Saadi Sultanate

At a glance

Why is it called the Saadi Sultanate?

The name was given by others. The historian Muḥammad al-Ṣaghīr al-Ifrānī, who wrote the main chronicle of the dynasty in the 1720s, explained that the rulers never used it "ni dans leurs diplômes, ni sur leurs sceaux, ni dans les protocoles de leurs dépêches". In his account, the label came from opponents who doubted their noble descent and claimed they came from the Banū Saʿd, the Arabian tribe of Ḥalīma, the Prophet's wet nurse, rather than from the Prophet's own family.

The dynasty insisted on its descent from the Prophet's family. Al-Ifrānī quotes a letter from the later Saadian sultan Muḥammad al-Shaykh al-Ṣaghīr to the ʿAlawī prince Muḥammad b. al-Sharīf, protesting against the Banū Saʿd story and declaring: "Nous sommes de Tedsi, un des qsours de l'Ouad Draâ". The ʿAlawīs, another sharifian family, would later replace the Saadians.

How did the Saadians come to power?

As leaders of a holy war in the far south. In the early sixteenth century the Portuguese held a chain of fortified ports on Morocco's Atlantic coast, among them Santa Cruz do Cabo de Gué, founded in 1505 near today's Agadir. A commentator quoted by al-Ifrānī says the authority of the Wattasid sultans of Fez in the Sous was "purement nominale".

The family legend began in Medina. According to the Durrat al-sulūk, a source quoted by al-Ifrānī, the family's founder Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad, later called al-Qāʾim bi-amr Allāh, dreamt on his pilgrimage that two lions came out of his navel. A holy man explained that his two sons would rule. The same source says he kept repeating this prophecy until 915 AH (1509–10), when he openly claimed power.

Al-Ifrānī lists several holy men who were said to have sponsored him, among them Muḥammad b. Mubārak of Aqqa. The most precise account is that of the chronicler Ibn al-Qāḍī: in 916 AH (1510–11) the jurists of the Maṣmūda and the tribal chiefs invited al-Qāʾim to lead them, and at "un bourg nommé Tedsi, près de Taroudant" he received the oath of allegiance from people "unanimement disposé à faire la guerre sainte". His first target was the Portuguese post at Teftent (Founti), close to Agadir.

Al-Qāʾim soon had the people of Tidsi swear allegiance to his elder son Aḥmad al-Aʿraj. He moved north with him to Afughal in the Ḥāḥā country, leaving his younger son Muḥammad, the future al-Shaykh, in the Sous to "harceler l'ennemi nuit et jour". Al-Qāʾim died at Afughal in 923 AH (1517–18) and was buried near the shrine of the Sufi master al-Jazūlī.

How did the Saadians defeat the Wattasids?

Slowly, over almost forty years. Aḥmad al-Aʿraj, born in 891 AH (1486), extended his power from the Sous into the plains to the north. Al-Ifrānī dates his entry into Marrakesh to 930 AH (1523–24). A Wattasid siege, dated to June 1527 by the French historian Henry de Castries, failed.

Two battles followed, and the sources date them differently. Al-Ifrānī puts the first, at Anmāy, in July 1529 and says it ended in peace; Castries, citing Portuguese records, puts it in July 1531. The Wattasids were defeated at Bū ʿUqba on the Wādī al-ʿAbīd in July 1536. Al-Ifrānī then describes a treaty that divided Morocco, with the Saadians ruling from Tadla southwards, and dates it to 940 AH (1533–34). Other accounts give other years for this 'Treaty of Tadla'.

Then the brothers fell out. Al-Ifrānī writes that Muḥammad al-Shaykh won their war, took "l'anneau de la royauté" from his brother and imprisoned him in Marrakesh in 946 AH (1539–40). Castries, using Portuguese and Spanish documents, gives a longer sequence: a defeat of al-Aʿraj at the Wādī al-Nafīs in 1542, an agreement brokered by the princess Lalla Meriem, and a final defeat at El-Kohera on 19 August 1544.

When did the Saadians take Agadir?

On 12 March 1541, after a siege of six months. Many books still give 12 or 13 August 1536, the date in the Spanish writer Luis del Mármol, which Diego de Torres and Francisco de Andrada repeated. Castries showed in 1905 that this date cannot be right: a Portuguese letter shows that the Portuguese still held Santa Cruz in September 1537. He relied instead on a Portuguese chronicle that printed the governor Gutierre de Monroy's own report, written in captivity at Taroudant. Al-Ifrānī's year, 947 AH (1540–41), fits, and Castries suggested that Mármol misread 'Março' as 'Agosto'.

