Taza

The walls the Almohads had raised around the old town were strengthened by the Marinids in the 14th century and again by the Saadis in the 16th, for the corridor remained the road by which invaders from the east came on. In December 1553 an Ottoman army from Algiers, sent to restore a Wattasid pretender, routed a Saadi force camped near Taza and marched through the gap to Fez. A century later the same road carried a new dynasty to power. In 1665 Moulay Rashid, the first Alaouite sultan, made Taza his main base, building a palace on the south side of the old town and restoring the Great Mosque, and the following year he took Fez.