Meknes

Under the Saadis, who ruled from Marrakesh, Meknes was left to itself. Its moment came in 1672, when Moulay Ismail, who had governed the city for his brother Moulay Rashid, became sultan and made it his capital. Throughout his fifty-five-year reign he kept building a palace-city on the south side of the old town, in the end some four times larger than the medina itself. The medieval kasbah was torn down to make room, and the rubble heaped before the new palace gates gave Place el-Hedim its name. Prisoners of war laboured beside paid workers, though European tales of tens of thousands of Christian slaves were exaggerated. The work outlived its builder: his son Moulay Abdallah finished the great gate of Bab Mansour in 1732, named for its designer, a Christian slave who had turned Muslim. Yet the palaces decayed once Ismail was gone, and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 hastened their ruin.