Torres, who published his account in 1586, gives the army as more than 50,000 men under al-Shaykh's son Muḥammad al-Ḥarrān, a figure found only in his book. The captives included the governor's daughter, Doña Mencía de Monroy; Castries records that al-Shaykh married her in 1541, and Torres surrounds her with a romantic story best read as legend.

The fall of Agadir changed the coast. According to Castries, it was after this loss that King John III decided to evacuate Safi and Azemmour, which was done in December 1541. Torres explains why the sharifs wanted the port: they needed "puerto seguro, donde los estrangeros viniessen a comprarlo", a safe harbour where foreigners would come to buy their sugar.

Why was sugar so important to the Saadians?

Because it was their most valuable export. The Saadians did not introduce sugar cane to Morocco: the French archaeologist Morgane Godener notes that it was already grown in the Sous in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and Leo Africanus described it there before the dynasty rose. What changed was the scale and the quality. Half a century after Leo, Mármol wrote that the sugar had become refined after a converted Jew restored the mills using Christian captives from Santa Cruz.

The archaeology shows a large industry. In the 1950s and 1960s Paul Berthier identified ten sugar works in the Sous plain. One of them was fed by the seguia Mahdia, an open canal that he traced for more than 45 kilometres along the south bank of the Oued Sous, supplying three mills in turn. Godener stresses that sugar became "une source de richesse essentielle pour la nouvelle dynastie", traded at Santa Cruz mainly with English and French merchants. Another mill, at Chichaoua west of Marrakesh, was excavated in 1957 and 1960.

Sugar also paid for the dynasty's monuments. Al-Ifrānī, quoting Aḥmad al-Manṣūr's court historian al-Fishtālī, writes that marble for the El Badi palace was brought from Italy "payé en sucre poids pour poids", and that al-Manṣūr had set up many sugar presses in the Ḥāḥā, at Chichaoua and elsewhere.

When did the Saadians take Fez?

At the end of January 1549. Al-Shaykh had captured the Wattasid sultan Aḥmad al-Waṭṭāsī in September 1545 and released him in August 1547 in return for Meknes and the Gharb, according to Portuguese documents cited by Castries. Fez then held out for about a year. The Spanish eyewitness Jerónimo Díez gives 31 January 1549 for the fall of the city, which Castries adopted; al-Ifrānī gives only the year 956 AH (1549). A Wattasid princess, Lalla Mahabib, negotiated the surrender.

The conquest had a dark side. Before entering Fez, al-Shaykh had the mufti ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Wansharīsī, who refused to break his oath to the Wattasid ruler, murdered at the Qarawiyyīn mosque. A Spanish report summarised by Castries says that his army consisted largely of Turks and renegades.

How did the Saadians resist the Ottomans?

By war, diplomacy and, in the end, at the cost of al-Shaykh's life. In June 1550 al-Shaykh took Tlemcen, west of Algiers, after a siege of nine months during which his son al-Ḥarrān died, and pushed east to the Chelif river. The Turks soon drove him out. In 959 AH (1552) the Ottoman sultan Süleyman sent an envoy to Marrakesh, al-Kharrūbī, "avec la mission de conclure une trêve et de fixer les limites communes".

The Ottomans then tried a Wattasid restoration. Abū Ḥassūn, the last Wattasid claimant, won over the pasha of Algiers, Ṣāliḥ Raʾīs. With a Turkish army he entered Fez on 9 January 1554. When the Turks had gone home, al-Shaykh returned; Abū Ḥassūn was killed in battle at Mosellema in September 1554. Al-Shaykh took Turkish deserters from Abū Ḥassūn's army into his service as a separate corps "qu'il appelait les janissaires".

That corps killed him. Al-Ifrānī tells that al-Shaykh boasted he would march on Egypt and called Süleyman "le sultan des pêcheurs", the sultan of fishermen, because the Turks were always at sea. Süleyman ordered his death. At Guelâguel in the High Atlas, Turks in his service entered his tent at night and one of them cut off his head with an axe. The head was sent to Istanbul and hung on the city wall. Al-Ifrānī dates the murder to 29 Dhū l-Ḥijja 964 AH, which is 23 October 1557.

The body was buried in Marrakesh, in the cemetery of the sharifs south of the Kasbah mosque, the site of today's Saadian Tombs. Three days later the governor of Marrakesh had the imprisoned al-Aʿraj and his children killed, to stop anyone from proclaiming him sultan.

