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

In the mid-thirteenth century the Berbers were still the majority element in the Moroccan population. Their great tribal confederations – Sanhaja, Zanata, Masmuda and others – still dominated the sultanate and provided its ruling dynasties. But the insurrections of zealot warriors were giving way in the countryside to the more peaceful charisma of holy men and saints. Likewise, the linguistic and ethnic composition of Morocco was changing. Under the Almoravids and the Almohads the language of government and of the army had been Berber, but during the second half of the twelfth century the Almohads enrolled Banu Hilal and other Arab tribesmen from Ifriqiya to fight in their armies in Spain, and later encouraged them to settle in the Atlantic plain of Morocco. Still during the thirteenth century, another Arab grouping, the Banu Ma’qil, moved in from further east to occupy the southern and eastern part of the Atlas, from where they spread out over the desert fringes south of the mountains. By the fifteenth century these pastoralists, now known as the Banu Hassan, had overrun much of the western Sahara as far as the north bank of the Senegal, where they were encountered by the earliest sea-borne expeditions of the Portuguese to the West African coast.

These Arab tribesmen were to have a profound effect on the language and culture of the sultanate in the centuries to come. Far from being the unwanted locusts depicted by Ibn Khaldun, the Banu Hilal and the Banu Ma’qil migrated primarily as warriors. They became the allies of the ruling dynasties in Tunis, Tlemcen and Fez, or, more generally, of one or other of the petty warlords who held precarious power over the small towns and countryside of the Maghrib. Before long, the Arabs had superseded the earlier Berber aristocracy and were waxing fat off the taxes and tribute they exacted from the local populations. In these circumstances Berber peasants either withdrew to previously uninhabited levels of the high mountains, or else became absorbed into the Arab tribal system. The rough vernacular of the Banu Hilal became the Arabic of the majority and fictitious genealogies from classical Arabia became the touchstone of respectability. By the sixteenth century the process of arabisation was so nearly complete that Moroccan society was divided no longer mainly by ethnicity but by wealth. The powerful became wealthy through force of arms, by extracting tribute from the less powerful. The poor became increasingly impoverished.

These problems of insecurity were mitigated in Morocco by the spiritual potency of the holy men, the marabouts, who played a role not dissimilar from that of the monks of medieval Europe. The word came from murabit, meaning ‘a man of the ribat’, one of the many fortresses built mostly during the time of the Almoravids for the warrior monks who defended the frontier of Islam against the infidel. In Ifriqiya, they had become in the course of time rather more the retreats of hermits, who sought sanctity through asceticism and withdrawal from the world. During the time of the Almohads both kinds of marabouts became profoundly influenced by Sufism, a new kind of mysticism developed in the eastern part of the Islamic world and introduced into the Maghrib by the Banu Hilal and other immigrant Arabs. There it fused with the maraboutism of the Berbers to inspire the dominant form of popular Islam, and gradually multiplied into a whole variety of tariqas, or ‘ways’ to the knowledge and experience of God. In the religious practice of country people, it centred upon the cult of saints. The faithful liked to live near a holy man during his lifetime, and to send their sons to serve him and so learn to follow his example. The tombs of former holy men became places of pilgrimage and spiritual revival. And the marabouts themselves often led their devotees on to make the greater pilgrimage to Mecca.

Moroccan pilgrims were well known all along the routes to the east. They travelled in great numbers, using the desert trails in preference to those which passed through the coastal towns, and paused for rest and refreshment at the zawiyas of other holy men along the way. The leading zawiyas had became places of great importance, both in the diffusion of Sufi devotion and in the resolution of disputes between the pilgrims and the local people. In the Fezzan a Moroccan dynasty, the Awlad Muhammad, ruled for more than two centuries following the retreat of the kings of Kanem from their northernmost possessions. And with the Islamisation of the Nilotic Sudan, it was the Sufism of the Islamic Far West which became the practice of country people. In Morocco itself, the political and sociological significance of maraboutism was that it bridged the gap between town and country and, still more importantly, between the settled lowlanders of the bilad al-makzan, who paid taxes to the central treasury, and the dissident highlanders of the bilad al-siba, the ‘land running to waste’.

