by Giles Milton
The twenty-six-year-old Ismail was not noted for his good humor, but he could scarcely refrain from smiling when he heard the messenger’s news. His brother, the ruling sultan, was dead—killed by his own recklessness. He had been celebrating the end of Ramadan with customary abandon, carousing with friends and drinking deeply from the forbidden bottle. As he charged on horseback through the gardens of his Marrakesh palace, he had fallen from his stallion and “dashed out his brains against an arm of a tree.” By the time his aides reached him, Sultan Moulay al-Rashid was bleeding to death.
Moulay Ismail knew he would have to act with speed and cunning if he was to secure the throne. He had no fewer than eighty-three brothers and half-brothers, as well as countless nephews and cousins. Although Ismail was one of the most plausible claimants to the throne, the death of a sultan in Morocco invariably signaled an outbreak of insurrection and fratricide as rival factions sought to eliminate one another. These orgies of bloodshed were unpredictable, and the favored heir was by no means certain to succeed.
Moulay Ismail’s first action was to seize the treasury at Fez. Once this was secured, he proclaimed himself sultan and reputedly celebrated his first day in power by slaughtering everyone in the city who refused to submit to his rule.
Deception and betrayal were second nature to Moulay Ismail. He had grown up in a land that was fractured into separate kingdoms and ruled by bitter rivals. Internecine feuds were commonplace; brutal warlords, mercenaries and fanatical holy men were continually butchering their rivals and installing themselves as petty despots. Ruling from mud-walled kasbahs, they were, for a time, absolute masters of all they could survey. They would plunder and pillage without mercy, and with teams of European slaves to serve them they would live in considerable splendor, until they found themselves evicted by a more successful—and less dissolute—princelet.
Moulay Ismail’s patrimony lay in the sand-blown wastes of the Tafilalt, in southern Morocco. It was “an extremely sandy and barren country,” according to the French slave, Germain Mouette, “because of the excessive heat which continues throughout the year.” The natives of this dusty backwater scratched a living as best they could, but remained a “wild, savage and cruel people.”
For centuries, Moulay Ismail’s family had ruled the Tafilalt with carefree indolence, stirring from their torpor only to murder a rival or dispatch an interloper. Their power did not extend beyond the palm-fringed oases of the desert, and there was little sign that they were about to thrust themselves into the imperial pleasure palaces of Fez and Marrakesh. Yet they were a family with noble roots and an illustrious pedigree. One of their forebears, al-Hasan bin Kasem, was a sharif—a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. This imbued them with a sacred piety, which Moulay Ismail would later exploit with aplomb.
Many of Morocco’s bandit rulers could command small armies of European slaves and renegades, and Ismail’s family were no exception. Moulay Ismail himself had been given his first slave when he was just three years of age. Dom Louis Gonsalez was a Portuguese cavalry officer who had been ambushed and captured while serving in the garrison of Tangier, at that time held by Portugal. Dom Louis soon found himself playing father to the toddler: “he had him continually in his arms,” wrote one, “and gradually won the affection of the little prince.” In later years, Moulay Ismail “would always have him in attendance” and would eventually free Dom Louis after he had served more than thirty years in captivity. He was one of the few slaves who would ever escape his grasp.
The clan into which Ismail was born had become unruly and quarrelsome, and their hands were steeped in fratricidal blood. In 1664, Moulay Ismail’s brother Moulay al-Rashid had wrested the family lands from a rival sibling, murdering him in the process. After installing himself as ruler of the Tafilalt, he led his army north toward the Rif and added this mountainous domain to his fiefdom.
Soon after, he captured the populous city of Fez and tortured its governors with such enthusiasm that the terrified townsfolk of nearby Meknes immediately capitulated. Moulay al-Rashid, feeling that his hour had arrived, promptly declared himself sultan of all Morocco and installed his young brother Ismail as governor of Meknes and viceroy of Fez. In the space of two bloodstained years, the family’s fortunes had been transformed.
