Morocco, 1600–1660

Sultan since 1578, Ahmad al-Mansur ruled from Marrakesh with a gunpowder army and a lavish court. In 1591 his army had crossed the Sahara and broken the Songhay empire on the Niger. He had named his son al-Mamun heir in 1579 and again in 1584, but by 1600 the heir governed Fez more as a rival than a deputy.

At Fez al-Mamun abused his power, and he was said to be ready to put himself under the Turks of Algiers. In October 1602 his father rode north with twelve thousand horsemen. Al-Mamun fled to a saint's shrine on the Ouergha, was taken out by force and locked up at Meknes. The heir was a prisoner when the succession fell due.

Judar Pasha, born Diego de Guevara in Spain and carried off as a boy by raiders, had risen as one of al-Mansur's eunuch officers and led the army that conquered Songhay in 1591. In 1602 the sultan used him again: Judar and another commander dragged al-Mamun from the shrine. His part in this family quarrel would follow him.

Lalla Aisha, a wife of al-Mansur from the Arab tribe of the Shabbanat, was the mother of Zaydan. Her son was with his father when, camped outside Fez, al-Mansur caught the plague and died on 25 August 1603; the notables of Fez swore to Zaydan that day. She lived until 1623 and lies beside al-Mansur in the royal tombs of Marrakesh.

Al-Mansur's principal secretary, Abd al-Wahid ibn Mas'ud, landed at Dover on 8 August 1600 at the head of an embassy of sixteen. He spent six months at Elizabeth's court and was received by her on 19 August and 10 September. His master proposed a joint English and Moroccan invasion of Spain. His portrait, painted in London that year, survives.

Elizabeth I welcomed the envoy but would not supply a fleet on his terms: she asked for 100,000 pounds in advance, and the sultan wanted an English ship sent to fetch it. Trade agreements followed; the invasion did not. She died in March 1603, five months before al-Mansur, and the plan for a joint war on Spain died with the two of them.

Abd al-Aziz al-Fishtali, of a Sanhaja tribe north of Fez, headed al-Mansur's chancery, drafted his letters and wrote the verses carved in the El Badi palace. His Manahil al-safa is the main chronicle of the reign. Al-Mansur said that al-Fishtali made him more illustrious than all the other princes of the earth.

Ahmad Baba, the leading jurist of Timbuktu, had been arrested after the Moroccan conquest and brought to Marrakesh in chains with his family in 1594, his 1,600 books seized. Freed in 1596 on condition that he stay in the city, he taught to crowds, and judges came to his lessons. He wrote much of his work in this exile.

Ahmad ibn al-Qadi of Meknes, jurist, historian and mathematician, was among those who studied with Ahmad Baba. Christian corsairs had captured him at sea on his way east; he sent al-Mansur verses begging for help, and the sultan paid 20,000 ounces for his freedom. He had been a judge at Salé and wrote on the scholars of Fez and on al-Mansur's deeds.

Ahmad al-Maqqari, of a scholarly family of Tlemcen, came to Fez in 1600 and was presented to al-Mansur at Marrakesh; he dedicated to the sultan a book on the scholars he met in the two capitals. Al-Fishtali became his friend, and al-Maqqari later wrote his life and called him the greatest poet of the age.

Zaydan was proclaimed at Fez the day his father died, the notables saying al-Mansur had died in his arms. Marrakesh refused him. In 1604 his soldiers deserted to al-Mamun on the Oum er-Rbia and he lost Fez. He fled east to Ottoman Tlemcen, waited there in vain for Turkish help, and came back south through Sijilmasa to the Sous.

Abu Faris, al-Mamun's full brother, had commanded at Marrakesh while their father marched north, and the city swore to him within days. To beat Zaydan he took al-Mamun out of prison and sent him north with an army. It worked, but al-Mamun then claimed the throne for himself, and Abu Faris had made his own rival.

Freed, al-Mamun won over the men of the Gharb, who remembered him as their governor, and in 1604 Fez opened its gates to him. He held the north for some years, but his position weakened; he sought help first from Tuscany and then from Spain. Around 1608 or 1609 he took ship at Larache for Spain, with his mother and his commanders.

