Wattasid Dynasty

The regents who stopped pretending

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

The Marinid dynasty spent its last century with children and nonentities on the throne and its government in the hands of the Wattasids — Zenata kinsmen of the Marinids who became hereditary regents from 1420 and refused to give the regency back. In 1465 a rising in Fez killed the last Marinid, and in 1472 the Wattasids stopped ruling in anybody's name and took the throne.

That is the oldest mechanism in politics: the instrument of a state becoming heavier than the state. Here it produced one of the weakest governments the region ever had.

The problem was legitimacy, and it is worth setting out, because everything that happened to the dynasty afterwards followed from it. The Almoravids had a legal programme; the Almohads had a mahdi; the Marinids had no doctrine but did have two centuries of possession and a madrasa-building record. The Wattasids had a family relationship to the dynasty they had displaced, and possession. That is all, and it is a thin thing to rule Morocco on.

What made it worse is what was happening on the coast. Portugal had taken Ceuta in 1415 — the Marinid page records it — and did not stop: Arzila and Tangier in 1471, then Safi, Azemmour, Agadir, Mazagan, Mogador and a string of smaller posts down the Atlantic, until by the 1520s the Moroccan coastline was a chain of European fortresses with a Moroccan interior behind it. Spain was doing the same on the Mediterranean side, at Oran, Bougie and eventually Tunis.

A government whose only claim is that it holds the country, and which visibly cannot hold the coast, is in trouble with anyone who can make a better claim. In the south, in the Draa and the Sous, somebody could.

A year outside New Fez

Drafted from Africanus, The History and Description of Africa (1896)expansion

The Wattasids took power twice, and the second time was harder than the first, because the first had not been a conquest at all.

They had held the regency since 1420 and run the government while a succession of Marinid children occupied the throne. Then in 1465 a citizen of Fez killed the last Marinid and the city made him ruler — a sharif, a man with the best credential in Morocco, put up by popular acclamation over the heads of the family that had actually been governing.

Leo Africanus tells what happened next in a few sentences, and they are the whole founding of the dynasty.

Beaten, and then not

The Wattasid — Leo writes his name as Saic Abra — was pricked forward with ambition, and went about to conquer the city of Fez and make himself king. The sharif took the advice of a counsellor of his, who happened to be the Wattasid's own cousin, and vanquished him and put him to flight to his great disgrace.

Then the sharif sent that counsellor away to Temesna to pacify a province that was about to rebel.

The Wattasid came back. He besieged New Fez — the walled administrative city the Marinids had built beside the old one — for a whole year with eight thousand men, and at length took it by the treason of the townsmen, and compelled the sharif and all his family to flee to the kingdom of Tunis.

What that founding is made of

Not a doctrine, not a genealogy, not a battle in the field. A siege won by waiting until the other man's best adviser was out of town, and then by paying somebody inside.

It is the same method the Marinids had used to take Sijilmasa two centuries earlier, and it worked for the same reason: in a country of walled cities and mobile tribes, the decisive question is usually who inside the walls can be bought. The difference is that the Marinids went on to hold Morocco for two hundred years and the Wattasids were about to spend eighty of theirs watching the coast go.

The bill arrived in the same season

Leo puts it in the next sentence, and the sequence is not a coincidence — a Moroccan civil war was exactly the opportunity Lisbon had been waiting for:

The same time therefore that Saic besieged Fez, the king of Portugall sending a fleete into Africa, tooke Arzilla.

Among the captives shipped to Lisbon was a boy of seven and his sister, children of the man who would rule Morocco next. He spent seven years there and learned the language exactly; his father eventually ransomed him for a great sum; and when he came to the throne people called him Muhammad the Portuguese.

A dynasty that had just won a year-long siege of its own capital acquired, in the same months, a coastal port in Portuguese hands and an heir who spoke Portuguese. Both facts stayed with it until the end.

The city that filled up

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

The Wattasids governed Morocco during the two decades in which al-Andalus stopped existing, and the largest thing that happened to their country was demographic rather than political.

