
Meknès History
There
seems to have been no occupation of the site until, in
the 9th century, the Zeneta Berber Maknassa tribe settled on
flat ground .overlooking the Bou Fekrane River, attracted
no doubt by the vast fertile plain (the Sais). The first to
construct buildings more substantial than the little
Berber villages were the Almoravids, who, in 1069, built a
kasbah in what is now
a city district. The town became rich and the Almohads started casting
their eyes on it from 1120, although their sultan, Abd el-Mumen,
succeeded in taking the town only in 1145, after a seven-year siege. The weakening
Almohads did not rule long over Meknès, for in the beginning of
the 13th century their successors, the Merinids, invaded the
region and captured the town. They did not establish their
capital here, but built a kasbah,
a mosque, a medersa, and numerous buildings to house
their governor. Meknès declined when the Merinid
dynasty crumbled at the end of the 14th century. Although the
Wattasids and then the Saadians occupied the town, it only
really came into its own when the new Alaouite sultan Mulay
Ismail chose it as his capital in 1672.
Sultan
Mulay Ismail. Meknès
and Mulay Ismail are inextricably bound together,
for this powerful, long-reigning figure left an indelible mark
on the town. Mulay Ismail was
a young man of 26 when he came to the throne. Dark-skinned,
of good physique, and extremely strong-willed, he reigned for
55 years. He was a great builder, though not a great
architectural innovator/
One of his first tasks was to rebuild the city, using (it is
said) between 1,000-3,000 Christian slaves and
20,000-30,000 prisoners from the surrounding tribes. The
Merinid kasbah and part of the old town were destroyed and a
new vast wall of trampled down earth and lime, with huge gates,
was constructed. Mulay Ismail built kasbahs for his Black Guard,
mosques, hangars in which to
store supplies of grain, stables, and gardens. Much of
the decorative building materials for the Imperial Town, Dar el-Makhzen, built to house his personal administration and harem (said to
contain 500 women),
which he built south of the medina, came from the nearby Roman
ruins of Volubilis and the El-Badi Palace of his predecessors in
Marrakech. Well aware of the
need for a strong military force, Mulay Ismail got
together an army of 150,000 men, made up of black slaves,
immigrant Arabs,
Andalusians, and Christians, whom he housed in a military camp
beside the palace. He needed a good army to keep his
unruly compatriots under
control and push the Europeans out of Morocco's coastal towns.
A
diplomat too, Mulay Ismail worked to increase commercial
exchanges with
France and sent missions to France and England. His court in Meknès,
in turn, became the destination of western ambassadors coming,
often, to buy the release of their countrymen captured by the
Moroccan corsairs. Up to
1678, the captured foreigners belonged to their corsair captors,
but after that date they became the sultan's personal property.
Negotiations with France were particularly difficult, for the
French king held far more Moroccan galley slaves than Mulay Ismail did French building
slaves. The Alaouite sultan was such an important figure that it
is worth recalling a
few stories about him, one of which concerned Louis XIV. The French
king received one of Mulay Ismail's missions—headed by the
ex-pirate Ben Aicha-'-at Versailles in 1699. Ben Aicha presented
such an enthusiastic
portrait of the French king's daughter that Mulay Ismail requested
her hand in marriage (a request that Louis XIV turned down).
John
Windus, who went to Meknès in 1720 with an English mission trying
to buy back a number of English slaves, saw the sultan when he
was about
74 years and described him as very active for his age. Mulay
Ismail's strong
personality ensured that a host of legends were attached to his name,
some of them certainly true, others not. He had many good qualities,
including determination, religious faith, abounding energy,
political astuteness, and a certain tolerance towards his
Christian slaves, allowing them
to live apart in a sort of shantytown and have a Catholic priest
to administer to their
spiritual needs. He also had many less appealing traits, such
as extreme cruelty, ruthlessness, and a fierce spirit of
revenge. Stories of
the people he put to death on a whim are endless. Many are true,
but I won't dwell on
them here. With his death in 1727, the civil war that broke out
led to the decline of Meknès, a decline hastened by the Lisbon
earthquake in 1755.
However,
the city maintained its military reputation. Under the Protectorate,
a New Town was built in 1920, separated from the Old Town by
the Bou Fekrane River (about a 15- to 20-mlnute walk). It housed
an important French
military garrison. French farmers settled in the rich surrounding
plain and turned Meknès into a thriving agricultural center,
also producing
Morocco's best wines. When Morocco got back its independence,
their farms were confiscated, many of them being taken over by
the state (but the
well-known wines such as Guerrouane and Ait Soualah continued
to be produced).
One of the kingdom's imperial cities,
Meknès' medina
is one of the six Moroccan
sites recognized as world heritage by UNESCO
Volubilis/Meknès
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