Second Alaouite sultan (1672–1727): fifty-five years, the Black Guard, and Meknes.
Moulay Ismail ruled Morocco for fifty-five years — one of the longest reigns in recorded history — and in that half-century he built the Alaouite state into its classic form: the Black Guard, the makhzen, Meknes the Versailles of Africa, and a kingdom the European powers treated as an equal.
Ismail came to the throne in 1672 on his brother Moulay Rachid's accidental death. Where Rachid had reunified the kingdom, Ismail institutionalized it. His great creation was the Abid al-Bukhari — the Black Guard: tens of thousands of black soldiers, recruited from across the Sahara and raised as a military caste loyal to the Sultan alone, owing nothing to the tribes. With this instrument — a standing army in an age of tribal levies — Ismail broke the power of every rival: the Dila'i remnants, the Berber confederations, the maraboutic chiefs, the corsair cities. No Moroccan ruler before him had commanded such concentrated force; none after him would need to.
With force secured, he built. Meknes — his capital — became the most ambitious building project in Moroccan history: twenty kilometers of walls with monumental gates, the Bab Mansour gate (completed under his son) still the grandest in North Africa, the Heri es-Souani granaries and stables that could house 12,000 horses, palaces, mosques, and the mausoleum where he lies today, a place of pilgrimage. The chroniclers, European and Moroccan, agree on the scale: Ismail built like a Roman emperor, using the marble stripped from the Saadian El Badi in Marrakech and the labor of Christian captives and Moroccan tribes alike.
His foreign policy was the diplomacy of strength. He drove the English from Tangier in 1684 — the English blew up the mole as they left — retook Larache (1689), Asilah, and Mehdya from Spain, and reduced the European presence to the presidios of Ceuta and Melilla. He corresponded with Louis XIV as an equal — the famous exchange of embassies, the Moroccan ambassador in Versailles, the French in Meknes — and with James II of England; his corsairs operated from Salé to the English Channel, and his treaties with the European powers were negotiated, not imposed. The European image of the "bloodthirsty" Moulay Ismail — the legends of his cruelty, his thousands of sons — obscures the statesman: a ruler who made Morocco the power of the western Mediterranean's southern shore.
The reign's shadow is real: the forced labor, the heavy taxation, the ruthlessness with which revolts were crushed. But the achievement is permanent: the makhzen system — the central administration, the guich armies, the Black Guard, the sharifian legitimacy — that governed Morocco into the twentieth century was Ismail's work. When he died in 1727, the kingdom held together; the thirty years of anarchy that followed his death (the "reign of the Abid," when the Guard made and unmade sultans) only proved how much the state had depended on him.
Moulay Ismail is buried in Meknes, his tomb a green-tiled sanctuary visited by Moroccans as a saint's shrine. The Alaouite dynasty's second sultan, its great builder, its longest reign: the maker of the Moroccan state in its modern form.
The Black Guard's social engineering was Ismail's most radical act: the Abid were recruited as children from the Sudan and the Haratin populations, raised in military nurseries speaking only Arabic, married within the corps, and settled in military villages — a self-reproducing army-caste, deliberately cut off from tribal society, whose loyalty ran to the Sultan alone. At its height the corps numbered in the tens of thousands, with its own mosques, markets, and cemeteries; the system worked so well that after Ismail's death the Abid became kingmakers, deposing sultans at will for thirty years — the instrument outliving the hand. The European captives' Meknes is the reign's other face: thousands of Christian prisoners — sailors taken by the Salé corsairs, soldiers from the recaptured presidios — labored on the walls and palaces, and their memoirs (the French priest Dominique Busnot's account is the most famous) created the "bloodthirsty" legend that Europe still repeats. Read against the Moroccan chronicles, which praise the Sultan's justice and piety, the two Ismails — the European tyrant and the Moroccan saint-king — are the same man seen from opposite sides of the strait.
Moulay Ismail (r. 1672–1727) built the classic Alaouite state: the Black Guard standing army, the makhzen administration, Meknes as imperial capital, and the expulsion of the English and Spanish from Morocco's Atlantic ports. His fifty-five-year reign — among the longest in history — made Morocco the equal of Louis XIV's France in diplomacy and the dominant power of the western Mediterranean's southern shore. The institutions he created governed Morocco for two centuries.