Granada surrendered in January 1492, and the Capitulations that guaranteed the Muslim population its religion and its law were void within seven years. Conversion became compulsory in Castile in 1502. Perhaps two hundred thousand people left for North Africa at or soon after the conquest, and the flow continued in waves for more than a century, through the Alpujarras rising of 1568 and the final expulsions of 1609 to 1614.

A large part of them came to Fez, which had absorbed Andalusi refugees before — a whole quarter of the city was settled by people expelled from Cordoba in 818, and still carries their name — and which now received a population of urban, literate, skilled exiles from a country with a higher material culture than the one taking them in.

What they brought is visible in Morocco still. Andalusi craftsmen carried the silk weaving, the tilework, the leather trades and the building techniques of Granada; Andalusi musicians brought the al-ala repertoire that is still the classical music of Morocco and Algeria; Andalusi families supplied secretaries and jurists to the chancery. The dialect of Fez, the architecture of its merchant houses and the food are all marked by it.

It was not a comfortable absorption. The refugees were resented as foreigners in places, competed for trade and office, and some were suspected of the lukewarm Islam of people who had spent a generation being baptised under compulsion. But the receiving of them is the largest single thing the Wattasid state did, and it did it while losing a war on the coast and its authority in the interior.

It is worth saying plainly, because the rest of the story is a dynasty failing. This is the one thing it did not fail at. Morocco absorbed the population of a destroyed country and turned it into part of itself, and the government that presided over that was the least legitimate the region produced.

The envoy who ended up in Rome

Drafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)aside?What aside means

Al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan was born in Granada around 1494, into a family of the Nasrid administrative class, and was carried to Fez as a small child in the exodus that followed the fall of the city. He was educated there, entered Wattasid service, and travelled for the sultan.

The travelling is the point. As a young man he went with his uncle, an ambassador, across the Sahara to the Songhai empire, a lifetime before a Moroccan army destroyed it. He went again on his own account. He saw Timbuktu and Gao, the Hausa cities, the Atlas, Tunis, Cairo, Constantinople and Arabia. He was, on the evidence of what he later wrote, an observant and sceptical traveller with a diplomat's interest in how places were actually governed.

In 1518, returning by sea from Egypt, he was captured by Christian corsairs off the Tunisian coast. Because he was obviously a man of learning he was not sold as an ordinary captive but presented to the pope. Leo X had him instructed, baptised him with his own names — Johannes Leo de Medicis — and kept him in Rome, where he taught Arabic, worked on an Arabic-Hebrew-Latin dictionary, and in 1526 finished a book in Italian describing Africa.

The Descrittione dell'Africa was printed in 1550 and translated into French, Latin and English within a generation, and it was Europe's principal source of information about the interior of Africa for something close to three hundred years. Almost everything a European reader knew about Timbuktu before the nineteenth century came from it, including the exaggerations.

Three things make him belong in the history of this dynasty rather than only in the history of European geography.

The man was a Wattasid official, and the knowledge he sold to Rome was knowledge the Wattasid state had sent him to acquire. Whatever else the dynasty failed at, its diplomatic service reached the Niger.

He is the exact inverse of the movement Fez was absorbing in those same years. Refugees had been crossing the strait southward for eight hundred years, and Andalusi learning had been arriving in the Maghreb with them. Here a man of that same diaspora carried the Maghreb's knowledge into Europe, involuntarily, as a captive.

And it is a transaction that had run in several directions before. Greek science was translated into Arabic at Baghdad; it was translated out again at Toledo; al-Biruni wrote about India for a court that had conquered it. Here a Granadan exile in a Roman palace writes Africa for readers who had never been there, and Europe reads him for three centuries, until it can go and look.

None of that is a thing a state can be credited with. It is what happens when a government sends a clever young man a long way and then loses him.

Guns among the oil jars

Drafted from Africanus, The History and Description of Africa (1896)contraction

Leo Africanus served the Wattasid sultan and went out with his army, and his account of how Morocco lost its coast is the account of a man who was there and did not enjoy it.