THE MARINID SULTANATE

After the defeat of the Muslim army by the Christian forces at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, the superb military empire, created by the first Almohad caliph ‘Abd al-Mumin only some sixty years previously, began to crumble. In Morocco it survived for another half-century until it was finally extinguished in its capital city of Marrakesh. As we have seen, the Almohads were replaced in Ifriqiya by the Hafsid dynasty, and in the central Maghrib by the ‘Abd al-Waddids or Zayyanids of Tlemcen. During this period of transition Seville, the great capital of Muslim Spain, fell to Castile in 1248. The conquest of the rich Muslim sultanates of Andalusia was largely complete. Only the mountains of Granada remained in Muslim hands. Great numbers of Spanish Muslims fled to the towns and cities of North Africa, to Tunis and Tlemcen, a few to the small port of Algiers, but the largest numbers to Fez and other towns in Morocco.

Here, in the heartlands of lowland Morocco, the Almohads came under pressure from the Banu Marin, a sub-tribe of the great confederation of Zanata Berbers, which had its home base on the desert edges of south-eastern Morocco. They were warrior pastoralists, pursuing the age-old tactics of their kind, by encroaching on the wealth of their settled neighbours as soon as there appeared to be any chink in their defences. ‘Originally from the desert’, wrote a nearly contemporary chronicler, ‘where they belonged to the noblest among the Zanata, the Marinids knew neither silver metal nor money, neither agriculture nor trade. All their wealth consisted of camels, horses and slaves.’ The Marinids took advantage of the weakness of the Almohads to invade the plains of north-eastern Morocco, where they established sporadic control over the peasant cultivators, and forced towns to pay tribute to them instead of to the Almohad government. Fez succumbed to the tribesmen in 1248, and finally in 1269 the Marinid chief, Abu Yusuf Ya’qub, captured Marrakesh and proclaimed himself sultan. But his ambitions did not stop there. His long-term aim was to resurrect the Almohad empire, with its boundaries running from southern Morocco into southern Spain and from the Atlantic to Ifriqiya. For his capital he chose not Marrakesh but the ancient northern city of Fez, where he built a new administrative and military town on the outskirts of the old city, with separate Christian and Jewish quarters, a palace for himself, and a library for the benefit of the scholars who flocked to his court. Abu Yusuf, despite his warrior background, was something of a connoisseur and bibliophile, and the skills and artistry of the Andalusian refugees helped him to turn Fez into the most illustrious city of the Maghrib, rivalling in architectural glory the Muslim towns of southern Spain. Their presence strengthened the religious, intellectual and commercial life of the city, in which the manufacture of cloth and leather goods flourished, as did trade, directed in large measure to Spain and the Italian cities.

The Marinids governed Morocco with the help of their Zanata followers, but also, and increasingly, by co-opting the Arab tribesmen settled on the Atlantic plain. Indeed, the Zanata themselves soon became assimilated into the Arab tribal system. The formerly independent Arabs now functioned as makzan, or government tribes, exempted from the taxes they collected from the peasant subjects of the regime. When riding in state, the sultan was flanked on either side by an Arab and a Zanata chief, symbolising the relationship between the ruler and the twin pillars of his power. Within their new state the Marinids threw their weight behind the urban religious establishment. The authority of the Maliki school of law, which had been swept aside by the Almohads, was restored. The towns, with their cathedral-like mosques and resplendent madrasas, or religious colleges, of which the Marinids built no less than seven, became bastions of Islamic orthodoxy. In the countryside, on the other hand, people turned increasingly to the zawiyas of the marabouts and the shrines of the Sufi saints for religious and practical succour.

