktu by a man whose city it destroyed and whose government it became. Al-Sadi finished his chronicle about 1655, having held office under the pashas; for the documents that started the war he says plainly, I myself have seen the originals.

And what those documents demanded was not gold. It was salt.

Ould Kirinfil

There was a servant of the Songhai prince named Ould Kirinfil, whose master Askia Ishaq had grown angry with and sent to be confined at Taghaza — the Saharan salt works, which formed part of the Songhai states and was administered by them. Fate willed that he escape and get himself to the red city of Marrakesh.

He wrote to the Moroccan sultan announcing his arrival, gave him news of the Songhai country, said its inhabitants were in a deplorable state on account of the baseness of their nature, and urged him strongly to seize the country and tear it out of the hands of its masters.

The sultan was not in Marrakesh when the letter came. He was at Fez, punishing the sharifs of that city, having had the eyes of the rebels put out — a good many of them died of it, and al-Sadi's comment is a formula of mourning followed by the observation that he did it for purely temporal advantages.

The demand

Ahmad al-Mansur then wrote to Askia Ishaq to say that he intended to come to his country, that he was at present far from his capital, and that the enclosed document would explain his intentions.

The document asked to be given the working of the salt mine of Taghaza, on the grounds that he had more right to possess it than anybody else, since it was thanks to him that the country was defended and protected against the incursions of the Christian infidels.

That is the casus belli, in the sultan's own hand, seen by the chronicler. The salt of Taghaza was the currency of the Sahara — it went south in slabs and came back as gold, and whoever held the mine held the exchange rate. Al-Mansur was not asking for the gold. He was asking for the thing gold was bought with, and charging for a defence of Islam that the Sudan had not commissioned.

The dispatches reached Gao in December 1589. Al-Mansur went back to Marrakesh through such heavy snow that he nearly died on the road, and a great many of his people lost hands or feet to the cold.

Askia Ishaq refused. He answered in violent and insulting terms, and sent with his reply a bundle of javelins and two iron shoes.

Three thousand men and a double number of followers

In November 1590 the army left. Al-Sadi counts it: three thousand men-at-arms, horse and foot, accompanied by twice as many followers of every kind, workmen of various trades, physicians.

Ten commanders are named, and the striking thing is who they were. Mustafa the Turk. Ahmad al-Harusi the Andalusian. Ammar al-Feta the renegade. Ahmad ibn Yusuf the renegade. Ali ben Mustafa the renegade. The right wing under Ba-Hasan Friro, a renegade; the left under Qasim Waradououi the Andalusian, a renegade. Over the whole of it, Judar Pasha, who was short and had blue eyes.

A Moroccan army crossing the Sahara to conquer the Niger was commanded, almost throughout, by European converts and Andalusi exiles. The sultan told them before they left that the divinatory calculations showed the Songhai country must cease to be ruled by the Sudanese and that his army would take a certain part of it.

What the other side did

Askia Ishaq assembled his generals and the principal men of his kingdom to ask their advice, and al-Sadi records the outcome in one sentence: every time a sound piece of counsel was offered, they hastened to reject it.

He follows it immediately with the theological reading — God had decided this kingdom would disappear and this dynasty collapse, and nobody can push back what he has decided. A man writing about the destruction of his own country by a state he later served does not have many ways of saying we handled it badly. That is his.

He also records the last act of the old regime: the Askia arrested the Songhai agent at Taghaza, who happened to be visiting Gao, on suspicion of spying for Marrakesh, and threw him in prison with three others.

The river

The Moroccans reached the Niger near Karabara without going through Arawan. Judar gave a great feast to celebrate their safe arrival at the river, on Wednesday 30 March 1591 — because the fact that these men had arrived intact was itself the omen that the enterprise would succeed.

The desert had been the enemy, and it had lost. At Tondibi a fortnight later a far larger Songhai army with no firearms met one that had them, and the outcome had effectively been decided at the feast on the riverbank.

Then what

Morocco held the Niger bend as a pashalik governed from Timbuktu. The gold did not flow as expected; what came north arrived as display rather than as revenue, and the Saharan province turned into a cost. The scholarly establishment of Timbuktu was broken up, and its most famous jurist, Ahmad Baba, was taken to Marrakesh in chains.

Within a generation the garrison had stopped remitting anything and had begun marrying locally, and its descendants ruled the river as a caste of their own. A sultan who is remembered for a palace paid for with Sudanese gold had in fact gone to war over a salt mine, and got neither.