How Safi was taken

Safi had killed its own king in a tumult and was being fought over by two governors, and the Portuguese merchants who frequented the town in great numbers wrote to their king asking him to send soldiers, because they were in good hope the city could be had cheaply. The king would not move until they confirmed it.

Meanwhile the merchants persuaded the townsmen that during the disorder everybody's lives and goods were at risk, and that what was needed was a strong castle on the sea shore where merchandise might safely be kept. The townsmen agreed. Then, in among their vessels of oil and their other wares, the merchants cunningly conveyed guns and every other kind of warlike instrument into it, while the town, knowing nothing of this, exacted nothing from them but the ordinary customs on their goods.

Having armed the castle, they looked for a quarrel. A Portuguese servant buying meat in the city provoked a butcher; they came to blows; the servant, feeling himself hurt, ran the butcher through and fled to the castle. The people rose and came at it in one body to pull it down and cut the throats of everyone inside, and the guns and crossbows made such havoc among them that a hundred and fifty citizens were killed at the first encounter. They kept assaulting it daily until the king of Portugal sent five thousand foot, two hundred horse and a great number of guns; at which the citizens fled to the mountain, nobody daring to stay in the town except the man who had built the castle.

That is how a Moroccan port changed hands: on a permit, a stack of oil jars and a butcher's quarrel.

Arzila, from the inside

Leo also gives the other side, and puts himself in it.

Muhammad the Portuguese, who had been a hostage in Lisbon as a boy, attempted repeatedly to recover Arzila. Once he came at it suddenly, beat down a great part of the wall, entered the breach and set all the Muslim captives free. The Christians retired into the castle and promised to yield within two days — until Pedro Navarro arrived with a great fleet and, with continual discharging of ordnance, compelled the sultan not merely to leave the city but to take his whole army away. Afterwards the Portuguese fortified it on all sides, and every later attempt was thrown back.

I my selfe seruing the king in the foresaid expedition could find but fiue hundred of our companie slaine. But the warre against Arzilla continued from the yeere of the Hegeira 914. to the yeere 921.

Seven years of campaigning to recover one town, and five hundred dead in a single expedition, counted by a man walking the field afterwards.

Where the money came from

The other half of the picture is what the war cost at home, and Leo records his own part in that too, without softening it. A great deal of gold was being raised in ransoms and levies. The king of Fez exacted fifty thousand ducats from the Jews of Fez, on the grounds that they were said to favour his enemies.

I my selfe bare him companie, that went in the Kings name to receiue the sayd summe of the lewes.

He is not confessing and not excusing. He is a young official noting where the money for the Arzila war came from, and the sentence sits in his book beside the ones about the beauty of the colleges.

A government losing on both sides of the ledger

Portuguese fortresses now ran down the Atlantic from Ceuta to Agadir and the Spanish were doing the same on the Mediterranean side. Every one of them was a customs house that no longer paid Fez. Every campaign to remove one cost more than the port had been worth. And a dynasty whose only claim was that it held the country was demonstrating annually that it did not hold the edges of it.

Somewhere south of the Atlas, a family that could claim descent from the Prophet was organising the same war and winning it.

Squeezed out of the middle

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

The Wattasid century runs between two pressures and gets thinner throughout.

To the north, Portugal and Spain on the coast. To the south, from about 1510, a sharifian family in the Sous organising the resistance to exactly that — the thing the Wattasids could not do.

The dynasty's response was the one available to a weak government with a strong enemy on two sides, and it was fatal to its standing. It made terms. Wattasid sultans signed truces with Portugal, traded with the fortresses, and at various points accepted Portuguese support against domestic rivals; one of them, Muhammad, had been a hostage in Portugal as a boy and is known in the sources as al-Burtuqali, the Portuguese. In the 1540s, with the Saadis taking the south, Fez sought Ottoman help from Algiers, and Ottoman troops installed a Wattasid in Fez in 1554 for a few months before the Saadis threw them both out.

Both moves are intelligible and both confirmed the charge. A dynasty accused of being unable to defend Muslim territory answered by allying first with the Christian power holding the ports and then with a foreign Muslim power holding Algiers.