Looking beyond Morocco, the first concern of the Marinids was to secure to themselves the dominant share in the profits of the trans-Saharan trade. The old trail crossing the western Sahara had been severely disrupted by the thirteenth-century incursions of the Banu Ma’qil into the border regions of the Sus and the Dar’a in southern Morocco. The trading caravans from Mali now travelled by a more easterly route, starting from Walata at the desert’s southern edge and passing the salt mines of Taghaza to Sijilmasa, the great oasis entrepôt to the south of the Atlas. From there the northern merchants found it easier to travel over the bleak plateau of the central Maghrib to Tlemcen than to cross the high passes of the Atlas to Morocco. And it was thus at the ports of Tlemcen at Oran and Hunayn, rather than those of northern Morocco, that the gold trade now passed into the hands of the European merchants from Spain and Italy. The Tlemcen trade reached its peak in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and it so happens that a remarkable set of family records of it survives in the papers of five brothers of the Maqqari family, from which a detailed picture can be reconstructed. Two of the brothers lived in Tlemcen, one in Sijilmasa and two more in Walata. The two last had made themselves comfortable by building houses of stone and marrying local wives. ‘The one in Tlemcen dispatched to his Saharan brother such merchandise [as] he requested, and the Saharan one sent him skins, ivory, [kola] nuts and gold dust. As for the one in Sijilmasa, like the needle of a balance, he informed them of downward and upward trends in prices, and wrote to them about the situation of the various traders and local events. And thus their wealth increased and their situation improved considerably.’

It was only to be expected that the self-confident Marinid conquerors of Morocco would make Tlemcen their prime target for further expansion. They made their first attempt before the end of the thirteenth century, by laying siege to the capital city for eight years on end, but without result. Finally in 1337 they succeeded, following another grim siege, conducted by the so-called Black Sultan of Morocco, Abu’l-Hasan. All the northern outlets of the trans- Saharan trade were thus brought under a single rule. Far to the south, the ruler of Mali, Mansa Suleyman, was quick to respond to the changed political and military circumstances in the Maghrib, sending an embassy to Abu’l-Hasan, the members of which, according to Ibn Khaldun, ‘lauded the authority of the sultan, acknowledged his prerogative, conveyed the submission of their king, and his willingness to pay the sultan his dues, and to act according to his wishes and advice.’

During the twenty years of his reign (1331–51) Abu’l-Hasan’s armies campaigned relentlessly across the length and breadth of the Maghrib and in southern Spain. It was in 1333 that the Black Sultan first crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and captured Algeciras as a bridgehead. He returned there in 1340, when the Marinid fleet, with the assistance of Hafsid ships, defeated the Castilian navy. But later that year Christian forces inflicted a crushing defeat on the Muslim army at the battle of the Río Salada, a defeat that marked the end of active Muslim intervention in Spain. However, within a few years virtually the whole of the Maghrib was under Abu’l Hasan’s control. Not content with reducing the Hafsids to a state of vassalage, he took advantage of a succession dispute and in 1347 entered Tunis and formally annexed Ifriqiya. This was the high point of the Marinid dynasty, at least in the eyes of Ibn Khaldun, then a fifteenyear- old student in the town. Years later, having been in the service of Abu ‘Inan, the son of the Black Sultan, at Fez, Ibn Khaldun expressed bitter disappointment at the failure of the Marinids to achieve their lofty imperial ideals. For Abu’l-Hasan in Ifriqiya nemesis fast approached.

The Black Death arrived in Tunis. The sultan foolishly stirred up an Arab revolt in Ifriqiya, and was soundly defeated. Thereupon Abu ‘Inan proclaimed himself sultan, and deposed and soon defeated his father, who died a lonely fugitive in the snows of the Atlas. A few years later Abu ‘Inan, who replicated his father’s endeavours against Tlemcen, Tunis and the Arab tribes, was murdered by his vizier in Fez.