Abdallah, al-Mamun's son, routed his uncle Abu Faris and in December 1606 let his troops plunder Marrakesh. That month, on his orders, Judar Pasha, the old conqueror of Songhay, was put to death. Marrakesh soon called Zaydan back, and for two years the capital changed hands again and again between uncle and nephew.

Mustafa Pasha led Zaydan's army against Fez. On 10 July 1609, in battle outside the city, he was thrown from his horse and killed. Abdallah rode into Fez with Abu Faris at his side, and a month later had his uncle strangled on his prayer rug. Zaydan kept Marrakesh; al-Mamun's line kept Fez.

James I succeeded Elizabeth in March 1603 and made peace with Spain by the Treaty of London in 1604. That broke the Anglo-Dutch front against Spain on which Morocco had counted, and freed the Spanish navy to raid the Moroccan coast again. English trade with Morocco went on, but no English king would now fight Spain for a sultan.

Samuel Pallache, a Jewish merchant of Fez whose family had come from Córdoba, was named by Zaydan in 1608 to interpret for his envoy to the Dutch. On 23 June 1608 he met the stadtholder Maurice and the States-General in The Hague to propose an alliance against Spain, their common enemy. Officially he was the sultan's agent, not his ambassador.

After al-Mansur's death Zaydan allowed the exiles of Timbuktu to go home. Leaving Marrakesh, Ahmad Baba prayed aloud never to be brought back, and he reached Timbuktu on 22 April 1608. He lived there until 1627; the town's great manuscript library is named after him.

In 1604 al-Maqqari moved to Fez for good. He became imam and preacher at the Qarawiyyin mosque and taught there for fourteen years while the city passed from one son of al-Mansur to another. Among his pupils was the young Muhammad Mayyara, who would teach the next generation of Fez.

In Spain al-Mamun begged Philip III for soldiers and money. The price was Larache, emptied of its Muslims, and he left his sons as hostages until it was paid. Early in 1610 he landed at Badis, a Spanish-held rock on the Rif coast. Only one of his officers would drive Larache's people out, and he asked the scholars of Fez to declare the cession lawful.

Philip III took the bargain. On 20 November 1610 Spanish troops under the Marquis of San Germán marched into Larache, a port Spain would hold until 1689. Four years later his fleet took La Mamora as well. The quarrel of al-Mansur's sons had given Spain two bases on Morocco's Atlantic coast.

The Duke of Lerma ran Philip III's government. From 1609 he carried through the expulsion of the Moriscos, Spaniards of Muslim descent: more than 300,000 people were driven out by 1614. Many crossed to Morocco. Some settled at Salé and Rabat, where they would build a corsair state; others arrived destitute, or were robbed on the way.

While al-Mamun dealt with Spain, Zaydan dealt with Spain's enemy. On 24 December 1610 his agent Samuel Pallache signed a Treaty of Friendship and Free Commerce with the Dutch Republic. It opened each country to the other's subjects and let the sultan buy ships, arms and munitions from the Dutch, one of the first such treaties between a European and a Muslim state.

Maurice of Nassau, stadtholder and commander of the Dutch Republic, supported the Pallaches in The Hague. The Dutch sent Zaydan warships he had asked for, and Maurice allowed Samuel to take Spanish prizes. When Samuel was jailed in England in 1614 at the Spanish ambassador's request, Maurice came to his aid and had him brought back to the Netherlands.

Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari, a Morisco who had fled Spain in 1599, served the sultans as translator. In 1610 Zaydan sent him to France to seek redress for Moriscos whom French shipmasters had promised passage to Morocco and then robbed. He saw the king, won some compensation from shipowners at Bordeaux, and in Paris in September 1611 taught Arabic to a young Dutch scholar.

When al-Mamun asked the scholars of Fez to rule that the surrender of Larache was lawful, some of the best of them, al-Maqqari among them, went into hiding rather than answer. Their silence fed the charge that spread across the country: a son of al-Mansur had sold a Muslim town to the Christians.

Thomas Erpenius of Gorinchem, a Leiden graduate, was touring the learned centres of Europe. In Paris he took Arabic lessons first from an Egyptian and then from al-Hajari, who taught him the classical language in 1611. Back in Leiden he was made professor of Arabic in February 1613 and published the first accurate Arabic grammar printed in Europe.