Saltpetre for sugar

Drafted from The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1600)peak

In April 1577 an esquire of Queen Elizabeth's body sailed from London for Morocco with ten men, three of them trumpeters, and wrote the trip up afterwards. Hakluyt printed it, and Edmund Hogan's account of his embassy is the best description there is of what the Saadi sultans and the English were to each other.

They were to each other an arrangement against Spain, and the terms of it were saltpetre one way and sugar and safe conduct the other.

The reception

The sultan was Abd al-Malik, who spoke Spanish and who told Hogan, while showing him over a galley on an ornamental lake, that he had spent eighteen years of his youth at that trade. He sent four captains and a hundred soldiers to the coast to escort the ambassador inland, with one of his own horses. The four English ships in the road fired off twenty marks' worth of powder to make a show.

Then, outside Marrakesh, the detail Hogan enjoyed most:

There met me all the Christians of the Spaniards and Portugals to receive me, which I knowe was more by the kings commandement then of any good wils of themselues: for some of them although they speake me faire hung downe their heads like dogs, and especially the Portugales, and I countenanced them accordingly.

The marginal note in Hakluyt is blunter: the Spaniards and Portuguese were commanded by the king, on pain of death, to meet the English ambassador.

The audience was held in Spanish, which both men had. Abd al-Malik then had one of his elchies — renegades, Europeans in his service — repeat it in Arabic for the Moors present, and answered in Spanish himself.

What the sultan said about Spain

He had granted the king of Spain a licence for an embassy of his own, and Philip had asked him, as part of the request, not to receive any envoy the queen of England might send. Hogan reports what he was told about that:

I know what the king of Spaine is, and what the Queene of England and her Realme is: for I neither like of him nor of his religion, being so gouerned by the Inquisition that he can doe nothing of himselfe.

The Spanish ambassador, when he came, would wait twenty days after delivering his message. The Englishman was to be treated as my companion and one of my house.

Hogan's own explanation for the favour is confessional and probably half right: that the sultan was well exercised in the scriptures of both Testaments, and beareth a greater affection to our Nation then to others because of our religion, which forbiddeth worship of Idols — for which the Moors, he adds, called him the Christian king.

What was actually being negotiated

The rest of the account is a merchant's diary, and it is the more valuable for it.

Hogan presented a great bass lute, and the sultan asked for English musicians and undertook to keep them well, with provisions, and to let them liue according to their law and conscience wherein he vrgeth none to the contrary. He was given a case of combs. He was taken into a garden where the sultan lay on a silk bed complaining of a sore leg, and then onto a new galley on an ornamental water, where the sultan spent two or three hours on the water. He watched bulls being baited with English dogs and ducks taken with water spaniels, and a Morris dance performed by the renegades. He was given a short dagger from the sultan's own girdle, set with two hundred rubies and turquoises.

And in among all that, in three long night audiences, the substance: English ships to enter any Moroccan port freely, in trade or for water, and to bring in prizes taken from the queen's enemies and sell them there; safe conduct along the whole Barbary coast and through the straits into the Levant, with the sultan's own letters to the Ottoman sultan and the ruler of Algiers to secure it; and no Englishman taken captive ever again to be sold anywhere in his dominions. In return the queen would confirm the trade and supply such commodities as he should haue need of — with the careful English proviso that nothing be required contrary to her honour and law, or in breach of her leagues with her Christian neighbours.

Everybody involved knew what the commodity was. Hogan raises it three times, and the third time it is the last item of business he does before leaving:

I desired his maiestie to haue special regard that the ships might be laden backe againe, for that I found litle store of saltpeter in readinesse.

The sultan promised to send down to Sus for it, and did. The other bills Hogan put in were for the quiet traffic of the English merchants, and for sugars to be made by the Jews — for debts past and to come — and for good order in the ingenios, the sugar mills.

A year

England got saltpetre for gunpowder and a market for cloth. Morocco got English cannon, English cloth, and a European ally with the same enemy. Both governments were conducting the relationship in Spanish through renegade interpreters, on the explicit understanding that the king of Spain was the reason for it.

Abd al-Malik died on the field at the Battle of the Three Kings a little more than a year after Hogan sailed home. His successor sent his own ambassador to London, and the English embassy to that court in 1585 is printed in Hakluyt a few pages further on. The gold from Songhay was a decade away. The alliance outlasted both of them.

