The sharifian dynasty of Morocco's golden age: the Three Kings and the road to Timbuktu.
The Saadians were the sharifs who saved Morocco from the Portuguese — the sugar barons of the Sous who built an empire on holy war and Sudanese gold, and whose sultan Ahmad al-Mansur presided over the most splendid court Africa had seen since the Almohads.
The Banu Saad were sharifs of the Draa valley, claiming descent from the Prophet, who rose as leaders of the maraboutic jihad against the Portuguese coastal forts in the early sixteenth century. The Wattasid sultans in Fez treated with the Christians; the Saadians fought them. In 1541 Mohammed al-Shaykh took Agadir (Santa Cruz) from the Portuguese — the first great Moroccan victory over a European power in the gunpowder age — and in 1549–1554 he took Fez and destroyed the Wattasids, uniting the country under sharifian rule.
The dynasty's apogee came with Ahmad al-Mansur (r. 1578–1603), "the Golden." Al-Mansur came to the throne through the most famous battle in Moroccan history — the Battle of the Three Kings (1578), where the Portuguese crusade of the young King Sebastian was annihilated at Ksar el-Kebir, and three kings died in one day: Sebastian of Portugal, the deposed Moroccan sultan al-Mutawakkil, and the Saadian Abd al-Malik. The victory — won by Moroccan arms against a European crusade — ended Portugal's Moroccan adventure, precipitated the Iberian Union, and flooded the Saadian treasury with ransoms.
Al-Mansur used the windfall to build an empire. He organized the sugar industry of the Sous — Moroccan sugar, produced by ingeniously irrigated plantations, was among the most profitable commodities in the sixteenth-century world — and in 1591 he sent the famous expedition across the Sahara: 4,000 men with arquebuses and cannon under Judar Pasha, a Spanish renegade, marched to the Niger and destroyed the Songhai Empire at Tondibi. The gold of the Sudan flowed to Marrakech — al-Mansur's nickname, al-Dhahabi ("the Golden"), came from it — and financed the most magnificent building program since the Almohads: the El Badi palace, "the Incomparable," built with Italian marble, Sudanese gold, and Indian teak, counted among the wonders of the world; the Saadian tombs, whose twelve-column mausoleum is the most exquisite interior in North Africa.
Al-Mansur's diplomacy matched his splendor: he corresponded with Elizabeth I, projecting an Anglo-Moroccan alliance against Spain; received embassies from the Ottomans while keeping them at arm's length; and made Marrakech a court where European merchants, Ottoman envoys, and Saharan caravans met. The English called him the "King of Barbary"; the Moroccans called him al-Mansur, the Victorious.
The dynasty declined after his death in 1603 — the plague that killed him, the succession wars among his sons, the maraboutic revolts, the Spanish and English pressures — until the Alaouites reunified the country in the 1660s. Moulay Ismail would strip the El Badi of its marble for Meknes, and the Saadian tombs were sealed and forgotten until French archaeologists rediscovered them in 1917. But the Saadian century remains the proof of what sharifian Morocco could be at its height: the dynasty that broke Portugal, taxed the Sudan, and built in gold.
The Saadian sugar economy deserves its full accounting, for it was one of the wonders of the early modern world: the Souss plain, irrigated by dams and seguia canals of remarkable engineering, produced sugar that competed with Brazil's in European markets, and the profits — concentrated in the Sultan's hands through royal monopolies — financed the state more reliably than any tax. English and Dutch merchants maintained factories at Taroudant; the sugar mills, powered by water and worked by labor that included enslaved sub-Saharans, were industrial enterprises two centuries before the Industrial Revolution. When the sugar price collapsed in the seventeenth century — Brazil and the Caribbean undercutting Morocco — the Saadian fiscal base collapsed with it, and the dynasty's fall is, in part, the story of a commodity bust. The lesson the Alaouites learned: never depend on a single export — the phosphate, tourism, automotive, and aerospace diversification of modern Morocco is the Saadian sugar crash remembered.
The Saadians (1544–1659) are Morocco's gunpowder-age golden dynasty: they expelled the Portuguese (Agadir 1541), annihilated the crusade of King Sebastian at the Three Kings (1578), conquered the Songhai Empire (1591) and its gold, and built the El Badi palace and the Saadian tombs. Ahmad al-Mansur's Marrakech was the richest court in Africa. The Saadian century proved sharifian Morocco could defeat European empires and command Saharan wealth — the model the Alaouites inherited.