Moulay al-Rashid had gained his kingdom through terror, and he vowed to rule by terror as well. Germain Mouette, who witnessed him in power, was appalled by his unstable temperament. “If I were to undertake the narration of all the cruelties and massacres he has committed,” he wrote, “of all the human blood he has shed for trifling faults … the story would make a great volume.” Rashid hoped to extend his frontiers even farther and acquired bands of European slaves to fight his battles. These unfortunate captives proved invaluable in his struggle to pacify the land; many were expert gunners who were able to reduce mud-walled kasbahs to dust with a few well-placed cannonballs. Moulay al-Rashid’s victorious army swept southward to the pink-walled city of Marrakesh, which was captured after a token resistance. The sultan was so “inflated with prosperity” that he began to plan the conquest of the southern Sahara. But before this could be achieved, his life was cut short amidst the lemon groves of his Marrakesh palace.
The weary European slaves welcomed his death, hoping that the constant battles would at long last come to an end. So did the sultan’s kaids, or lords, who had been relieved of much of their wealth during his reign of terror. What neither the slaves nor the kaids foresaw was that a far more tyrannous individual was waiting to wrest the reins of power. According to Mouette, “it was as if nature, before giving birth to so exceptional a being, had attempted first to sketch the model.”
The news that Moulay Ismail had proclaimed himself sultan infuriated many members of his extended family. One of his brothers, Moulay al-Harrani, also declared himself sultan, as did his nephew Moulay Ahmed. Other factions rose up in rebellion and attempted to carve out fiefdoms from the rapidly disintegrating empire.
Moulay Ismail’s forces proved more than a match for these fledgling armies, and he was encouraged by a number of decisive victories. His military successes—like those of his late brother—were due in part to the services of the European slaves he had managed to capture. “Having some Christian slaves which he took from the Jews,” wrote one of England’s few Islamic scholars, Simon Ockley, “that were very skilled in managing his cannon, he soon became formidable to the enemy.”
Moulay Ismail rarely showed magnanimity toward the slaves he captured in battle. When the town of Taroudant fell to his troops, he seized 120 French slaves. Having poked and prodded these miserable captives, he declared them to be overfed and ordered them to be denied rations for a week. Then, when they were crying out for food, he sent them on a long march to Meknes.
One of these slaves, Jean Ladire, would later recount the woeful story of his life to the French padre Dominique Busnot. Ladire had by then spent more than three decades in slavery, yet he still had vivid memories of that dreadful march. It was almost 300 miles from Taroudant to Meknes, and many of the chained and shackled captives were suffering from a debilitating sickness—probably dysentery. Several of them dropped dead of fatigue, and “the survivors were oblig’d to carry their heads, cut off by their conductors, for fear they should be accus’d of having sold, or suffer’ d them to escape.”
After five years of warfare and unrest, Moulay Ismail brought much of Morocco under his control. Even the Salé corsairs, who had proved a thorn in the side of successive sultans, now realized that they had met their match. Fearful of Moulay Ismail’s growing power, they elected to submit themselves to his rule. But they soon learned that Moulay Ismail had no intention of disarming them, rather, he wished to utilize them for his own sinister purposes. They were to become an instrument of his regime, providing him with a constant stream of slave labor.
When Moulay Ismail felt his grip on power was secure, he returned to the provincial city of Meknes, where he enjoyed “all the sweets of eas
e and voluptuousness of vice.” He also began to turn his attentions to rebuilding a country that was in a truly desperate plight. For centuries, Morocco had seesawed from extraordinary richness to catastrophic decay. Now, it was in one of its darker periods. Once-fertile fields had been laid to waste and the greatest imperial cities had been denuded by slaughter and famine.
Fez had traditionally been the most opulent city in the kingdom. When Leo Africanus wrote his description of the metropolis as it was in about 1513, Fez was still of a size and grandeur to make a lasting impression. “A world it is to see,” wrote Africanus, “how large, how populous, how well fortified and walled this city is.” Fez in its heyday was the greatest city in western Islam. Its sumptuous mercantile palaces offered the comforts of secluded courtyards and shaded walkways, and the richest merchants had enchanting walled gardens adorned with pavilions and teahouses. Designed to delight both the eye and the ear, their focal point was “a christall–fountaine environed with roses and other odoriferous flowers and herbes, so that in the spring-time, a man may both satisfie his eies and solace his mind.”