Ibn Abi Mahalli, a jurist of Sijilmasa, made the sale of Larache his cause: the sons of al-Mansur, he preached, killed each other for a crown and sold Muslim land to the Christians. Calling himself the Mahdi, he routed Zaydan's men at Sijilmasa and in the Draa, took Marrakesh in 1612 and moved into the palace.

Zaydan begged for help from Yahya al-Hahi, a holy man of the High Atlas with a following across the Sous. In October 1613 Yahya came down on Marrakesh with his musketeers. Early in the fight the Mahdi was shot through the chest and his head was hung on the city wall. Yahya took the palace for himself, until a sharp letter from Zaydan sent him home.

Driven from his capital in 1612, Zaydan fled to the port of Safi. He hired a French ship to carry his household goods south to Agadir, his library among them, and turned to Yahya al-Hahi to win Marrakesh back. Restored late in 1613, he ruled little beyond the city and its province for the rest of his reign.

In the north al-Mamun, discredited by Larache, was murdered in his camp near Tetouan on 21 August 1613; people said the Mahdi had urged it. His son Abdallah ruled on at Fez, where he was already at odds with the townsmen of the old city and would stay so for the rest of his life.

Jean-Philippe de Castelane, a French privateer, agreed in 1612 to carry Zaydan's goods from Safi to Agadir for 3,000 escudos. After waiting six days without being paid he sailed north for Marseille with the cargo still aboard, meaning to sell it. Among the goods were some four thousand of the sultan's books and manuscripts.

Off La Mamora four ships of the Spanish admiral Luis Fajardo took Castelane's vessel and brought it to Lisbon, where the crew were convicted of piracy. By Philip III's order the library went to Madrid and in 1614 to the Escorial, where the Zaydani library is still kept. Moroccan envoys, and later the French, tried for years to recover it.

In 1613 al-Hajari went on to the Dutch Republic, which the new treaty let him visit freely, and stayed from June to September. He discussed with Maurice of Nassau an alliance of the Dutch, the Ottomans, Morocco and the Moriscos against Spain, and saw Erpenius again in Leiden. He later settled in Tunis, where he wrote his memoir in 1637.

Abu Bakr al-Dila'i, a Sanhaja Berber of the Aït Mejjat and a follower of the Jazuli Sufi path, had founded the zawiya of Dila in the Middle Atlas around 1566, and the Saadians at first supported it. As their state fell apart it grew rich, and students leaving the troubled cities found refuge there. He died in 1612.

Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr took over Dila in 1612. Under him the zawiya rooted itself among the Berbers of the Middle and High Atlas and drew students to his lessons in Qur'an commentary and hadith. He also lent his authority to holy war: with the jurist Ibn Ashir he gave al-Ayachi's campaigns against the Christian forts their legal cover.

Muhammad al-Ayachi, once a student of a holy man at Salé, was Zaydan's governor at Azemmour and kept the Portuguese of Mazagan penned in. Courtiers courted by the Portuguese turned the sultan against him, but the officer sent to kill him warned him instead. He escaped to Salé and led its men against the Spaniards who had taken La Mamora in August 1614.

Yahya al-Hahi did not stay long in his mountains. He took Taroudant and set out to build a kingdom of his own in the Sous, while still corresponding with Zaydan and acting as his protector there. His great rival in the Sous was the lord of Iligh, and the two fought over the region for more than a decade.

Abu Hassun, great-grandson of the Sous saint Sidi Ahmad u-Musa, became head of the zawiya of Iligh in 1613. After the Mahdi's fall he raised the Berbers of the Sous, above all the Jazula, against the weakened sultan, and clashed again and again with Yahya al-Hahi, the sultan's protector in the south.

Zaydan ruled Marrakesh and little more. To protect himself from Ottoman Algiers he resumed the tribute his father had paid the Ottoman sultan. The empire on the Niger slipped away too: after 1612 the Moroccan soldiers at Timbuktu chose their own pashas, and by 1618 Zaydan had given up the Sudan his father had conquered.

