The Wattasids

By Kaveh Hosseini

Between the golden age of the Marinids and the glory of the Saadians stands a dynasty history often hurries past — the Wattasids, the last Zenata Berber rulers of Morocco, who held the country together in its most exposed century.

The Banu Wattas were cousins of the Marinids, fellow Zenata Berbers, who had served for generations as viziers — the power behind the throne. When the last Marinid sultan, Abd al-Haqq II, was murdered in the Fez revolt of 1465, Morocco fractured. The Wattasid Abu Abdallah al-Shaykh seized Fez in 1472 and founded a dynasty that would rule the northern heartland for eighty years, while the south drifted toward the maraboutic movements that would become the Saadians.

The Wattasids inherited an impossible position. In 1415 the Portuguese had seized Ceuta — the first European foothold in Africa — and through the fifteenth century they planted fortified factories along the Moroccan coast: Alcácer-Ceguer, Arzila, Tangier. Spain, finishing its reconquista, eyed the same shoreline. The Wattasid sultans, ruling from Fez with a shrunken tax base, fought a grinding defensive war against the best-armed powers of early modern Europe, while Portuguese artillery and Spanish gold bought allies among the coastal tribes.

They were not passive victims. The Wattasids maintained the madrasas and the ulama of Fez, kept the caravan routes to the Sudan running, and played a subtle diplomacy — treating with Portugal and Spain, buying time, preserving the interior. Under Muhammad al-Burtuqali (r. 1504–1526), they stabilized the kingdom and patronized the scholars of al-Qarawiyyin. Fez under the Wattasids remained what it had been for centuries: the intellectual capital of the western Islamic world, its libraries and madrasas functioning even as the dynasty's armies shrank.

But the tide of the age was against them. The Portuguese pressure radicalized the countryside; the Sufi brotherhoods preached jihad against both the Christians and the sultans who treated with them; and in the Sous valley the Saadian sharifs — claiming descent from the Prophet — built a rival power on the sugar trade and holy war. In 1524 the Saadians took Marrakech. The Wattasids held Fez for another generation, but in 1549 Muhammad al-Shaykh entered the northern capital, and in 1554 the last Wattasid sultan, Ali Abu Hassun, died fighting with Ottoman backing at Tadla.

The Wattasids matter precisely because they were the bridge. They preserved the Marinid state — its chancery, its madrasas, its diplomacy, its claim to the whole of Morocco — through the century when Portugal and Spain might have carved the country into coastal enclaves. They handed the Saadians a functioning kingdom rather than a ruin. The last Zenata dynasty closed the Berber imperial age that had begun with the Almoravids four centuries earlier — and the sharifian age that followed built on foundations the Wattasids had kept standing.

The Wattasid court produced one of the most famous Moroccans in world literature: Hasan al-Wazzan — Leo Africanus. A diplomat and scholar of the Wattasid chancery in Fez, al-Wazzan was captured by Christian corsairs in 1518, presented to Pope Leo X, and wrote his Description of Africa in Rome — the book that taught Renaissance Europe what Africa was. His account of Timbuktu's gold and scholars, of Fez's madrasas and markets, shaped European imagination for three centuries; Shakespeare's Othello echoes it. That the Wattasid century — the supposed age of decline — produced the African who explained Africa to Europe is the dynasty's quiet revenge on history. The Wattasids also patronized the Sufi scholar Ahmad Zarruq, whose commentaries remain standard texts, and maintained the Qarawiyyin's teaching through the hardest years. Intellectually, Wattasid Fez never declined at all: the libraries functioned, the jurists issued fatwas, the astronomers observed. The dynasty's tragedy was not cultural but military — a learned state with a shrinking army, defending a coastline against the artillery age with the weapons of the caravan age. When the Saadians took Fez in 1549, they inherited not a ruin but a university; the Wattasids' true monument is the learning they kept alive.

Impact on civilization