In Africanus’s day, there were 700 mosques in the city, as well as scores of colleges and madrassas or religious seminaries. Fez had also boasted hospitals, bathhouses, and 200 fondouks or hostelries. Africanus, who had traveled widely in Europe, was impressed. “Never, to my remembrance, did I see greater buildings,” he wrote, “except it were the Spanish college at Bologna, or the palace of the Cardinall di San Giorgio at Rome.”
By the time Moulay Ismail seized power, Fez had fallen into a terrible state of dereliction. Many of the great palaces were in ruins, and weeds ran riot in the sunken Andalusian gardens. According to an anonymous English account, written in the early 1680s, whole quarters of the city had been abandoned, and the scholars and theologians of old had long since fled. “Former ages have had the honour to find this famous city in great beauty and glory,” reads the account, “but time hath laid a rough hand upon it, and render’d it so deformed that her founders would not in the least know her again.”
The author added that although the decaying ruins were testimony to the ingenuity of Morocco’s architects, “true religion and learning has deserted this people, so has all manner of art to that degree that, by their neglect and laziness, they must in half another age become a heap of rubbish and confusion.”
Not everything in Morocco lay in ruins when Moulay Ismail acceded to the throne. As he toured his newly won kingdom, he glimpsed the broken vestiges of past architectural glories. Many of the greatest monuments had been built under the aegis of the medieval Merenid kings and the sixteenth-century Saadians. In the desert city of Marrakesh lay the fantastical palace of this latter dynasty, whose sultans had lavished a veritable fortune on beautifying their imperial capital. The result was al-Badi—The Marvellous—a palace whose exquisite beauty was to haunt Moulay Ismail for many years. “All other palaces seem ugly,” wrote one visitor. “Its appearance is fairy-like, its waters are pure, its earth is perfumed, and its walls rise proudly into the air.” The palace interior was encrusted with powdered gold, carried across the Sahara from the fabled cities of Djenne and Timbuktu. The floors were paved with slabs of polished marble. When a Spanish ambassador visited al-Badi in 1579, he penned a breathless description of its priceless silks and costly damasks, its glittering fountains and Turkish carpets.
Moulay Ismail was similarly entranced; al-Badi was a world away from the dusty kasbah in which he had been raised. The sight of its dappled courtyards and shaded pavilions was forever etched on his mind, inspiring him to begin a project that would change the lives of thousands of Europeans. Shortly after securing the throne, the sultan conceived the idea of building an imperial palace on such a vast scale that even the fabled al-Badi would pale into insignificance.
Moulay Ismail also harbored vainglorious dreams of restoring Morocco to a position in which the country would be considered the equal of the great powers of Europe. He realized that capturing large numbers of white slaves would provide him with precisely the leverage he wanted over the great powers of Christendom. He could hold European monarchs to ransom and force them to send emissaries to Meknes with begging bowls in hand.
The sultan trusted his Salé corsairs to garner a regular supply of captives from the North Atlantic and Mediterranean. But he also had his own, more tantalizing vision of how to acquire large numbers of European slaves. Morocco’s coastline was dotted with enclaves and fortified settlements, occupied by garrisons of Spanish and Portuguese troops. The Spanish held the towns of Ceuta, Larache, Mamora and Arzila, while the Portuguese controlled Mazagan. Their other Moroccan stronghold, Tangier, had been ceded to England in 1661, when King Charles II was betrothed to Catherine of Braganza, Infanta of Portugal. Together, these enclaves had a combined population of about 10,000 men—soldiers and civilians whom Moulay Ismail intended to capture and retain as slaves.
He was particularly attracted to the idea of attacking Tangier, which stood guard over the Straits of Gibraltar. The English had hoped to use the port as a base from which to eradicate the Salé corsairs. But this had proved almost impossible, and the garrison had singularly failed to halt the capture of English slaves. Instead of spearheading raids on Moroccan soil, the troops now found themselves facing an increasingly hostile and dangerous sultan.
