Marrakech

Marrakesh - In its nine centuries of life Marrakesh alternated moments of splendor and glory with long years of obscurity. It was built and destroyed more than once, plundered and embellished, venerated and punished. Thre are few cities in the world whose history is so closely tied to that of their country, to the point of even bearing th... Read on

Marrakesh - In its nine centuries of life Marrakesh alternated moments of splendor and glory with long years of obscurity. It was built and destroyed more than once, plundered and embellished, venerated and punished. Thre are few cities in the world whose history is so closely tied to that of their country, to the point of even bearing the same name. Marrakesh still today bears witness to the past splendor of its troubled and fascinating history and is to all effects a museum-city, with its striking mosques, minarets, splendid palaces, gardens which seem miraculously to spring from a void in the dry thirsty earth, where they were created thanks to the genius and fantasy of its builders. There is something both thrilling and delightful in the ancient lanes, the crooks and crannies, the shops of the souk where everything can be had; but there is also something overwhelming in the feeling of infinity of the landscapes stretching back towards the mountains of the High Atlas, the vastness of this mythical square (Place Djemaa el-Fna), the spectacular geometry of its walls.
Marrakesh was once the capital of all Morocco, an imperial city on a par with Fez, Meknès and Rabat. It was and is the capital of the South: with its burning sunsets and red and pink houses, an infinite variety of aromas and the perfumes of spices and acute and sweet essences; the intoxicating scents of roses and jasmine; the spell cast by the songs and words of the craftsmen and the snake charmers; the sound of water and the milling crowds in the markets; the majestic silence of its Berber and Arab art treasures; the incredible snows on the mountain peaks overlooking the city.
It sprang up as a great Berber metropolis, a symbol of the pride of this nomad race, accustomed to a hard life bounded by the sea of the Sahara sands and the friendless rugged stones of the Atlas mountain chain and its snow-covered peaks, and that is what it will always be.
No one - neither the Phoenicians nor the Romans, the Byzantines nor the Vandals - ever succeeded in completely dominating this pride. And not even the Arabs when they began their conquests in the seventh century.

Today Marrakesh is a city with over 500,000 inhabitants, the third in Morocco, after Rabat and Casablanca, the principal city of a province which numbers a population of over 1,260,000 souls. It is the principal crossroads for the Saharian south, beyond the High Atlas and for the routes which lead to Agadir, Casablanca, Fez and Meknès. It is, in other words, an ideal bridge which joins the north of Morocco to the south. The principal activity consists of crafts (leather, copper, textiles, carpets), in which 58.5% of the inhabitants are employed. But Marrakesh, in the seventies and eighties and now more than ever, thanks to its systems of hotels which cater to all pockets and range from the simplest to the most luxurious with splendid swimming pools, casino and perfect 18-hole golf courses, has consolidated its role as capital of Moroccan tourism, competing, perhaps, only with Agadir and its blue sea.
The almost millenary history of Marrakesh has always been closely related to that of the principal Berber tribes and their encounter-clash with Islam: the Almoravids, the Almohads, the Merinids, the Saadians, the Alaouites. Uncertainty still surrounds the origins of what was to become the capital of the Berber empire and its culture. Some date its foundation to 1062, others to 1070/71. But there are no doubts as to the fact that it was Abu Bakr who first established a settlement in Marrakesh in the bowl of the Haouz (which stretches for almost 6000 sq. km. at the feet of the High Atlas). The nucleus of a first casbah (Ksar al-Hajer) is also attributed to him.

With him the Almoravids became great and so did Marrakesh. In the next forty years, that initial temporary camp, called Marrakesh (“go away quickly”) became the capital of a real empire, that ranged from Algeria to the Atlantic, from the Sahara to the Ebro. Yusuf ibn-Tashfin had the first large mosque built almost immediately, which the subsequent lords of the city later destroyed. He set out to making Marrakesh a true metropolis. The city, which lacked water, was furnished with an ingenious system of subterranean conduits, the khettara, still in existence today, which connect the various wells discovered in the area that stretches out at the base of the rocky hills of the Gueliz. But Yusuf ibn-Tashfin was a Berber and a man of the desert, and once he had found water, he set about creating a sort of miracle, a palmeraie or palm grove. Legend narrates that his soldiers, who ate great quantities of dates, contributed to its creation by throwing the pits on the sand. But his genius was truly realized in his military undertakings.
He took over the regions of the north, from Tangiers to the eastern part of what is now Algeria. He crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to lend a hand to the Muslim princes in Spain threatened by the Christianity of Alfonso VI of Castille. In a merry go round of events and alliances, he ended up by ruling the lands of Malaga, Granada, Cordoba, Seville, as far as Valencia. These forty years of expansion were to leave an indelible mark in the future history of Marrakesh and all Morocco. For the city which was in a phase of growth it was the occasion to assimilate the Spanish and Moorish cultures as well as the classic Arab culture.
When Yusuf ibn-Tashfin died in 1106, he was succeeded by his son Ali, who continued his father’s commitments. In just one year the first part of the great circle of city walls which still today encloses the medina, the oldest part of the city, was built. But at the same time Marrakesh was acquiring the features of a mercantile and craft city, with the working of wood and leather.
From then on the fortunes of the “Berber capital”, at this point Arab in its main features, were to be the fruit of the vicissitudes and struggles which rewarded or destroyed the various ethnic groups who appeared on the scene. There were to be only four Almoravid sovereigns. At the end, Ishaq, the last and almost still a child, was decapitated by the new lords, the Almoravids. Only 41 years after the death of its founder, Marrakesh was captured by Ibn Tumart. It was March 23, 1147 when the hordes of Almohad horsemen, prey to a new furor of religious reform, took over the city. These were dramatic days. Marrakesh was laid waste; the Almoravids were decimated, imprisoned, forced to take flight. The new order of the “Unitarians” (which is what Almohad means), with Ibn Tumart who had proclaimed himself Mahdi (sent by God), once more launched the religious idea of divine unity, and put this into practice by cancelling all that the Almoravids had done. And only after having demolished, did reconstruction begin. Ruins were left behind, and now came the moment for new masterworks. Abd al-Mumin, the real founder of the dynasty, built the first Koutoubia, and then another one (the one now there), new gardens and large pools for water. His successor, Abu Yakub Yusuf even created a new quarter and may have begun the splendid garden of the Agdal or Aguedal. Yakub al-Mansur (the “victorious”) in 1185 began building a new casbah, endowed the city with hospitals, filled the medina with a dozen superb palaces. For the Almohads and Marrakesh it was a moment of new splendor. The dynasty was to reign for almost a century. The city became a first class cultural center, humanist and scientific, with astronomers, mathematicians and philosophers of fame such as Averröes called to the court.
Then, once again, the crisis. A decline that began in Spain, with the great defeat inflicted by the Christian armies of Alfonso VII in 1212 at Las Navas de Tolosa. Repercussions of the rout were transformed into years of anarchy. At the end the Merinids, a nomad Berber peoples who came from the Sahara, saw their chance. Marrakesh was occupied in 1269 and the last Almohad sovereign swept away. The new rulers moved their capital to Fez.