Among Zaydan's secretaries, al-Ifrani records, was Abd al-Aziz al-Fishtali, his father's old secretary, who carried the chancery of the golden reign into a shrunken court. He died in 1621. His chronicle of al-Mansur's reign remained the main record of what the dynasty had been.

At Fez Abdallah could not hold the old city, whose quarters fell to rival strongmen and whose merchants were safe only under a clan chief's protection. His own commander openly plundered houses while Abdallah took a daily share. He died in 1623 or 1624, of drink, al-Ifrani says, and his brother Abd al-Malik succeeded him.

Muhammad, a son of al-Mamun known as Zaghuda, was proclaimed sultan in the Habt in 1619, at the shrine of Abd al-Salam ibn Mashish. He entered Fez that summer and put some of his brother's officials to death, but Abdallah beat him at Meknes within weeks and again later, and Zaghuda fled and wandered the north.

John Harrison, James I's agent, came to Zaydan in 1610 and again in 1613 and 1615 to obtain the release of English captives. He learned that the sultan could not deliver the ports where the captives were held. On later missions, for Charles I, he dealt directly with the men who held them: al-Ayachi and the councils of Salé.

Samuel Pallache died at The Hague on 4 February 1616 and was buried in the Portuguese Jewish cemetery at Ouderkerk. His brother Joseph took over as Morocco's chief agent in the Netherlands, with his sons as deputies; on one journey to Morocco he and his son Moses tried and failed to build a new port near Cape Cantin.

Jacob Golius, Erpenius's best pupil, went with the Dutch embassy to Morocco in 1622. He studied a site for a port near Agadir and bought Arabic manuscripts in Marrakesh. Erpenius died in 1624, and Golius succeeded him as professor of Arabic at Leiden; he later also taught mathematics, Descartes among his students.

Jan Janszoon of Haarlem, a Dutch privateer captured by Algerian corsairs in 1618, turned Muslim as Murad Reis and in 1619 moved to Salé, where the Moriscos expelled from Spain had made the harbour a corsair base. In 1624 he became its grand admiral, and Zaydan, unable to stop him, acknowledged him as his governor.

Isaac de Razilly, a knight of Malta in the French navy, first sailed to Morocco for Louis XIII in 1619 and scouted the coast as far as Mogador; the Moroccan envoy he brought back was to recover Zaydan's library. In 1624 he went to Salé on the same errand, was put in chains before his release, and had to leave many French captives behind.

In 1618 al-Maqqari, weary of the strife among al-Mansur's heirs, left his family in Fez and went east on pilgrimage. He taught at Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem and Damascus and settled in Cairo, where he wrote Nafh al-tib, a vast history and anthology of al-Andalus, at the request of a Damascus patron.

Abd al-Wahid ibn Ashir, born at Fez in 1582 to a family of Andalusian origin, studied law with Ibn al-Qadi, who died in 1616, and attended Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr's lessons at Dila. His verse primer, al-Murshid al-mu'in, on belief, the duties of Islam and Sufi conduct, is still memorised in North African schools.

Muhammad Mayyara, born at Fez in 1591, studied with Ibn Ashir and al-Maqqari and also with al-Ayachi. He wrote the standard commentary on his teacher's primer, al-Durr al-thamin, and a defence of Muslims of Jewish descent, whose position had worsened since al-Mansur's death.

Yahya al-Hahi died in the kasbah of Taroudant on 4 March 1626, and his principality fell apart. Abu Hassun made Iligh the capital of the Sous and soon pushed into the Draa valley. The south-west now had a ruler who owed nothing to Marrakesh.

At Salé al-Ayachi preached holy war against the Spaniards of La Mamora and raised men of his own. When the Andalusians of the Kasbah killed the governors Zaydan sent them, in 1627, he stood behind their break with the sultan. In May he treated with the English envoy John Harrison, who offered him arms against Zaydan and sought English captives.

At Fez Abdallah's brother Abd al-Malik succeeded him in 1624. Until his death in 1626 or 1627, al-Ifrani writes, he saw the inheritance his brother had left him shrink year by year. Al-Mamun's line now held little beyond the new city of Fez.

