The sharifian dynasty of Morocco's golden age: the Three Kings and the road to Timbuktu.
The Saadian dynasty restored Morocco's golden age in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sharifian sultans from the Draa Valley, the Saadians expelled the Portuguese from Agadir in 1541, annihilated their crusade at the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578, and under Ahmad al-Mansur turned Marrakech into a capital of sugar, gold, and marble.
The Saadians rose as leaders of holy war against the Portuguese enclaves on the Atlantic coast. Muhammad al-Shaykh took Fez in 1549 and ended Wattasid rule, uniting Morocco under sharifian — Prophetic-descended — kingship. When the Portuguese king Sebastian landed in 1578 to restore a deposed Saadian claimant, Sultan Abd al-Malik met him at Alcácer Quibir; the catastrophe that followed made the Saadians masters of Morocco and ended Portugal's independence.
Abd al-Malik died on the battlefield, but his brother Ahmad took the throne that very evening with the title al-Mansur — ‘the Victorious.’ The ransoms of captured Portuguese nobles flooded the treasury, and al-Mansur built: the El Badi Palace, begun in 1578 and completed in 1593, decorated with marble from Italy and gold from the Sudan — ‘the Incomparable,’ contemporaries called it.
Al-Mansur needed gold, and the gold road ran south. In October 1590 he dispatched Judar Pasha across the Sahara with some four thousand fighting men and eight cannon; in March 1591, at Tondibi, Moroccan arquebuses shattered the Songhai host of Askia Ishaq II. Gao and Timbuktu fell. The Arma pashalik that resulted answered, nominally, to Marrakech into the nineteenth century — the farthest reach of any Moroccan dynasty.
Al-Mansur died in 1603 and his sons tore the kingdom apart in civil war. Sugar prices collapsed, the treasury emptied, and power seeped to marabouts and warlords. From the Tafilalt rose the Alaouites; in 1668 Moulay Rashid took Marrakech, and the Saadian age closed. The Saadian Tombs of Marrakech — rediscovered in 1917 — remain the dynasty's marble signature.
