by Giles Milton
Although their complicity won them many privileges, they never had as much freedom as their fellow renegades in Algiers. One British consul, Joseph Morgan, reported that “nothing was more common to be seen in the streets of Algiers, than parties of renegades, sitting publicly on mats, costly carpets and cushions, playing cards and dice, thrumming guitars, and singing a la christianesca, inebriating like swine.” The local population would mutter to one another that “these renegades are neither Christians, Musulmans nor Jews; they have no faith nor religion at all.”
In Morocco, such outlandish behavior would have earned them death, torture or banishment to the sandy wastes of the desert. In 1698, Moulay Ismail exiled 3,000 unruly renegades to the Tafilalt, where they eked out a subsistence among the palm groves. On another occasion, he dispatched 1,500 renegades to the Draa—a desert region adjoining the Tafilalt—where they were “employed to erect a city here for themselves.” Flogged by their overseers and burned by the sun, these unwilling converts to Islam found themselves treated little better than their erstwhile comrades in the slave pens.
Moulay Ismail was dependent on his renegades to quash rebellions, yet he never trusted them in the way he did his infamous bukhari or black guard. This formidable fighting force provided the backbone to Moulay Ismail’s rule; from its ranks came his personal bodyguards, his crack troops and his slave-drivers. The black guard was fiercely loyal and highly trained, and the troops never wavered in their devotion to their master. They originated from Guinea, where most had been seized in battle or bought as slaves in exchange for “salt, iron-ware, little looking glasses and other peddling toys that came from Venice.” They were led in chains to Meknes, where they were trained to act with the blind loyalty that had once been the hallmark of the Turkish janissaries. Their name, bukhari, came from their oath of allegiance to Moulay Ismail, which they swore upon a copy of the Sahih of al-Bukhari, a ninth-century theologian.
Those who formed the sultan’s personal bodyguard were very young—between twelve and fifteen years of age—and their mothers were generally housed in the harem. “He chuses ’em such,” wrote Pidou de St. Olon, “because he will not trust the guard of his person to those of a proper age, for fear of some attempt against him.” Extremely haughty in their manner, these brutal young guards were dressed in the most costly clothes—finely cut kaftans in purples, indigo and scarlet—and wore exquisite silk stockings, making a splendid sight as they strutted and drilled in the parade grounds of the imperial palace. They wore scimitars by their sides and carried heavy muskets, which, according to one English slave, “they must keep, upon pain of death, as bright as when it first came out of the gunsmiths’ hands.” Unlike most of the sultan’s subjects, they were never allowed headgear. “Their heads were shaved and always exposed to the sun,” wrote Pellow, “for he affected to breed them hard.”
Pellow witnessed these bodyguards in action and was stunned by their ruthless efficiency. “They were so ready to murder and destroy,” he wrote, “ … that the kaids trembled at the very sight of them.” Always carrying out the sultan’s orders to the letter, they took especial pleasure in dealing with those sentenced to be executed. If the condemned man was not to be killed immediately, they battered and beat him until he squealed for mercy. Pellow witnessed their treatment of one victim, who was almost torn to pieces by the time he reached the place of execution. “By the fury of their looks, and their violent and savage manner … [they] made a scene very much resembling the picture of so many devils tormenting the damned.”
As well as providing Moulay Ismail with his personal bodyguard, the bukhari patrolled Meknes and helped to supervise the sultan’s Christian slaves. They were strict taskmasters, accustomed to whipping and flogging the captives under their charge. Francis Brooks was one of the British slaves who frequently felt the lash of these guards. “The poor Christians were grievously hurried and punished by those hellish rogues,” he wrote. “[They] had scarce time to take any nourishment or eat any of their bad bread … but with a great many threats, stripes and blows by the negroes, bidding them turn Moors.” The bukhari also helped to enforce the sultan’s rule in the rebellious mountain areas. There were said to be 150,000 black troops stationed in various parts of Morocco—25,000 in Meknes and a further 75,000 in the garrison town of Mahalla, southeast of Salé. The rest were posted to kasbahs on the frontiers of the country.