Zaydan died at Marrakesh in September 1627, after twenty-four years of fighting brothers, nephews, a Mahdi and the holy men. He was buried beside his father in the royal tombs. He left several sons, among them Abd al-Malik, al-Walid, Ahmad and Muhammad al-Shaykh, and no settled rule for choosing between them.

As grand admiral, Murad Reis sent Salé's ships far north: they held Lundy island in the Bristol Channel, and in 1627 they raided Grindavík in Iceland and carried off captives for sale. Late in 1627, as Salé's politics turned against him, he moved his family and his business back to Algiers.

The first Moriscos of Salé came from Hornachos in Extremadura: some three thousand who left Spain with their wealth before the 1609 expulsion, followed by about ten thousand poorer exiles. In April 1627 the Hornacheros, holding the Kasbah on the Rabat bank, expelled the sultan's governor and governed the port through a council of their own, the diwan.

Abd al-Malik, Zaydan's son, was proclaimed at Marrakesh. At once his brothers al-Walid and Muhammad al-Shaykh rose against him; he beat them in battle after battle and took their treasure. Al-Ifrani remembered him as dull-witted and given to drink. His guard of European converts to Islam would prove the real danger.

Another of Zaydan's sons, Ahmad, made his own bid in the north. On 5 November 1627, forty-six days after his father's death, he entered Fez and struck coins in his name. He set the Arab tribe of the Hayayna raiding the city, until al-Ayachi came and crushed them.

Muhammad Zaghuda, al-Mamun's son, now held the kasbah of Fez. On 16 June 1628 his cousin Ahmad ibn Zaydan had him killed by treachery. Two months later, on 12 August, Ahmad himself was thrown into prison in Fez's new city before he could take the throne, and Fez was left to its quarters and their strongmen.

Called in by the people of Fez, al-Ayachi raided the Hayayna again and again until they submitted. He was now master of the Gharb plain from the coast toward Taza, fought the Spaniards at La Mamora and Larache, and dealt with the English as a power in his own right. Scholars such as Ibn Ashir gave his war its legitimacy.

Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII's chief minister, was building a French navy and a policy overseas. In 1626 Razilly sent him a memorandum urging trade and bases abroad, and proposed seizing Mogador to choke the Saadian port of Safi. Richelieu agreed, and in 1629 Razilly sailed for Salé with seven ships.

In the summer of 1629 Razilly bombarded Salé, destroyed three corsair ships and landed a hundred men with supplies on Mogador island, though they were soon taken off again. In 1630 he was able to buy French captives back from the Moroccans, and he returned in 1631 to negotiate a treaty.

In 1630 the poorer Andalusians of the lower town rose against the Hornacheros, who kept the council and the customs revenue to themselves. After bloody clashes an agreement was reached under pressure from the English envoy Harrison: a sixteen-member diwan, eight from each side, a qaid chosen by the Andalusians, and the prize and customs money shared.

Still beset, the Hornacheros sent a draft treaty in 1631 to the Duke of Medina Sidonia, for the king. They would hand over the Kasbah, its 68 cannon and their ships if they might go home to Hornachos with their old privileges. Four leaders signed it, among them Mahamet ben Abdelkader, governor of the Kasbah.

The Duke of Medina Sidonia, captain general of Spain's galleys and Lerma's son-in-law, had helped organise the occupation of Larache and La Mamora. He was to pass the Hornacheros' offer to Philip IV. Negotiations began but came to nothing, and by 1636 the factions of Salé were fighting again.

Philip IV, king of Spain since 1621, was the offer's intended recipient; his garrisons already held Larache and La Mamora. The talks did not prosper, and Spain gained no third fortress on the Moroccan coast.

On 10 March 1631 the European converts in Abd al-Malik's service murdered him at Marrakesh while he was drunk, and he was buried beside his father. The English agent John Harrison, who had dealt with his court, published an account of his life in 1633.

Al-Walid was proclaimed the same day. To make himself safe he killed most of the princes who might rival him and threw his brother Muhammad al-Saghir into prison. He kept the guard of converts that had killed his brother.