In the dying days of 1677, Moulay Ismail ordered his trusty commander, Kaid Omar, to launch an offensive against Tangier. The kaid was told to seize captives whenever the opportunity arose and send them in chains to Meknes. He was also to attempt to capture the city itself. Moulay Ismail was confident of success, for the English troops were half starved and stricken with disease. But Kaid Omar quickly discovered that capturing a city was altogether more difficult than defending it, and that his hope of seizing Tangier’s 2,000-strong garrison was steadily receding.
ON A BITTER January morning in 1681, a young English soldier could be seen pacing the battlements of Tangier. Colonel Percy Kirke made quite a spectacle as he marched up and down in his flamboyant uniform. He wore a long frock coat with slashed shoulder pads, while his chemise was decorated with lace ruffs and frilly sashes. His most foppish accessory was the dainty silk ribbon tied around each knee.
In normal circumstances, Colonel Kirke would not have dared to poke his head above the parapet in his formal dress uniform. For almost five years, the Moroccan forces had led charges against the citadel of Tangier and wreaked carnage among Kirke’s fellow soldiers. In 1678, Kaid Omar’s men had managed to destroy two of the outlying forts and had taken prisoner eight of the defenders, who were promptly led off to Meknes in chains. Delighted by his success in seizing these men, Kaid Omar launched a spectacular new wave of attacks and captured a further fifty-seven Englishmen. They, too, were shackled and sent to a gleeful sultan in Meknes.
Kaid Omar’s warriors showed such resolution that there was a very real fear among the English that the entire garrison would be overpowered and taken into slavery. In the event, a fortuitous arrival of reinforcement troops saved the day. Kaid Omar’s forces were beaten back, and the English and Scottish musketeers scored a decisive victory. “The attacque prov’d a very hott and bloody piece of service,” wrote one of the English soldiers, “ … come–ing to push of pike and handy blowes in severall places.” After a severe struggle, Kaid Omar’s troops were forced to abandon their offensive.
The garrison soldiers were elated by their victory, but their jubilation was tempered by the knowledge that large numbers of their countrymen—including nearly seventy members of their own garrison—were being held as slaves by the sultan. King Charles II, anxious to release these captives as soon as possible, decided to send an embassy to Moulay Ismail. Its purpose was to demand the immediate release of the slaves and discuss the terms of a lasting peace.
It was widely assumed that the slaves would be home within a matter of months. King Charles’s ministers were buoyed by the recent triumph over the Moroccan forces and spoke of Moulay Ism
ail as if he were a simpleton. One Tangier veteran, Colonel Edward Sackville, was appalled by their dismissive comments and warned them not to underestimate the Moroccans. “They discourse and debate matters calmly and judiciously,” he said, “and therefore I see not where the reason of this contempt of them lyes.”
The ambassadorial delegation was led by the trusty Sir James Leslie, who was specially knighted for the mission. He arrived in Tangier in December 1680 and was anxious to head directly to Moulay Ismail’s court. But his gifts for the sultan—transported on a separate vessel—had been delayed at sea. Since it was unthinkable for a foreign ambassador to arrive in Meknes empty-handed, Leslie decided to send a messenger to the sultan with an explanation of the delay.
The man chosen was most unsuitable for such an important role. Colonel Percy Kirke, a spineless individual, was a drunkard and a braggart who would later find himself castigated for his appalling lack of judgment. When Samuel Pepys met him in Tangier, he was horrified that such a man could be given a position of responsibility. “The tyranny and vice of Kirke … is stupendous,” he wrote, and added that he was saddened “to see so great a villain in his place [position].”
Colonel Kirke headed toward Meknes in January 1681. His experience of Moroccans had hitherto been limited to action on the battlefield, where he had been impressed by their skill and brutality. Now, as he traveled toward Meknes accompanied by a locally raised guard, he was startled to discover that the sultan’s fearsome warriors could be quite charming in times of peace. “I am among the most sevilisde pepell in the worlde,” he wrote, “and iff ever I have a sone, I will rether choose to send him hether for breadin then to the cort of France.” His hosts took him hunting for wild boar and antelope, and grilled large quantities of meat for him to dine on each evening. “Wee have in a prodigall manner more meate than wee can tell what to doe withall,” wrote Kirke.