Their number was constantly replenished by the great breeding farms and nurseries that Moulay Ismail had established outside Meknes. He visited these nurseries each year and would take back all the ten-year-olds to Meknes. The girls were taught cooking, washing and housekeeping in the imperial household, while the boys were prepared for military training. In their first year they were apprenticed to a craftsman; in the second, they learned to ride mules. In the years that followed, they were instructed how to make pisé—the earth and lime mixture that was used to build the great palace of Meknes. They would then be made to do hard labor in order to improve their physique. “They took off their clothes,” wrote Pellow, “and, laying them all in a heap, every one took a basket and removed earth, stones or wood.” In their fifth and sixth years they learned horsemanship, and when they reached sixteen years of age, they were enrolled into the army.
Moulay Ismail treated these trainees barbarously, believing that harsh treatment would toughen them and render them immune to pity. “He beat them in the cruellest manner imaginable,” wrote Pellow, “to try if they were hard. Sometimes, you should see forty or fifty of them all sprawling in their blood, none of them daring to rise till he left the place where they were lying.” The most loyal and fanatical would be singled out by the sultan and be made kaids, while those in their charge were ordered to obey their every command. Pellow said that the power often went to their heads. “It was wonderful to see the indolence, state and the gravity of these young rogues,” he wrote. “They used the haughty phrases of command, and talked of cutting throats, strangling, dragging and so forth.”
Some of the bukhari became horsemen—“the highest esteem imaginable”—and were appointed stewards to the country’s greatest kaids. They were also employed as emissaries, “to carry the emperor’s letter of thanks to any officer who served him well, or to call him cuckold, spit in his face, give him a box on the ear, strangle, or cut off his head.”
On occasions, select members of the black guard were called upon to carry out political assassinations. Moulay Ismail used one of his bodyguards to kill the richest Jew in Morocco, Joseph Maimaran, whose vast fortune had helped him secure the throne. Maimaran made the mistake of reminding Moulay Ismail of his debt, and the sultan responded by having him murdered. “The negro did as he was ordered,” wrote Francis Brooks, who said that Maimaran was followed while he was out riding. “[The assassin] spied his opportunity very diligently, so spurred his horse over him, rode upon him, and trode out his brains.”
Moulay Ismail’s relations with Morocco’s large Jewish community were always ambivalent. The majority he treated with contempt, but a handful of the wealthiest—descendants of Jews expelled from Spain—were accorded senior positions at court. One of them, Moses ben Hattar, became treasurer of the court and played a prominent role in keeping Moulay Ismail in power. Another who found great favor with the sultan was Joseph Maimaran’s son, Abraham. He was appointed comptroller of the imperial household soon after his father’s murder. An ugly man, but a skillful survivor, he amassed a vast fortune and was only too willing to lend money to the sultan. Father Busnot thought he had “a very ill presence,” but conceded that he had “a great deal of wit and a long experience.”
Neither of these two courtiers showed any interest in helping the Christian slaves. Father Busnot said that Maimaran was the one member of the imperial household “that might do most service to Christians, if his inclination were towards it.” But Maimaran hated Christians with almost as much passion as the sultan himself and had no desire to improve the lot of the European slaves. Nor did any o
f Morocco’s other influential Jews. One used to boast that he had amassed as many Christian slaves as Moulay Ismail. When asked what he intended to do with them, he gave a wry grimace and said “that he would sacrifice one of them every Friday night until they were all consumed.”
Even the wealthy Jews were not immune to the sultan’s wrath. On one occasion, he summoned a group of them to his palace and began to harangue them in a most unpleasant fashion. “You dogs,” he began, “I have called you all hither that you may take the red cap and embrace my law.” He told them that “you have amuzed me above these thirty years with the coming of your messias … [and] if you do not positively tell me the year and day when he will come, you shall no longer enjoy your goods or lives.”