In 1631 the people of Sijilmasa in Tafilalt swore allegiance to Moulay Sharif, of the Alawi sharifs, a family descended from the Prophet that had until then led the oasis only in religion. To deal with the fortress of Tabouasamt, which refused him, he called in his friend Abu Hassun, lord of the Sous.

Abu Hassun took Sijilmasa in 1631 and kept a governor of his own in the oasis. When Sharif's son Muhammad stormed Tabouasamt by night, Abu Hassun ordered his governor to seize Sharif, and around 1635 or 1636 Sharif was sent to the Sous as a prisoner.

With his father a captive, Muhammad gathered fighters from Sijilmasa and the country round it, and from 1636 he was the oasis's ruler in all but name. He had the plunder of Tabouasamt to pay them, and Abu Hassun's officials, who were said to tax a man even for sitting in the sun, made him allies.

Al-Walid ruled Marrakesh with the same guard of European converts. When they asked for their pay, he told them to go and eat orange peel. Four of them ambushed and killed him on 21 February 1636.

Razilly returned to Morocco in 1631 and, with help from the Pallache family, negotiated a treaty that gave France preferential tariffs, a consulate and freedom of worship for French subjects. He then turned to North America, where he led the French colony of Acadia until his death in 1635.

Louis XIII had sent Razilly to scout the Moroccan coast in 1619 and backed Richelieu's naval plans. He ratified the 1631 treaty in 1632. Its terms, low tariffs, a consul and freedom of worship for French subjects, were the kind of privileges France already held in the Ottoman empire as capitulations.

Ibn Ashir died at Fez on 3 July 1631, about fifty years old. He had at first hesitated to rule that al-Ayachi might fight the Andalusians of Salé, until he was shown proof that they were helping the Spaniards; then he gave the ruling. His pupils included Mayyara and Abd al-Qadir al-Fasi.

Abd al-Qadir al-Fasi, grandson of the Sufi master Abu al-Mahasin, was born at Ksar el-Kebir in 1599 and came to Fez to study in 1616. Robbed on the road home, he took it as a sign to stay. He studied with Ibn Ashir among others and became the city's leading teacher and Sufi master, called master of the community.

Al-Maqqari died in Cairo in 1631 or 1632, as he was preparing to move to Damascus. His Nafh al-tib, a compendium of the history and literature of al-Andalus, became the basis of scholarly work on Muslim Spain until the twentieth century.

On 22 February 1636, the day after al-Walid's murder, the people of Marrakesh brought his brother Muhammad al-Saghir out of prison and made him sultan. Son of a Spanish mother, he spoke good Spanish. He was mild and slow to shed blood, but his armies lost, and he ruled Marrakesh and its province, no more.

Moses Pallache, Joseph's son, had studied languages at Leiden and served the Moroccan court from 1622 to 1642 as secretary and interpreter for European affairs, translating Spanish, Dutch and French for four sultans, al-Saghir among them. He became one of the most influential men at court and a leader of Morocco's Jews.

In 1638 al-Saghir sent his ambassador Muhammad ibn Askar to Charles I. He carried a letter urging the king to send the arms promised under their treaty of 20 September 1637 and to stop English merchants selling weapons to the sultan's enemies at Agadir. The smuggling went on.

In 1636 the Andalusians of Rabat stormed Salé's Kasbah, drove out the Hornacheros, and then attacked Old Salé, al-Ayachi's base. Al-Ayachi had already turned on them, accusing them of supplying the Spaniards, once the scholars ruled war on them lawful. On 13 May 1637 he signed a convention with Charles I.

Charles I wanted the English captives held at Salé freed. He came to terms with al-Ayachi, master of Old Salé, in May 1637, and with the sultan al-Saghir in September, who wanted arms and an end to English dealings with his enemies. To force the corsairs' hand he sent a naval squadron.

William Rainsborough led four royal warships and two armed merchantmen against Salé in June 1637. His guns bombarded the Andalusians' Kasbah in support of al-Ayachi's side, and English captives were freed. Charles offered him a knighthood, which he declined, and gave him a gold chain and medal.

Antonius de Liedekerke, a Dutch sea captain, sailed from Texel on 1 September 1640 as envoy to al-Saghir and reached Salé three months later. In March 1641 the sultan received him at Marrakesh. In July he left Safi with forty-five Dutchmen freed after two years of captivity, and he was home at Texel on 12 November 1641.