Two things they cannot take from us

Drafted from al-Ifrani, Nozhet-elhâdi: histoire de la dynastie saadienne au Maroc, 1511-1670 (1889)contraction

The Saadis were made by holy men and spent the rest of their existence trying to get out from under them.

The persecution of the lodges

In 1551, al-Ifrani records, Muhammad al-Shaykh ordered a persecution of the members of the zawiyas who claimed the standing of shaykhs and constituted a danger to the monarchy — since it was precisely through them that he had come to power himself.

The sentence is al-Ifrani's, and he does not soften the irony. A dynasty raised to the throne by the religious lodges of the south, on the strength of a sharifian genealogy the lodges had endorsed, turned on the lodges within two years of taking Fez.

He was after money as well as authority. He sent to demand the return of deposits he suspected the zawiyas of having received from the old dynasty. One of his servants went to collect from a shaykh at Meknes and found him sitting in a corner of the lodge plaiting palm fibre; a bird flying over let its droppings fall in front of him; the shaykh barely raised his eyes to it before the animal dropped dead and its feathers scattered in every direction, at which the sultan's man fled in terror and went back to his master.

Al-Ifrani reports the miracle straight, and he reports the reasoning of another shaykh straight too. Asked whether the sultan did not frighten him, the man answered:

God alone is to be feared. In any case there are two things they cannot take from us, water and the qibla; as for the rest, it must be left to whoever is looking for it.

That is the reply of a class of people who had watched dynasties come and go for eight hundred years and had correctly identified which of them were temporary.

What the persecution cost

Nothing immediately. Ahmad al-Mansur's reign after 1578 was the height of the dynasty: Portuguese ransom money, a modernised army with firearms, an embassy trade with England, and in 1591 the Niger.

Then he died of plague in 1603, and it turned out that what the government had been standing on was one man's prestige and a war chest.

Three sons, and everybody else

The sultanate divided between Marrakesh and Fez and stayed divided, with the succession contested by whichever brother, son or nephew had an army that season. Al-Ifrani's later chapters are a directory of the people who took pieces of the country while the family fought over the title.

In the Sous, a man called Ali ben Muhammad — the son of a venerated saint — came forward as claimant when the reigning Saadi could no longer hold the province, gathered the Berbers of the Jazula and Harsa plains and all the tribes of the Sous, took Taroudant, was thrown out of it by a jurist-marabout, came back after that man died, took the Draa, then took Sijilmasa, and ruled from there. He was easy to approach, exemplary in conduct, chaste and little inclined to shed blood, and he died in 1659 holding the south.

At Marrakesh, after a Saadi sultan was killed, the city rose at the call of Abd al-Karim al-Shabani, chief of the great tribe of the Shabana, and swore allegiance to him in 1658. He united the whole kingdom of Marrakesh under his authority and behaved admirably towards his subjects.

Neither of those men was a sharif of the Saadi line and both of them governed better than it did by the end. The dynasty that had made sharifian descent the price of ruling Morocco was being replaced, region by region, by saints' sons and tribal chiefs — and the country did not appear to mind.

The famine

Then, in the year that Ali ben Muhammad died in the Sous and while al-Shabani sat at Marrakesh, came the great famine of 1070 of the Hijra.

The scarcity was such, al-Ifrani writes, that the people, reduced to the last extremity, came to eat corpses.

That is the state of Morocco a century after Alcácer Quibir, and the Saadi sultanate had one more year to run.

What came after

Drafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)end

Ahmad al-Mansur died of plague in 1603 and left three sons who all wanted the throne, and the sultanate spent the next twenty-five years divided between Marrakesh and Fez with the succession contested by whichever brother or nephew had an army that season.

Dynasties end that way more often than any other. What is distinctive here is what filled the space, because it is not another dynasty.

Sufi brotherhoods took over large parts of the country — the Dila'iyya of the Middle Atlas ran a state of their own for decades — and so did marabouts, holy men whose local authority was religious and hereditary. A corsair republic at Salé and Rabat on the Bou Regreg, founded substantially by Andalusi Muslims expelled from Spain between 1609 and 1614, governed itself and raided the Atlantic as far as Iceland. Provincial commanders and tribal confederations held what they could. The last Saadi sultan was assassinated by his own uncle in 1659.

What ended the fragmentation was another sharifian family from the Tafilalt — the oasis at the end of the western gold road — who took the country in the 1660s and reign in Morocco today. The Saadis are the dynasty that made sharifian descent the requirement, and the Alawis are the dynasty that has held it ever since.