Ups and downs were a matter of course in this city, a stage at all times for the political and relgious contrasts which saw peoples and tribes from the entire Maghreb opposing each other in the name of Islam. The pomp of the periods of the Almoravids and the Almohads seemed a thing of the distant past. The Merinids were never able to construct empires of this sort, while the Christian penetration on the coasts of Morocco gathered force with the arrival of the Portuguese. The entire thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were nothing but one vicissitude after another, leaving for history and for their descendants practically nothing but the undertakings of Ibn Batuta, the great traveler (a kind of Merinid Marco Polo) whose travels took him to Peking, Samarcand, Timbuctu. These were the years of a Morocco split in two parts and of a Marrakesh which tried in vain to recuperate a national hegemony.

After the interval of Wattasid power, new splendors had to await the arrival of a new and great dynasty, that of the Saadians. They dominated events of the sixteenth century, gaining force and power as they succeeded in standing up to the Christian penetration in the north and then pushing into the great south. The Saadian renaissance, a new golden age for Marrakesh, took shape with Moulay Abdallah who restored the casbah, created a Mellah (a Hebrew “ghetto” in the old city), built a great medrassa, raised the Moussain mosque. Ahmed al-Mansur (el Dehbi, the “golden one”, the most famous, 1578-1603) in particular had splendid masterworks such as the al-Badi palace (only ruins now remain) and the Saadian tombs built.
The Saadians, the “sherifs” (descendants of Mohammed), once more exploited the springs of religious sentiment, intolerance against the danger of the “infidel”, the desire for order and tranquility after years of uncertainties. The renewal of the fortunes of Marrakesh coincided with those of Morocco as a whole, firmly under Saadian control, and the direct consequence was the expansion of commerce, to the point of giving Morocco the reputation of being a “land of gold”.

By the middle of the seventeenth century the powerful Saadians also began to decline. For the glorious “Berber capital” it seemed to be a replay of previous events. The new lords, the Alaouites, the same dynasty which still reigns over Morocco with Hassan II, transferred the centers of their power. Moulay er Rachid transferred the capital to Fez.
Not until the end of the nineteenth century, with Moulay Hassan (1873-1894) and his son Moulay Abd al-Aziz, was there a return of a period of prosperity for the ancient “capital of the south”. The Bahia palace was built (1895-1901), and the Dar Si Said palace.

With the twentieth century Morocco too found itself involved in clashes with European colonialism, above all French and Spanish. Marrakesh was still to be the protagonist of important events. In the years of French penetration, in 1907, Moulay Abd al-Hafid had himself proclaimed sultan of Morocco, in Marrakesh, and his place was then taken by El Hiba, the great insurgent of the Moroccan south, who took up arms against the French. But on September 7, 1912, the troups of the French Colonel Mangin occupied the city where Moulay Abd al-Hafiz, the famous Glaoui, was to remain as uncontrasted lord and pasha, thanks to the support he had supplied to the new French protectorate.

This power was to last until the independence of Morocco (March 2, 1956) and the advent to the throne of the sovereign of the new national unity, Mohammed V.
The Marrakesh of today is also the fruit of the difficult years of the French protectorate. And it was the French, with the occupation of the city in 1912, who built the new part, the Gueliz, three km. northeast of the old medina. Since then expansion has been going on continuously. The old city protected within its walls has remained intact in its age-old charm, while new quarters were added to the initial French agglomerates. Further urban expansion marked the fifties and sixties and the population of the city has more than quadrupled since the beginning of this century.
So that now the “Berber capital” is both a city of the past, a precious coffer of centuries of history, art and culture, and a great metropolis of contemporary Morocco, a unique country in Africa, a melting pot and crossroads for the black continent, the Arab world and Europe.

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