Second Alaouite sultan (1672–1727): fifty-five years, the Black Guard, and Meknes.
Moulay Ismail (1645–1727) ruled Morocco for fifty-five years, the longest reign in the country's history. The 'Warrior King' forged the modern Alaouite state from his new capital at Meknes: a standing army loyal to the throne alone, European enclaves swept from the coast, and a prestige that made Louis XIV treat him as a fellow sovereign.
The seventh son of Sharif ibn Ali, Ismail was governor of Fez when his half-brother Moulay Rashid died in 1672; after years of war with a rival nephew, he stood alone. He chose Meknes — neither Fez nor Marrakech — and built it into an imperial city of walls, palaces, and granaries on a scale Versailles would have recognized. His instrument was the Black Guard, the Abid al-Bukhari: tens of thousands of soldiers, drilled from childhood and sworn on the Sahih of al-Bukhari, owing loyalty to no tribe and to no one but the sultan.
Ismail expelled the Europeans one port at a time — Tangier from the English in 1684, Larache in 1689, Asilah in 1691, Mehdya earlier — and held a Christian captive population whose ransoms filled his coffers. He corresponded as an equal with James II of England and Louis XIV of France, and kept the Ottoman regency of Algiers at arm's length in the wars of 1692 and 1701. No Moroccan ruler before him had dealt with Europe from such strength.
Europe called him the 'bloody king'; Morocco remembers the state-builder. The Guinness Book of Records credits him with 888 children — the most of any recorded father — from a harem of hundreds. He died in 1727 at eighty-two, and the throne he had made so strong collapsed into thirty years of succession wars among his sons, until Mohammed III restored it. The chaos proved the point: Ismail had been the state.