Genuinely alarmed, the assembled Jews asked for eight days in which to consider their answer. Moulay Ismail granted them this request and sent them out of his presence. When they returned the following week, they coolly informed him that their messiah would appear in thirty years. Moulay Ismail scowled and said they had answered thus in the knowledge that he would be no longer alive. “I will deceive you in my turn,” he said. “I will live longer than shall be requisite to make out your imposture.” He would probably have had the Jews executed for impertinence had they not had the foresight to present him with a huge sack of gold coins.
While a handful of wealthy Jews were content to support Moulay Ismail in power—and were reasonably well treated—the majority were poor and downtrodden. They were confined to ghettoes, known as mellahs, or places of salt, on account of the fact that Jewish butchers were compelled to pickle the severed heads of rebels and traitors. All were forced to wear black cloaks and caps, and they were obliged to walk barefoot through the unsanitary streets of Meknes, Fez and Marrakesh. Many were treated little better than the sultan’s slaves and were subject to constant violence and abuse. “They cannot walk about the streets but the meanest boy will affront them and pelt them with stones,” wrote one, “while they dare not, upon pain of death, vindicate themselves or make any resistance.”
One of the few checks on Moulay Ismail’s rule came from a most unexpected quarter. The sultan’s first wife, Lala Zidana, exercised considerable authority over him and was adept at imposing her will. She was, by all accounts, a veritable harridan, “black, and of a monstrous height and bulk,” wrote Father Busnot in 1714. She had beady eyes and an elephantine belly, and had once been a slave of the sultan’s brother, who had sold her to Moulay Ismail for sixty ducats. Quite why he was so infatuated with her remains a mystery. There were many at court who believed her to be a witch who retained the affections of the sultan by means of spells and incantations. She ruled the harem with great ruthlessness and—in common with Madame de Pompadour at Versailles—she ensured that her lover was supplied with a stream of young virgins. But unlike her French counterpart, Zidana had neither grace nor charm. “When she goes abroad,” wrote Simon Ockley, “she wears a sword by her side, and a lance in her hand; and is as cruel and imperious as the king himself.”
Zidana held sway over Moulay Ismail with machiavellian adroitness. She ensured that her firstborn son, Zidan, was named as the sultan’s heir, and she retained tight control over the harem. Her chief rival for the sultan’s affections could not have been more different—a wistful young girl who had been brought to the harem as a Christian slave. Either Georgian or English, this apostate virgin soon bore Moulay Ismail a son, Moulay Mohammed. Fearful that her own position was under threat, Zidana turned on the girl with chilling aplomb. She falsely informed the sultan that his young sweetheart had been unfaithful and bribed witnesses to testify against her. The sultan was so incensed that he had the girl summarily strangled.
Zidana oversaw the murder of countless other rivals, including that of Moulay Mohammed. She also had a hand in the grisly execution of one of the sultan’s kaids, who was ordered to be sawn in two. Even the sawyers were revolted, for they were told to start sawing between the thighs, rather than at the head, as was customary. “[They] were all bloody,” wrote Father Busnot, “[and] stood sometimes void of sense and motion, and the teeth of their saw tore off pieces of flesh, that none could endure to look at.”
Zidana continued to wield enormous influence over Moulay Ismail and was one of the only members of his household who could conceivably have led a palace coup. Yet she remained resolutely loyal, preferring her role as the power behind the throne. So long as her son was the sultan’s official heir, she was content to confine her machinations to the bejewelled walls of the harem.
Moulay Ismail proved extremely adept at controlling the European renegades, the black guard and the wealthiest Jews. Any one of these groups could have threatened his rule, yet they were always denied the opportunity to challenge his excesses. Those suspected of plotting against the sultan were instantly dispatched with the blow of a cudgel or the slice of a sword. “His government is more than despotick,” wrote Father Busnot. “He treats all that belong to his empire not as free subjects but as slaves.” The padre added that Moulay Ismail saw himself as the very embodiment of the law, who killed in order to demonstrate his ruthlessness. “He strikes off heads only to show his dexterity, without any remorse; or obliges his subjects to cast themselves down precipices headlong to exert his absolute authority.”