Who was ʿAbd Allāh al-Ghālib?

Al-Shaykh's son and successor, who held Morocco together for seventeen years. He was born at Taroudant after 920 AH (1514) and was governing Fez for his father when the murder took place; Marrakesh recognised him in Muḥarram 965 AH (October–November 1557).

In early 1558 an Ottoman army under a son of Khayr al-Dīn Barbarossa, the pasha of Algiers, marched on Fez. Al-Ghālib defeated it near the Wādī al-Laban, and the Turks withdrew to Badis. Plague followed.

He was also a builder. In 970 AH (1562–63) he began the 'mosque of the sharifs' in the Mouassine quarter of Marrakesh, with its fountain, and he endowed a hospital. He rebuilt the madrasa beside the mosque of ʿAlī b. Yūsuf, today's Ben Youssef Madrasa, but al-Ifrānī insists that, "contrairement à l'opinion de beaucoup de gens", he was not its founder: the Marinid sultan Abū l-Ḥasan was. The popular story that alchemy paid for his buildings is, in al-Ifrānī's words, "une erreur absolue".

According to Ibn al-Qāḍī, al-Ghālib died of asthma on 27 Ramaḍān 981 AH, 21 January 1574. The tale that he died on his knees in prayer on the Night of Destiny is "absolument faux", al-Ifrānī says.

Who ruled the Saadi Sultanate?

Al-Ifrānī ended his chronicle with the verdict that the dynasty "a duré environ 150 ans et le nombre de ses princes a été de dix". Modern lists count differently, because the civil wars of 1603–1627 produced several rival sultans. The table follows al-Ifrānī's Hijri dates where possible.

What was the Battle of the Three Kings?

The battle of 4 August 1578 at the Wādī al-Makhāzin near Ksar el-Kebir, known in Portugal as Alcácer Quibir, in which three kings died in a single day.

Al-Ghālib's son Muḥammad al-Mutawakkil, whom al-Ifrānī calls the son of a slave mother, succeeded him in 1574. His uncles ʿAbd al-Malik and Aḥmad had fled to Algiers years before. ʿAbd al-Malik went to Istanbul with his mother, Saḥāba al-Raḥmāniyya, sailed with the Ottoman fleet that took Tunis in 1574, and as a reward obtained Turkish support. With about 4,000 Turkish soldiers, according to al-Ifrānī, he defeated his nephew and entered Fez at the end of March 1576. Al-Mutawakkil turned to King Sebastian of Portugal for help.

This alliance with a Christian king outraged Moroccan scholars. In a legal reply preserved by al-Ifrānī they argued that the old order of succession favoured the eldest member of the family, which made ʿAbd al-Malik the rightful heir, and that rulers who had called Christians against Muslims had been declared apostates by the scholars.

Sebastian sailed from Lisbon on 24 June 1578, according to the Portuguese chronicler Jerónimo de Mendonça. The size of his army is disputed:

• Mendonça, whose Jornada de África appeared in 1607, says the army "não chegava a desasete mil homens": 9,000 Portuguese, 3,000 Germans, 2,000 Castilians, 600 Italians and 1,500 Portuguese gentlemen adventurers.
• Arabic chroniclers quoted by al-Ifrānī give 125,000 men, or about 60,000 according to "d'autres auteurs".
• Encyclopaedia Britannica gives 20,000 Christians and 50,000 Moroccans.
• For the Moroccan army Mendonça gives more than 80,000 horse and more than 40,000 foot, "segundo os mesmos mouros dizem", as the Moors themselves said, with more than forty guns.

The armies met at the Wādī al-Makhāzin, a tributary of the Loukkos. ʿAbd al-Malik was gravely ill. Al-Ifrānī writes that he died in his litter "au moment même du premier choc", and that his chamberlain Riḍwān hid his death, going from tent to tent with orders in the sultan's name. Mendonça tells it differently: the sick sultan left his litter, mounted and charged, fell from his horse and was secretly put back into the litter, where he died. Britannica says he died the next morning.

The Portuguese army was destroyed. Al-Mutawakkil drowned trying to swim the river; his body was flayed and the skin, stuffed with straw, paraded through Marrakesh, which earned him the nickname al-Maslūkh, 'the flayed'. Sebastian's end is disputed: al-Ifrānī and Britannica say he drowned, while Mendonça describes how a servant, Sebastião de Resende, found the king's stripped body on the battlefield, and how it was buried at Alcácer in the house of the town's governor.

