Wattasid dynasty

Politics and institutions

The Wattasids came to power through the machinery of the Marinid state. As hereditary viziers from the eastern Rif, they had governed the Marinid chancery for generations; when Abd al-Haqq II tried to break them in 1458 or 1459, he killed many of the clan, but his own death in a Fez revolt in 1465 left the field open. Abu Abd Allah al-Sheikh Muhammad ibn Yahya became the first Wattasid sultan, ruling from Fez over the north while the south fragmented into principalities. The dynasty never controlled the whole country, and its authority was further weakened by the rise of the Saadian sharifs in the Sous. After the Battle of Tadla in 1554 the last Wattasid, Ali Abu Hassun, was killed and the Saadis took Morocco.

Economy and finance

The Wattasid economy was an economy of contraction. Portuguese conquests along the Atlantic — Safi in 1488, Melilla in 1497, Mazagan in 1502, Agadir in 1505, Mogador in 1506 — cut the kingdom off from the southern caravans and the gold trade, while the fall of Granada in 1492 removed the last Muslim outlet in Iberia. Towns grew poorer, population stagnated, and the rural economy relied on subsistence agriculture and local markets. The sultans struck few coins: a handful of rare gold pieces and square silver dirhams and half-dirhams on the Almohad standard. They lacked the revenue to pay a standing army or to recover the ports, and their dependence on tribal levies and local lords deepened the political fragmentation.

Society and culture

Wattasid Morocco was a society under strain. The learned life of Fez continued, but the dynasty is remembered for intellectual decline, and the fuqaha, Sufi brotherhoods and sharifian families increasingly supplied the leadership that the sultans could not. The arrival of Andalusian refugees after 1492 added skilled craftsmen, merchants and scholars to the northern cities, but also sharpened competition for scarce resources. The Portuguese occupation of the ports turned the coast into a frontier, and the religious prestige of the Saadian sharifs offered a mobilizing alternative to the Wattasids' compromised accommodation with the Christians. Socially, the period marks the transition from the Marinid order to the sharifian monarchies that would dominate later Moroccan history.

Military and frontiers

The Wattasids could not defend the coast. Their attempts to recover Asilah and Tangier in 1508, 1511 and 1515 failed, and their armies were tribal levies rather than a standing force. The Portuguese held the fortified ports with naval support, and the Saadis in the south built a reputation by defeating them on land: Agadir fell in 1541, and the Saadian army went on to take Fez. At the Battle of Tadla in 1554 the Wattasid force was destroyed and Ali Abu Hassun killed. The dynasty's military weakness was not only a matter of numbers; it reflected the absence of a fiscal base capable of paying soldiers, and the political fragmentation that made a unified command impossible.

Foreign relations

Wattasid foreign policy was a series of concessions. The Treaty of Alcáçovas in 1479 and Tordesillas in 1494 placed Morocco in the Portuguese sphere; a 1485 treaty with Spain promised not to aid Granada in return for Spanish restraint at sea. The sultans sought Ottoman help against the Saadis and the Portuguese, but the Ottomans were more interested in Algiers than in Fez. The Saadis, by contrast, combined war against the Portuguese with a claim to independent Islamic legitimacy, and their victory at Agadir in 1541 exposed the Wattasid policy of coexistence. By 1554 the dynasty had no foreign patron capable of saving it, and the Saadis took both Fez and the international standing that went with it.

Legacy and influence

The Wattasids are remembered as a transitional dynasty, the last Zenata Berber house to rule Morocco before the sharifian Saadis and Alawis. Their failure to defend the coast discredited the old Berber monarchy and helped make religious descent the basis of political legitimacy. The square silver dirhams and rare gold coins of the period are their most distinctive material remains; architecturally, they left little that can be securely attributed to them. Their reign also saw the beginning of the long Moroccan crisis that the Saadis would resolve, and the integration of Andalusian refugees into northern urban life. In the national memory they stand for the cost of division in the face of European expansion.