The Haarlem engraver Adriaen Matham, whom Frans Hals had painted as an ensign of the civic guard, travelled with Liedekerke. He drew the El Badi palace before its destruction, the fortress of Mogador and many fish. His engraving of the palace carries a portrait of al-Saghir.

Murad Reis, taken by the Knights of Malta in 1635 and freed in 1640, came back to Morocco and was made governor of the fortress of Oualidia near Safi. In December 1640 his Dutch daughter Lysbeth, who had sailed out with the Dutch, found him seated on a carpet among his servants, an old and feeble man.

Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr died in 1636, and his son Muhammad al-Hajj made the zawiya a power. In 1638 he built a new walled seat, with mosques and palaces, at present-day Aït Ishaq, and the Berbers of the Moulouya swore to him. Al-Saghir marched against him and lost; the sultan's writ now stopped at the Oued el-Abid.

About 1637 Muhammad paid a great ransom and brought his father home. With the plunder of Tabouasamt he raised more men, and the oasis rose and drove out Abu Hassun's officials. On 23 April 1640 Sijilmasa swore allegiance to Muhammad himself; he then beat Abu Hassun and took the Draa valley from him.

Some Andalusians who escaped al-Ayachi fled to Dila. Dila asked him to spare them, and he refused. Muhammad al-Hajj and his Berbers broke his army; al-Ayachi took refuge with the Khlot tribe, who murdered him on 30 April 1641. The Christian garrisons on the coast, al-Nasiri says, celebrated his fall.

Al-Khadir Ghaylan, of a family of Granadan origin settled among the Jbala, had been put in charge of the holy war in the Habt, the north-west, by al-Ayachi. After his chief's death he carried on alone, against the Portuguese at Tangier, the Spaniards at Larache, and Dila.

In the Draa valley the zawiya of Tamegroute, a school since the 1570s, was led by Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ansari. He was killed in 1642, and by his testament the zawiya passed to Muhammad ibn Nasir, a jurist of the valley.

Muhammad ibn Nasir, born in the Draa in 1602, was a jurist and grammarian trained in the valley's mosques. Taking over Tamegroute in 1642, he made it a great centre of teaching and of books, copying many with his own hand. His order, the Nasiriyya, spread across Morocco, and his prayer was known at Fez as the sword of Ibn Nasir.

In 1645 Ibn Nasir married Hafsa, daughter of Abd Allah al-Ansari and widow of his predecessor Ahmad ibn Ibrahim, joining the house he had inherited to his own. She bore him Ahmad, later head of the Nasiriyya, who went to Mecca six times and brought back the books that became Tamegroute's library.

With al-Ayachi gone, Dila took Meknes, Fez and Salé in 1641 and went on to Tetouan; Muhammad al-Hajj governed Fez from then on. A Jewish chronicle says that in 1646 he ordered the synagogues of Fez closed, and they were desecrated or destroyed. Dila now ruled the north and centre, from the Atlantic plains to the Moulouya.

Mubarka, of the Saharan Mghafra, was the mother of Sharif's son Ismail, born at Sijilmasa in 1645. Al-Nasiri names her; a later historian says she was a black slave given to Sharif as a concubine while Abu Hassun held him, a story her son's birth date makes doubtful. Ismail would rule Morocco from 1672 to 1727.

On 28 April 1646 Muhammad al-Hajj beat Muhammad ibn Sharif at al-Qa'a, and Dila's Berbers sacked Sijilmasa while the fifteen-year-old Rashid watched. The peace drew a line at Jebel Ayachi: the desert side to the sharif, the rest to Dila. In August 1649 he routed the sharif and the townsmen of Fez at Dahr al-Ramka and took Fez back.

Muhammad soon broke the 1646 peace, holding that he owed nothing to men who had defiled Sijilmasa. In 1649 the people of Fez called him in against Dila, and on 10 July he entered the city to their oaths. Six weeks later Dila routed him at Dahr al-Ramka. He went home to Tafilalt, but kept his claim.

