Moulay Ismail's Meknès: The Imperial Capital Built on Fifty-Five Years of Absolute Will

Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif is the most complicated figure in Moroccan history to write about without either lionizing or condemning him, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. He unified a country that was fragmenting. He expelled the Spanish from Larache and Asilah and the English from Tangier. He established the Abid al-Bukhari — a standing army of enslaved Black soldiers, loyal to the dynasty rather than to any tribe, that gave Morocco the first professional military force capable of projecting authority across the entire territory. He ruled for fifty-five years — from 1672 to 1727 — and left Morocco more coherent and more territorially intact than he found it.

He also had people executed for reasons that were, by any civilized standard, arbitrary. He conducted torture. He used thousands of enslaved European captives — estimated between 25,000 and 60,000 at various points during his reign — as construction labor for the imperial building program at Meknès. He attempted to purchase the body of King Charles II of England from the English government for burial in Morocco as a devotional act, which tells you something specific and unsettling about his relationship with the concept of diplomatic norms.

The imperial city he built at Meknès is UNESCO-listed, one of the four Imperial Cities of Morocco, and genuinely extraordinary as an architectural achievement. Understanding it requires holding both of these things simultaneously. I will try.

Why Did Moulay Ismail Choose Meknès Over the Existing Imperial Cities?

The existing Moroccan imperial cities — Fes, Marrakech, Rabat — all carried the accumulated political weight of previous dynasties, previous alliances, previous tribal networks. Moulay Ismail had come to power by defeating his own brother and fighting a prolonged civil war against various claimants. He did not want a capital city whose existing elite families had loyalty structures that predated his rule.

Meknès had been a significant town — located in the fertile agricultural plain between the Rif and the Middle Atlas, with access to both the northern Atlantic corridor and the central Moroccan highland — but it was not a dynastic capital with entrenched power structures. He could build his own city there, staffed by people loyal to him, surrounded by agricultural land that fed his court without dependence on outside supply networks.

He moved the capital in 1672, immediately after consolidating his rule, and the building program that began then and continued for the next fifty-plus years produced a walled imperial enclosure of roughly 40 square kilometers — larger than the existing medina of Meknès — containing palaces, gardens, stables large enough to house 12,000 horses, granaries that could store enough grain to feed the court and army for years, mosques, bathhouses, and the complete infrastructure of a self-contained royal city.

What Survives of the Imperial Complex Today?

The Bab Mansour gate — named after the architect who designed it, a convert from Christianity named Mansour Allouj — is the most complete surviving element and one of the most impressive examples of Moroccan imperial gate architecture anywhere in the country. It is large enough to drive a modern bus through with room to spare, decorated on its flanks and above the arch with zellige tilework and carved plaster, and flanked by two octagonal bastions with their own decorative programs. It was built toward the end of Moulay Ismail's reign, around 1732, and represents the mature expression of what his building program was attempting: a gate so emphatic that it announced the power of the ruler before you had seen anything else.

The Mausoleum of Moulay Ismail — where the Sultan himself is buried — is open to non-Muslim visitors, which is relatively unusual. The interior is a sequence of tiled and carved rooms leading to the tomb chamber, and the quality of the craftsmanship is extraordinary: the zellige work in the outer rooms is some of the finest in Morocco, the carved plaster in the tomb chamber itself is dense and precisely executed. Whatever else Moulay Ismail was, he understood how to commission craft.

The granaries — Heri es-Souani — are the most unexpectedly moving part of the complex, for reasons I find difficult to articulate precisely. They are enormous stone structures, partially collapsed, with a vaulted interior scale that produces an effect somewhere between a Gothic cathedral nave and a very large ruin. At their peak they could store enough grain to feed the city for twenty years. They are now used for nothing. The scale of their ambition and the fact of their emptiness are in a conversation that you have to stand inside to feel properly.

The stables — which had capacity for 12,000 horses and which Moulay Ismail's contemporaries considered one of the wonders of the world — are mostly collapsed, the remaining sections giving only a partial sense of the original scale.

How Does Meknès Compare to the Other Imperial Cities?

It doesn't, quite. This is the honest answer.

Fes has twelve centuries of accumulated urban density and craft tradition. Marrakech has the immediate visual drama of its location and the Djemaa el-Fna. Rabat has the Hassan Tower and the Chellah. Meknès has the memory of Moulay Ismail — one man's extraordinary, partly terrible, partly magnificent ambition translated into stone and mortar and zellige — and it has considerably fewer tourists than any of the other three, which means you can stand in front of Bab Mansour at ten in the morning and have it essentially to yourself.

This alone, in the current Moroccan tourism environment, is worth something.

The Invisible Invitation

Walk through Bab Mansour from the north — from the medina side, approaching the gate as anyone approaching the imperial city in the 18th century would have approached it. The gate expands as you walk toward it: first you see the arch, then the flanking bastions, then the full zellige program above the arch, then the carved plaster border, then the proportions of the whole thing, which are designed to be overwhelming at close range and which succeed. Stop ten meters in front of it. Look up at the inscription band. The Arabic calls this gate "the glory of the dynasty." Stand there long enough for the scale to settle into your body rather than just your eyes. Then go through.

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