Tetouan

Pirates were the town's undoing. In 1399 a Castilian force destroyed Tetouan because corsairs were sailing from it, and in 1436 a raid from Portuguese Ceuta struck the ruins again. Its second life came from Granada. In the years before the Nasrid kingdom fell in 1492, Ali al-Mandri, a captain loyal to Boabdil, led Andalusian exiles into the empty site; they raised the walls first and then filled them with houses, and Muslim and Jewish refugees from Spain followed in great numbers.

The exiles brought their grievance with them. Tetouan's ships raided the Spanish coast in revenge for the homes their crews had lost, and Leo Africanus, passing through early in the 16th century, reported some 3,000 captives in the town. From the 1530s it was one of the chief corsair ports of the western Mediterranean, and in 1565 Castile destroyed its harbour in reprisal, but the raiding went on. Captives were kept in caves cut beneath the town until relatives or Spanish Franciscans paid their ransom; those who were never redeemed were sold as slaves.