Visitors to the court were surprised by the extent to which Moulay Ismail retained his grip on power. He rarely displayed any concerns about being overthrown, even when there was a real danger of widespread rebellion. Father Busnot’s visit to the court coincided with a period of great turmoil, when a number of powerful warlords were threatening to overthrow the sultan. Yet Moulay Ismail appeared to have not a care in the world, “giving audience to strangers; indulging himself in the pleasure of the seraglio [and] spending the rest of his time in forwarding his slaves’ work.” The padre was convinced that he was about to witness the destruction of Moulay Ismail, unaware that the sultan’s extensive network of informers were monitoring every aspect of the rebellion. “All was looked to be lost,” he wrote, “when, by the means of some secret springs working without arms, without councils, without any visible efforts, all those storms were laid, the mutineers crushed, the ringleaders delivered up to him, and put to the most dreadful punishments his revenge could invent.”
Moulay Ismail showed an increasing tendency to draw comparisons between himself and King Louis XIV of France, yet he dismissed all other European rulers with a contumelious sneer. He told Pidou de St. Olon that “the emperor of Germany was only the companion of his electors; that the king of Spain was less master of his dominions than his ministers; that the king of England depends on his parliament.”
There was a certain truth to this, and it helps to explain why Morocco’s chroniclers saw Moulay Ismail in such a different light from his European counterparts. In Morocco, his autocratic ruthlessness was admired just as much as it was feared. The sultan had crushed numerous mutinies and rebellions, and had unified the country under his iron rule. According to the Moroccan chronicler Mohammed al-Ifrani this alone was a cause for celebration. “The prince of believers, Moulay Ismail, only stopped fighting against his enemies when he had tamed the whole of the Maghrib [Morocco], and conquered all the plains and mountains.”
Moulay Ismail had also declared a holy war against the Christian enclaves in Morocco and, true to his word, had seized back most of these infidel citadels. His vast population of Christian slaves—so abhorrent to all European writers—was another source of Moroccan swagger. “He takes a pride,” wrote Father Busnot, “and sometimes boasts before the captives, that he commands all the nations of Europe in the persons of his slaves.” It was not long before the sultan’s willingness to hold Europe to ransom was being openly feted by the courtly poets of Meknes:
O, Moulay Ismail, O sun of the world,
O thou for whom all creation would not suffice as a ransom,
Thou art nothing less than the sword of God, which God has drawn Thou art nothing less than the sword of Go
d, which God has drawn from its scabbard to set thee alone among the khalifas [Islamic governors],
As for him who knows not how to obey thee, it is because God has made him blind and that his steps have wandered far from where they ought to be.
The manner in which the sultan corresponded with Europe’s monarchs also delighted the court. He hectored King Louis XIV about Christianity and sent him a letter—a copy of the Prophet Mohammed’s missive to the Roman emperor Heraclius—urging the French monarch to convert to Islam. “Become a Muslim,” it read, “submit yourself to the religion of Mahomet, and you will be saved … [but] if you shrink from this, you are committing a great crime.”
A fervent follower of Koranic teaching, Moulay Ismail was careful to display his religious orthodoxy whenever he was seen in public. “He causes the Koran to be always carried before him by his talbe [religious scholars] as the rule of all his actions,” wrote Father Busnot. “Wheresoever he is, he often lifts up his hands to heaven, and that very often when they are imbru’d with human blood.” The sultan ordered the construction of prayer places throughout his palace and often preached in the mosques, “after such a manner … that he outdoes all the talbe.” He constantly reminded his courtiers that he was descended from the prophet and that his every word and deed was sanctified by God.
