Who ruled Marrakesh?

Marrakesh lies on the Haouz plain of southern Morocco, at the foot of the High Atlas mountains, where caravan routes from the Sahara met the roads to the Atlantic coast and the north. Water from the mountains, brought underground by long irrigation channels, made an oasis of palm groves and gardens possible on a dry plain. Founded as the capital of a desert dynasty, it gave its name to the whole country (the word Morocco comes from it), and for much of its history it was either the imperial capital or the great rival of Fez.

The city was founded around 1070 by the Almoravids, a Berber religious and military movement from the western Sahara, as a camp and then a fortified base on the plain. Under Yusuf ibn Tashfin and his son Ali ibn Yusuf it became the capital of an empire stretching from Senegal to al-Andalus in Spain. Ali built a great mosque and palace and, in 1126 to 1127, the long earthen walls whose line still encloses the medina.

In 1147, after a long siege, the Almohads, a rival reform movement from the Atlas, stormed the city and made it the capital of their own caliphate. They largely rebuilt it: the Koutoubia mosque, whose minaret was completed under Yaqub al-Mansur at the end of the twelfth century, became the model for the Giralda in Seville and remains the city's landmark. Almohad Marrakesh was a centre of learning, and the philosopher Averroes spent time at its court. When the Marinids took the city in 1269 they moved the capital to Fez, and Marrakesh declined into a provincial centre for more than two centuries.

The Saadian dynasty, which claimed descent from the Prophet, took Marrakesh in the 1520s and made it the capital of a reunited Morocco. Their greatest ruler, Ahmad al-Mansur (1578 to 1603), built the immense El Badi palace with wealth from sugar and from ransoms after the defeat of the Portuguese at the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578. In 1591 his army crossed the Sahara from Marrakesh and defeated the Songhai Empire, whose state collapsed, and gold and captives flowed back north. The Saadian tombs and the Jewish quarter, the mellah, date from this period.

The Alaouite dynasty, which still rules Morocco, took Marrakesh in the 1660s. Moulay Ismail moved the capital to Meknes and stripped the El Badi palace for materials, but later sultans often resided in Marrakesh and built new palaces and gardens there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In 1912, the year Morocco became a protectorate of France, French troops occupied Marrakesh after expelling a rebel claimant, Ahmed al-Hiba. The French built a new European town, Gueliz, outside the walls, and governed the south through Thami El Glaoui, the powerful pasha of Marrakesh, who held the post until independence in 1956. Tourism grew from the interwar years, and in 1985 the medina was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In September 2023 a strong earthquake in the High Atlas killed nearly 3,000 people in the region and damaged historic buildings in the medina. Marrakesh, with about 1 million inhabitants, is one of the largest cities in Morocco and the country's leading tourist destination.