Two closing notes for the region.

The gold road ends here too. Every state in the Maghreb had lived off it in some way, from the Kharijite oasis towns taxing it in the eighth century to the Genoese buying at Tlemcen to al-Mansur's army at Tondibi. Within a generation of 1591 the Atlantic trade had made the Saharan crossing marginal, European ships were buying West African gold on the coast, and the routes that had financed every polity in the region for eight hundred years stopped mattering. The garrison at Timbuktu outlived its own purpose.

Nine hundred years of Maghribi history had turned on three questions: who holds the gold road, who can defend the coast, and who has a claim the scholars will accept. By 1660 the first had stopped being worth asking, the second was being settled in Lisbon and Madrid, and only the third was still open — which is why the answer to it has not changed since.

The corpse, and the marble

Drafted from al-Ifrani, Nozhet-elhâdi: histoire de la dynastie saadienne au Maroc, 1511-1670 (1889)afterlife

What ended the fragmentation was another sharifian family, from Sijilmasa in the Tafilalt, and al-Ifrani — who wrote under them — gives them a chapter heading of their own: the dynasty of the Hasanid sharifs of Sijilmasa, some words on their glorious deeds and their brilliant qualities.

He is a court historian and it shows. But the facts he reports about how the Alawis established themselves are not flattering, and he reports them anyway.

What happened to the men who had governed

Abd al-Karim al-Shabani, who had held Marrakesh well for eleven years, died forty days before Mawlay al-Rashid came to the throne. His son Abu Bakr succeeded him at Marrakesh, secured his authority over the city and followed his father's example — until the sultan al-Rashid seized him and his cousins, had them all put to death, and decimated the tribe of the Shabana.

Then he had Abd al-Karim's body taken out of its grave and thrown on a fire.

In the Sous, the son of the other claimant kept what his father had left him until he was crushed by the same sultan, and the standard of that house went to ground in a village and stayed there, powerless to continue the struggle. The power belongs to God alone, al-Ifrani writes, which is what he writes at the end of every such passage.

What the marble had been for

Al-Ifrani devotes a chapter to El Badi, the reception palace Ahmad al-Mansur raised at Marrakesh, and he begins with the motive rather than the marble. The sultan built it, his authority says, out of a desire to leave a lasting trace of his dynasty, descended from the Prophet, and to establish its superiority over the Berber dynasties — the Almoravids, the Almohads and their successors the Marinids. All those governments had put up monuments to perpetuate their memory, and until then the sharifian dynasty had done nothing of the kind, although it was worthier of it than any other on account of its illustrious ancestor and its ancient nobility. When princes want to recall their glory, runs the verse he quotes, they do it in the language of buildings.

Then he describes it: a square, with a great dome on each face and other domes and palaces and apartments grouped around them; onyx of every colour and marbles white as silver or entirely black; capitals sheathed in melted gold or gold leaf; floors of polished slabs; walls faced in coloured tile worked like the embroidery on a cloak; ceilings inlaid with gold; and, when the decoration was done, the purest water set running through the courts.

It was pulled apart by the dynasty that came next, and what stands now is a rectangle of red earth walls around a sunken garden.

The dynasty that dismantled it had understood the chapter above perfectly. The whole point of the building was to say that a sharifian house was worth more than a Berber one, and the people who took the marble away were sharifs.

What happened on the Niger

The pashalik at Timbuktu outlived the sultanate that founded it and stopped belonging to it. The garrison married locally, stopped remitting revenue, elected its own pashas, and its descendants — the Arma — governed the river bend as a military caste for another two centuries, with no reference to Marrakesh at all.

Al-Sadi, writing his chronicle in Timbuktu under those men, is himself the evidence: a local scholar taking office under an occupation whose original purpose everyone had forgotten, in a city whose libraries the occupation had broken up two generations earlier.

What actually carried

Not the palace, not the province, not the family. What the Saadis established is the thing that outlasted every one of those, and it is the argument they made in the Sous in 1510.

Before them, Morocco had been ruled for three centuries by Zenata dynasties whose claim was that they held the country. After them, no Moroccan dynasty has ruled on anything but descent from the Prophet. The Alawis who dug up al-Shabani and burnt him were making exactly the case the Saadis had made against the Wattasids, and they have held the throne on it ever since.

The Saadis lost their capital, their gold, their province and their line inside sixty years of al-Mansur's death, and they permanently changed what a Moroccan ruler has to be.