Al-Ifrānī dates the battle to Monday, the last day of Jumādā I 986 AH, which is 4 August 1578, and quotes the chronicle Durrat al-ḥijāl: God "dans un même jour il a fait périr trois princes … et n'en a élevé au pouvoir qu'un seul, Aboulabbâs Elmansour". Sebastian died without an heir, which, in Britannica's words, brought the Portuguese empire under Spanish control for the next sixty years. Many Portuguese believed that Sebastian would return; Britannica counts four impostors between 1584 and 1598.

Who was Aḥmad al-Manṣūr?

The victor's brother, the most famous Saadian ruler. Born at Fez in 956 AH (1549), the son of Lalla Masʿūda, a patron of mosques who built the Bab Doukkala mosque in Marrakesh, he was proclaimed sultan on the day of the battle. Later he was also called al-Dhahabī, 'the golden'. Al-Ifrānī explains that after the conquest of the Sudan so much gold arrived that al-Manṣūr paid his officials only in pure metal, and that 1,400 hammers struck gold coins every day at the palace gate. "Ce fut cette surabondance d'or qui fit donner au sultan le surnom de Eddzehebi". That is a chronicler's claim.

Al-Manṣūr claimed far more than a kingdom. In his own letters, quoted by al-Ifrānī, he called himself "le calife, l'imam, le prince des Croyants". García-Arenal describes how he received visitors from behind a curtain. Britannica describes him as resisting the demands of "his nominal suzerain, the Ottoman sultan", by playing France, Portugal, Spain and England against one another.

His great monument was the palace of al-Badīʿ, 'the Incomparable', one of the names of God. Al-Ifrānī records that the foundations were laid in Shawwāl 986 AH (December 1578) and that the building was finished only in 1002 AH (1593–94), although work never stopped. Italian marble was paid for weight for weight in sugar. García-Arenal adds that the marble came from Carrara and that Montaigne mentioned the deal.

The palace did not survive. The ʿAlawī sultan Moulay Ismāʿīl ordered it destroyed in 1119 AH (1707–08), and al-Ifrānī writes that the materials were scattered so widely that no town in Morocco failed to receive some of the debris. The printed translation gives the Gregorian years as 1610–1611, a misprint. What remains today are mainly bare earthen walls.

Why did Morocco invade the Songhai Empire?

For salt, gold and prestige, in proportions that historians still debate. The Timbuktu chronicler ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Saʿdī, whose Taʾrīkh al-Sūdān is the main source, tells the story through the salt mine of Taghaza in the Sahara. Al-Manṣūr demanded the mine from the Songhay ruler Askiya Isḥāq II. Isḥāq refused "en termes violents et injurieux", and sent javelins and "deux chaussures de fer" with his reply.

Other motives are clear from the wider sources. Al-Manṣūr wanted recognition of his caliphate from the rulers of the Sudan; the historian John Hunwick notes that he obtained the allegiance of Bornu in the 1580s. García-Arenal points to al-Manṣūr's "obsession with America" and the Atlantic.

The army left in Muḥarram 999 AH (October–November 1590). Al-Saʿdī gives 3,000 musketeers with twice that number of support staff. The Encyclopedia of War gives about 5,000 men, mostly Iberian mercenaries and Muslim converts, and says around half died crossing the desert. Their commander, Pasha Jūdar, was a freedman of the sultan according to al-Ifrānī, and "de petite taille" with blue eyes according to al-Saʿdī.

The armies met near Tondibi, a place whose name means 'black rock' in Songhay, about 48 kilometres north of Gao on the Niger. Al-Saʿdī gives Songhay 12,500 cavalry and 30,000 infantry. The Songhay army broke "in the twinkling of an eye", in Hunwick's translation. Hunwick dates the battle to Tuesday 17 Jumādā I 999 AH, 13 March 1591; the Encyclopedia of War gives 12 March. The French translation of 1900 gives 12 April, which Kaba notes all other sources contradict.

Askiya Isḥāq offered 100,000 pieces of gold and 1,000 slaves if the Moroccans withdrew. Jūdar referred the offer to Marrakesh, remarking that "la maison du chef des âniers au Maroc valait mieux que le palais de l'Askia". The Moroccans entered Timbuktu on 30 May 1591 and built a fort in the merchants' quarter.

What happened to Timbuktu's scholars?

