Morocco: the empire of the far west

By Khalid Al-Harbi

For more than eight centuries, a Moroccan state has stood at the western edge of the Arab world — and it stands still. The Almoravids and the Almohads, reformers turned conquerors, built an empire that held Al-Andalus and the Maghreb at once: Morocco’s great imperial age, whose shadow still falls on both shores of the Strait. But the empire did not end with them. Dynasty after dynasty — Marinid, Saadian, and above all Alawite, on the throne since 1666 — carried the Moroccan state forward, unbroken, to the present day.

The empire in images

The rise

The Almoravids began as a reform movement, not an army. Around 1040, the preacher Abdallah ibn Yasin gathered the veiled Sanhaja warriors of the deep Sahara into a ribat — a fortified brotherhood of strict faith — and the al-murabitun, “those of the ribat,” set out to purify the religion and ended by conquering kingdoms.

Their general, Yusuf ibn Tashfin — whose 45-year reign (r. 1061–1106) carried the movement to empire — in 1062 raised Marrakech, the “red city,” at the foot of the Atlas, and looked north from it. When the squabbling taifa kings of Al-Andalus begged for rescue against Alfonso VI of Castile, Yusuf crossed the Strait in 1086 and broke the Castilian host at Sagrajas. Four years later he took Al-Andalus itself — with Seville and Cordoba.

Behind the armies marched the caravans: Sijilmassa, the Saharan gate of the gold trade, was theirs — and gold paid for empires.

The zenith

The Almohads were Morocco’s answer to everything the Almoravids had become. Ibn Tumart preached the absolute oneness of God; his lieutenant Abd al-Mu’min — whose 33-year reign (r. 1130–1163) did the conquering — stormed Marrakech in 1147 and inherited a realm already spanning two continents.

The high noon came under his grandson Yaqub al-Mansur, whose 15-year reign (r. 1184–1199) was the empire’s summit. In 1195 at Alarcos he shattered the largest Christian army yet sent against him, and his architects raised the Koutoubia minaret over Marrakech and the Giralda over Seville — twin towers of a civilization at full confidence. At its greatest, an empire from Al-Andalus to the Senegal — and the Moroccan imprint on Europe, in stone and learning, endures across the Strait to this day.

Beneath it all runs a deeper memory: in 711 Tariq ibn Ziyad — a Moroccan — crossed the Strait into Iberia and left his name on Gibraltar, the mountain of Tariq. The Almoravids and Almohads did not invent the Moroccan crossing; they inherited it and made it an empire.

The fall

The turn came in 1212 at Las Navas de Tolosa, where a crusading coalition of Christian kingdoms broke the Almohad host — and with it the spell of invincibility. Then the empire unraveled the old way — disputed successions, overmighty governors, restless cities — until in 1269 the Marinids entered Marrakech and the Almohad century closed.

What followed was not eclipse but transmission. The Marinids kept the state and its cities; the Saadians restored its splendor and broke Portuguese power in Morocco; and in 1666 the Alawite dynasty took the throne — and has never left it.

The Alawites: the throne that never fell

Since 1666 — more than three and a half centuries — the same dynasty has ruled Morocco. That alone sets the kingdom apart: few states on earth can point to an unbroken line of sovereigns stretching back to the seventeenth century.

The early Alawite sultans reunified a fractured realm — Moulay Ismail made Morocco a power to be reckoned with from the Atlantic to the Sahara — and the dynasty guarded the country’s independence while empires rose and fell around it. When the protectorate years came, the throne endured as the living symbol of the nation, and the Alawite kings led the struggle that restored full sovereignty. They reign still.

This is the heart of the Moroccan story: not two centuries of empire followed by a long decline, but more than eight centuries of continuous statehood, carried across the ages by a monarchy that never broke.

The legacy