Muhammad al-Shaykh of the Saadis took Fez in 1549 and again decisively in 1554, and the Wattasid line ended. Nothing else did: the state, its administration and its capital carried on without a break, and what changed was the family and the argument for it.

This is the last dynasty to rule Morocco on a purely political claim. Every Moroccan dynasty since — the Saadis, and the Alawis who followed them and reign still — has been sharifian, claiming descent from the Prophet. The Wattasids are the point at which that became the requirement, and they are the reason it did: eighty years of a government that could hold a country and not defend it taught Morocco to ask for something more than possession.

The axe

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

The last Wattasid did not go quietly, and what he left behind killed the man who beat him.

Abu Hassun in Algiers

Driven out of Fez by Muhammad al-Shaykh of the Saadis, Abu Hassun escaped to Algiers to save his life and ask for help. Al-Ifrani gives his pitch to the Turks almost as direct speech:

He has taken my kingdom from me, the kingdom of my fathers; he has stripped me of the inheritance of my forefathers. Come with me, let us go and fight him, and it is likely that God will help us and give us success and victory, without your losing any part of the treasure and plunder you have gathered.

He worked on them constantly with brilliant descriptions of the Maghreb, and he promised them a large sum, and they went. The Turkish pasha Salih led them. They entered Fez, and after hard fighting Muhammad al-Shaykh had to abandon the city and run.

Abu Hassun made his entry on 9 January 1554. The people received him with great transports of joy. He dismounted, embraced everyone, great and small, noble and common, and burst into tears at the memory of what the sharifs had done to him and his family.

Then the complaints started. The Turks were seizing women and committing every sort of excess. Abu Hassun hurried to pay them what he had promised and got them out of Fez, and very few of them stayed.

Very few of them stayed. That clause is the whole afterlife.

Choose it for yourself

Muhammad al-Shaykh went to Marrakesh, rallied the tribes, rebuilt his army and came back. Abu Hassun came out to meet him with the archers of the city and whatever forces of the Maghreb had joined him, was beaten in the field, and withdrew behind the walls of Fez to stand a siege. The dynasty ends there.

On entering the city the second time, the sultan ordered the execution of the chief qadi of Fez, Abu Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab ibn al-Zaqqaq, whom he suspected of having favoured Abu Hassun. When the man was brought before him he said: choose the manner of your execution.

The qadi answered: choose it for yourself, for a man perishes in the way he makes others perish.

Let his head be cut off with an axe, said the sultan.

Three years

The Turks who had come with Abu Hassun and had not gone home were still in Fez. Muhammad al-Shaykh took them into his own army, made them a special division, and when he moved to Marrakesh he kept them constantly around him and showed them the greatest confidence.

He had also, by this time, told the Ottoman sultan's ambassadors to inform their master that he intended to conquer his states and march against him — and he was in the habit of referring to Suleiman as the sultan of the fishermen, because the Turks were always at sea. Suleiman sent word to Algiers for his head.

The Algerians picked one of their bravest, Salih al-Kahya, who took a small troop of Turks, pretended to have deserted the Ottoman service, presented himself to the Moroccan sultan and asked to be taken into his army and protected from pursuit. The sultan was delighted and said so publicly. The Turks already in his guard were delighted too and made much of the newcomers — every foreigner in a country, al-Ifrani observes, finds himself somehow related to the foreigners he meets there.

They waited for their moment through a campaign in the mountains, and got it at a place called Guelaguel. The guard was careless; they went into the prince's tent; one of them struck him with an axe and took his head off the body at a single blow. They carried it away in a nosebag and fled in the dark towards Sijilmasa, telling anyone who asked that they were men being sent to Tlemcen. They were caught on the road and a number of them were killed, but some got away with the head, and sent it to Constantinople, where it hung on a wall of the city until it rotted.

What a defeated dynasty leaves

Nothing that looks like an inheritance. No claim, because it never had one; no territory, because it lost the coast and then the interior; no line, because the family was taken in chains to Marrakesh and, it is said, put to death after first being pardoned.

What it left was a division of Turkish soldiers in the Saadi army, a prophecy made by a judge under sentence, and an axe.