Sijilmasa

Ibn Battuta stayed here in 1352–53 on his way to Mali and called it a very beautiful city, its dates finer even than those of Basra. Within a century and a half the city was gone. When Leo Africanus came to the Tafilalt in the early 16th century he found Sijilmasa destroyed, only its high walls still standing; the townspeople, he was told, had killed their last prince and scattered into the villages and castles of the oasis. The oasis outlived its city. In 1631 its people chose Muhammad al-Sharif, head of a local sharifian family, as their sultan, and from the Tafilalt his sons built the Alawi dynasty, al-Rashid taking Fez in 1666. Moulay Ismail later rebuilt Sijilmasa, but in 1818 the nomadic Ait Atta conquered it and laid it waste once more.