SALÉ, THE TURBULENT CITY – PART 1

The city of Salé was a famous corsair capital during the seventeenth century. It was (and still is) actually composed of two settlements that straddle the mouth of the Bou Regreg River, which flows northwestwards from its headwaters in the Middle Atlas Mountains in the interior of Morocco and empties into the Atlantic Ocean about 170 miles (a little under 275 kilometers) south of the Strait of Gibraltar. The settlement on the north bank of the river is today known as Salé, that on the south bank as Rabat (now the capital city of Morocco). The twin modern cities are frequently referred to as a single place—Rabat-Salé. Seventeenth century Europeans used the name Salé quite loosely, however, applying it to both towns. Usually, they distinguished between the two by referring to the town on the north bank of the river as Old Salé and that on the south bank as New Salé.

Salé is often described as having been an independent pirate republic. It was, at least for a time. But the phrase “independent pirate republic” conjures up the wrong sort of image. It makes one think of swarms of pirates descending upon Salé, thumbing their collective nose at ineffectual local authorities, and setting up a wild “anything goes” frontier town full of taverns, brothels, and shady merchants, all catering to the pirates and their ill-gotten gold—a Moroccan version of the sort of place people imagine seventeenth century Caribbean pirate havens like Tortuga or Port Royal to have been. The problem with this “independent pirate republic” image is that it totally ignores Moroccan history.

And Moroccan history—like everybody’s history—is complicated.

To understand why Salé became the place that it did, it’s necessary to know something about the larger context in which Salé existed. It wasn’t just an isolated town that sprang up on the seacoast due to a sudden influx of pirates. It had a history, and it played a part in, and was affected by, the larger history of Morocco.

Early seventeenth century Morocco was not a ‘country’ in our modern sense of the word. It can indeed be thought of as a distinct geographical territory—bordered on the west by the Atlantic, on the north by the Mediterranean, and on the east and south by shifting boundaries determined by regional allegiances and conflicts—but in the early seventeenth century there was no stable central authority, no national government bureaucracy, no universal rule of law.

It’s worth pausing here for a moment to think of just what this means. We modern inhabitants of nation states are so used to stable government structures and bureaucracies, and to the rule of law, that we take such things for granted. They are, however, relatively modern developments, and even today they do not apply in some areas of the world—think Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria, for instance. For much of history, government has been a fragile thing, prey to the vicissitudes of famine, fire, politics, plague, and war.

And so it was in early seventeenth century Morocco.

The Morocco landscape is mountainous, interspersed with fertile plains and numerous river valleys—the kind of geography that tends to create independent tribal groups living in isolated conditions. This rugged, varied territory was inhabited by a variety of peoples: Berbers, Arabs, Andalusians, Jews, and Moriscos.

The Berbers were the indigenous group and had been there for millennia.

The Arabs, as part of the wave of Islam-inspired tribesmen who came boiling out of the Arabian Peninsula, conquered/colonized Morocco starting in the early eighth century.

The Andalusians were refugees from the Spanish Reconquista, when the Emirate of Grenada, the last surviving Muslim kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula was overrun by the forces of Queen Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1492.

The Jews were both indigenous and Reconquista refugees (as the culminating act of the Reconquista, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the entire population of Iberian Jews from their realms).

The Moriscos were Muslims who had remained in Spain after the Reconquista, been made to convert to Christianity, and were then forcibly expelled, in an act of ethnic cleansing, by the Spanish crown in 1609-14.

The Berbers and Arabs, who formed the vast majority of the population, were tribal peoples, many of whom lived in the mountains. The Andalusians, Jews, and Moriscos, who tended to live in the cities, formed tight-knit ethnic groups. Loyalties among these varied peoples were local: family, ethnic group, clan, tribe, coalitions of tribes. Each group—or group of groups—was intent on improving its own position, so there was constant jockeying for power.

European (and Ottoman) outsiders who became involved with Morocco—as is the case today with outsiders in places like Afghanistan—were inevitably sucked into internal power struggles as one tribal or ethnic faction or another sought to use alliances with the foreigners to improve their own positions.

To this complicated dynamic must also be added the religiously based opposition to the European (Christian) colonization—either geographic or economic—of Morocco. Numerous marabouts (holy men) raised armies and launched violent jihads against the Christian infidels. These leaders and their holy wars were woven deep into the fabric of seventeenth century Moroccan power politics.

Fashioning any sort of centralized rule in such a complex, volatile place first required forming a powerful enough coalition of tribes/groups to establish dominance through brute force, and then playing one tribe/group off against another.

Successful Sultans were able to juggle the intricately interlocked pieces of this ethnic/religious/political puzzle in such a way as to create a kind of dynamic equilibrium: the ruling dynasty at the head, negotiating with external European and Ottoman powers, enmeshed in a network of Moroccan tributary allegiances, with each set of players, at every level, acting out of self-interest and so keeping other nearby sets of players in check.

If that complex equilibrium was upset, however, events could quickly spiral into bloody chaos.

In the early 1600s, just such a disequilibrium had occurred, resulting in revolt and civil war—or al-fitna as it has been called. (Fitna is an Arabic word, used in the Koran in the sense of “trial” or “testing.” By extension, it came to be used to describe periods of revolt or civil war.)

Over the centuries, a number of ruling dynasties governed Morocco. During the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries, it was the Sa’adian dynasty’s turn to be in power. The Sa’adis claimed to be sharifs, that is, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. This claim endowed them with sufficient status to build a coalition of tribes, and so rise to power. By the turn of the seventeenth century, however, the Sa’adis were floundering.

In 1603, the Sa’adi Sultan al-Abbas Ahmad al-Mansur died (of plague), precipitating a brutal struggle for succession between his three sons. The period of al-fitna that followed al-Mansur’s death lasted over half a century. It destroyed the Sa’adian Dynasty and tore Morocco apart, shredding what infrastructure remained from al-Mansur’s reign as rival groups clashed against each other in continuous bloody conflict.

This period of al-fitna was so cruelly devastating, in fact, that an early eighteenth century chronicler of Moroccan history described it as dreadful enough to make the hair of a suckling infant turn white.

Desperate though the time of al-fitna was, the chaos it created also offered up opportunities that might otherwise not have existed. The rulers of the city of Salé availed themselves of just such an opportunity.

For more on all this, see the next post in this series: Salé, the Turbulent City – Part 2.

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For those who may be interested…

The observation that the Moroccan civil war was “dreadful enough to make the hair of a suckling infant turn white” comes from Nozhet-Elhâdi: Histoire de la Dynastie Saadienne au Maroc, (History of the Sa’adian Dynasty in Morocco), by Mohammed Esseghir ben Elhadj ben Abdullah Eloufrani, p. 398. The French text (a translation of the original Arabic) reads: “Les luttes qu’il [Moulay Zaydan] eut à soutenir contre ses frères auraient fait blanchir les cheveux d’un enfant à la mamelle.”