They were arrested and deported. On 24 Muḥarram 1002 AH (October 1593) Pasha Maḥmūd b. Zarqūn assembled the people of Timbuktu in the Sankoré mosque to swear allegiance to al-Manṣūr. On the third day he had the doors closed and arrested the jurists. They reached Marrakesh in May 1594.

The best-known prisoner was the jurist Aḥmad Bābā. Britannica says he returned home when the sultan died in 1603, but the Taʾrīkh al-Sūdān records his arrival at Timbuktu on 26 February 1608, in Hunwick's dating. Hunwick adds that "all his exiled relatives died in Morocco".

The conquest enriched al-Manṣūr for a time. An English merchant, Jasper Thomson, reported in 1599 that Jūdar returned to Marrakesh with "thirty camels laden with tyber which is unrefined gold". But the occupation turned into a long war. Kaba writes that the Moroccans were "bogged down" by a resistance led by Askiya Nūḥ, that by 1612 the musketeers refused to fight, and that "the invasion swallowed up both the conqueror and the conquered". Abun-Nasr notes that after al-Manṣūr's death the gold caravans came only once every three years, and that the value of gold against silver fell from one to four in his reign to nearly one to twenty about twenty years later.

What was al-Manṣūr's alliance with England?

A trade partnership that grew into a proposal for war against Spain. Morocco sold England sugar and saltpetre for gunpowder. Elizabeth I's letters patent of 1585, which created the Barbary Company with a twelve-year monopoly, declared Moroccan goods "very necessary and convenient for the use and defence of this our realme of England". In return, García-Arenal writes, English cloth went to Morocco, and al-Manṣūr sought English timber, rigging and arms.

In 1600 al-Manṣūr sent an embassy to London. It was led by his secretary ʿAbd al-Wāḥid b. Masʿūd al-ʿAnnūrī. A contemporary note printed by Castries records that the party, three principals "with thirteene others", landed at Dover on 8 August 1600 and were lodged "neere the Royall Exchange, in Alderman Ratcliffes house". The Guardian article by Jerry Brotton and the University of Birmingham say instead that they stayed in a house on the Strand. The letter writer John Chamberlain reported that sailors refused to carry them on to Turkey, thinking it "odious and scandalous to the world to be too frendly or familiar with Infidells".

The secret purpose was an alliance against Spain. A memorandum of September 1600 proposed that Morocco and England together could take the Spanish Indies, east and west, and cited the conquest of a powerful kingdom in Guinea as proof that al-Manṣūr's soldiers could endure hot climates. Nothing was agreed. Both rulers died in 1603, Elizabeth in March and al-Manṣūr in August.

Al-ʿAnnūrī's portrait survives. It is an oil painting on oak panel, inscribed "1600 ABDULGUAHID. LEGATUS REGIS BARBARIAE IN ANGLIAM. AETATIS: 42", and belongs to the University of Birmingham, which calls it "the earliest surviving painting made in England that depicts a Muslim". Brotton has argued that the ambassador may have influenced Shakespeare's Othello; no document connects the two. He also wrote that Elizabeth discovered al-ʿAnnūrī was a Morisco, a Spanish-born Muslim, whereas an English agent's note of June 1600, printed by Castries, calls him "a naturall Moore borne, but of the race of the Fessians", a native Moroccan of Fez stock.

What happened after al-Manṣūr's death?

A civil war between his sons that lasted a generation. Plague had raged in Morocco since 1598, and al-Manṣūr fell ill in his camp near Fez on 11 Rabīʿ I 1012 AH and died of it a few days later, in August 1603. The story that his son Zaydān poisoned him with a fig is, al-Ifrānī says, "une pure fiction" invented by the common people.

Fez proclaimed Zaydān on 25 August 1603; Marrakesh proclaimed his brother Abū Fāris. A third brother, Muḥammad al-Shaykh al-Maʾmūn was released to fight Zaydān. Al-Ifrānī records that ʿAbd Allāh, al-Maʾmūn's son, took it on 22 December 1606 and let his troops sack it, and García-Arenal writes that the city was "thoroughly sacked and destroyed in 1609".

The war drew in Spain. Driven out, al-Maʾmūn asked the Spanish king for help, and the price was Larache. Al-Ifrānī records that the Muslim inhabitants were driven out, some killed, and that the Spaniards occupied it on 20 November 1610; Britannica says Spain held Larache until 1689. Al-Maʾmūn then asked the scholars of Fez whether it had been lawful to cede a Muslim town to ransom his children. Some approved, al-Ifrānī says, "parce qu'ils redoutaient la colère du souverain", and many fled rather than answer. He was murdered near Tetouan on 21 August 1613.

