From Wattasids to Saadians: Morocco’s 16th-Century Power Shift

On paper, 4 August 1578 looked like a local dispute. Portugal’s young King Sebastian had bankrolled a deposed Moroccan prince, Abu Abdallah Mohammed II, to reclaim the Saadian throne. The reigning sultan, Abd al-Malik, was already dying of an unspecified illness when the armies met at the Wadi al-Makhazin river, near present-day Larache on the Moroccan Atlantic coast.

What unfolded was carnage and irony in equal measure. Sebastian had brought around 23,000 men including Portuguese nobility, Spanish volunteers and German mercenaries. The Saadian forces were larger and held the better ground. In the rout, Sebastian charged forward and was never seen alive again — his body was eventually recovered and ransomed. The puppet claimant died of illness during or just after the battle. And Abd al-Malik, the Saadian sultan, had actually died of fever shortly before the decisive moment: his advisors propped his corpse in the saddle and kept the death secret for hours, so his troops would not panic. Three kings, three deaths, one afternoon.

The consequences rippled across continents. Portugal, having lost its entire ruling line and much of its noble class, was absorbed by Spain two years later in the Iberian Union — a dynastic accident that redirected the Portuguese empire’s trajectory for 60 years. Morocco, by contrast, emerged stronger and flush with ransom cash: thousands of captured European nobles had to be bought back by their families at considerable cost.

The dead sultan’s younger brother Ahmed took power in 1578 and ruled for 25 years as al-Mansur al-Dhahabi — "the Victorious, the Golden." He earned both epithets. The Portuguese ransom payments filled the treasury immediately. Then, in 1591, he sent an army of around 4,000 men (many of them Andalusian Moors and Spanish renegades armed with firearms) south across the Sahara to destroy the Songhai Empire, the dominant power in the West African savannah. The campaign worked. Moroccan governors controlled Timbuktu and the trans-Saharan gold and salt trade for decades.

Back in Marrakech, al-Mansur built on a scale that stunned foreign visitors. The El Badi Palace ("the Incomparable") covered nearly 10 hectares, with a central pool 90 metres long, pavilions imported from Portugal as ransom settlements, and columns of Italian Carrara marble traded weight for weight against Moroccan sugar. The diplomatic traffic was extraordinary: Elizabeth I sent ambassadors, as did the Ottomans. The city’s population is estimated to have reached 80,000–100,000 at the dynasty’s height — comparable to London at the same period.

Morocco’s 16th century is remarkable for what did not happen. The Ottomans absorbed Algeria in 1516, Tunisia in 1574, and controlled Libya. Portugal held Ceuta, Melilla and a string of Atlantic ports. Morocco sat between two expanding empires and was, plausibly, next.

The Saadians navigated this by playing one power off against the other. They exchanged ambassadors and even opened trade negotiations with Elizabeth I — England and Morocco sharing a common enemy in Spain — while using Ottoman pressure as a justification for building a larger army. The sherif status of the Saadian rulers also complicated Ottoman annexation: the Ottomans could hardly absorb a dynasty that outranked their own sultan in religious genealogy. When the Battle of the Three Kings removed the Portuguese threat permanently, it also removed the pretext for an Ottoman protectorate.

The result was that Morocco entered the 17th century as the only part of North Africa to remain outside both European colonial and Ottoman imperial control — a status it would more or less maintain until the French Protectorate in 1912.