In 1649 al-Saghir and Muhammad ibn Sharif exchanged poems by letter. The sharif's reply, composed for him by a jurist of Fez, warned the sultan against the Shabbanat, the Arab tribe close to his throne, who hoped one day to have the kingship for themselves. The warning would prove right.

Muhammad al-Murabit, brother of Muhammad al-Hajj, was Dila's great teacher: a grammarian and jurist who wrote on law, poems in praise of the Prophet and a verse work on the sharifs. Students left the troubled cities for Dila's teachers and library. Among his pupils was the young al-Hasan al-Yusi.

Abu Salim al-Ayyashi, born in 1627 or 1628 in the Middle Atlas, grew up in the zawiya his father had founded on Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr al-Dila'i's advice. He studied with Ibn Nasir in the Draa and with Abd al-Qadir al-Fasi and Mayyara at Fez, though the times kept him from studying at Dila. In 1649 he made his first pilgrimage.

Abd al-Rahman al-Fasi, born at Fez in 1631, studied with his father Abd al-Qadir and other scholars of the family. He became a writer of some 170 works on law, history, music and astronomy, among them a treatise on the astrolabe, and he wrote his father's life.

Muhammad al-Hajj placed his son Abdallah over Salé as governor, binding the corsair port to his own house. Dila had held Salé since 1641, while Dutch and French consuls dealt with its Andalusian council. Abdallah would one day lead Dila himself, and lose it to Rashid.

In 1652 or 1653 Ghaylan's men took Ksar el-Kebir, capital of the Habt, from Dila. He killed there Ali ibn Ahmad, the man who had carried out al-Ayachi's murder, and drove out families who had sided with Dila. He made the town his capital and turned to the Christian ports.

Al-Hasan al-Yusi, a Berber of the Aït Youssi born about 1631, wandered as a student through the Sous, Marrakesh, the Draa and Tafilalt. At Dila he studied with al-Murabit and won the favour of Muhammad al-Hajj, and his Sufi master was Ibn Nasir of Tamegroute. He became the greatest Moroccan scholar of his century.

Al-Saghir died in the mid-1650s, and his young son Ahmad al-Abbas was proclaimed at Marrakesh. The boy's mother was of the Shabbanat, the tribe of Zaydan's mother too, and under his reign her kin grew strong. In 1659 they besieged Marrakesh for months. His mother urged him to go out and make peace; he went, and was murdered.

Abd al-Karim, called Karrum al-Hajj, the young sultan's maternal uncle and commander of his army, killed him outside the walls and was proclaimed at Marrakesh in 1659. He locked up al-Abbas's wives and children in a tower. With him ended the Saadian dynasty, which had ruled all Morocco for about a century.

On 28 May 1655 Ghaylan led the tribes against Spanish Larache and tried to breach its walls until a sally drove them off; on 9 May 1657 he attacked again, so hard that Spanish writers said the garrison was saved by a miracle. He also pressed Portuguese Tangier, whose governor asked him for a truce in 1656.

After the last Saadian's murder, Muhammad al-Hajj was proclaimed sultan at Fez in 1659. His title outran his reach: Karrum al-Hajj held Marrakesh, Ghaylan the north-west, Iligh the Sous and the Alawis Tafilalt. In 1660 he fought Ghaylan and, by one account, won, at heavy cost; another account gives the victory to Ghaylan.

In 1660 Salé rose against Dila's governor, and Ghaylan's men laid siege to its Kasbah, a siege that lasted until 1664. The port Dila had ruled since 1641 was slipping away, and with it Dila's hold on the north.

Moulay Sharif died at Sijilmasa on 4 June 1659, twenty-eight years after the oasis first swore to him. Sijilmasa swore again to his eldest son, Muhammad, who had ruled in practice since his father's captivity.

Rashid, born in 1631, refused the oath. Muhammad's horsemen caught him on the way to the Draa and jailed him; he escaped, was caught and escaped again, and went from tribe to tribe through the mountains, a prince with nothing. Within ten years he would take Fez, break Dila and rule all Morocco.

Abu Hassun, who had ruled the Sous from Iligh since 1626 and once held Sharif prisoner, died about 1660. His son Muhammad succeeded him at Iligh, which remained outside the reach of both Fez and Marrakesh.