Zaydān's troubles were not over. A religious rebel from Sijilmasa, Abū Maḥallī, who claimed to be the Mahdī, took Marrakesh and forced Zaydān to flee to Safi. A High Atlas marabout rescued him, and Abū Maḥallī was shot dead in battle. In 1612, the historian Daniel Hershenzon writes, a Spanish fleet captured a French ship carrying "the entire manuscript collection" of Zaydān, which went to the library of El Escorial.

How did the Saadi Sultanate end?

By fragmentation. When Zaydān died in 1627, the Saadians still held Marrakesh, but much of the country had passed to local religious leaders and tribal powers. The historian Jamil Abun-Nasr names three main centres of opposition by the late 1620s:

• The Dilāʾ zāwiya in the Middle Atlas, a Sufi lodge founded in the 1560s that became a state. Abun-Nasr says the Dilāʾ routed a Saadian army in 1638; al-Ifrānī describes a decisive defeat at Abū ʿAqaba in 1050 AH (1640–41), after which the sultan's authority ended beyond the Wādī al-ʿAbīd.
• Abū Ḥassūn al-Samlālī of Iligh, who ruled the Sous and from 1631 the oasis of Tafilalt, and with them the trade with the Sudan.
• The Bou Regreg republic at Salé and Rabat, together with the holy warrior al-ʿAyyāshī.

The Bou Regreg republic was the work of Moriscos expelled from Spain. According to Castries, the Moriscos of Hornachos in Extremadura crossed to Morocco from late 1609 and settled at the mouth of the Bou Regreg. In 1627 they expelled Zaydān's governor and formed what a contemporary called a "seigneurie republicque", with "un gouverneur élu annuellement assisté d'un divan". Their corsairs, the 'Sallee Rovers', reached "the English Channel and even Ireland", Abun-Nasr writes.

Zaydān's son ʿAbd al-Malik was murdered by renegade troops in 1631; his brother al-Walīd was killed by four renegades in 1636 after telling them, when they demanded their pay, to eat orange peel. His son Aḥmad al-ʿAbbās was killed by his maternal uncles of the Shabāna tribe, who proclaimed their own chief, ʿAbd al-Karīm. Al-Ifrānī writes that this killing, in 1069 AH (between 29 September 1658 and 18 September 1659), "mit fin à la dynastie des Saadiens". Abun-Nasr gives "1658 or 1659".

The final winners were another family of sharifs from Tafilalt, the ʿAlawīs. Al-Rashīd took Fez in 1666, destroyed the Dilāʾ capital in June 1668 and took Marrakesh from ʿAbd al-Karīm the following month, according to Abun-Nasr; Britannica gives 1669 for Marrakesh. His dynasty still rules Morocco today.

What are the Saadian Tombs?

The royal necropolis of the dynasty in Marrakesh, beside the Kasbah mosque. According to the Moroccan Ministry of Culture, al-Ghālib established its core in 1557 for the tomb of his father, Muḥammad al-Shaykh, and was buried there himself in 1574. Aḥmad al-Manṣūr buried his mother Lalla Masʿūda there, enlarged and embellished the complex, and was buried there with several of his heirs. Its halls include the room of the twelve columns and a domed tomb for Lalla Masʿūda. The ʿAlawī sultan Moulay al-Yazīd, who died in 1792, is also buried there.

The Ministry states that the complex was "découvert en 1917 par le Service des Beaux-Arts et des Monuments", the monuments service of the French protectorate, and the heritage database Qantara says the same. The tombs and the ruins of the El Badi palace are named among the outstanding monuments of the Medina of Marrakesh, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1985.

Common myths about the Saadi Sultanate

Timeline of the Saadi Sultanate

What the map shows next

At 1600 on the map the Saadi Sultanate covers Morocco at the height of Aḥmad al-Manṣūr's reign. Before it, the Wattasid dynasty ruled from Fez while the Saadians rose in the south, and Portuguese Africa shows the Atlantic forts they fought. Across the Sahara, the Songhai Empire is still intact before the invasion of 1590. The border data keeps the Saadi name on Morocco until 1740, long after the ʿAlawīs took power; the ʿAlawī state appears as Morocco.

Related entries cover the Kingdom of England of Elizabeth I, the Spanish Empire and the Wattasid dynasty.