Who was Moulay Ismail, the powerful Moroccan sultan?

Moulay Ismail is the sultan whose stamp you cannot avoid if you visit Meknes, and his story is one of the most extraordinary — and most brutal — in Moroccan history. He ruled for fifty-five years, from 1672 to 1727, as the second sultan of the Alaouite dynasty, the same family that rules Morocco today. He came to power when the country was fractured and lawless, and he forged it into a single, fearsomely centralised state through a combination of administrative genius and famous cruelty. Contemporaries across Europe spoke of him with a mix of awe and horror.

His great obsession was Meknes, which he transformed from a provincial town into a monumental imperial capital meant to rival the Versailles of his contemporary, Louis XIV of France — the two rulers actually exchanged ambassadors and gifts. He poured decades of labour into vast palace complexes, granaries, stables said to hold twelve thousand horses, and ramparts that ran for miles. The Bab Mansour, the colossal gate that still anchors the old city, is the showpiece: green-and-white zellij tilework on a gate built to make every visitor feel small. Standing under it, you understand his ambition immediately.

I am honest with guests about the dark side, because it is part of the truth. The building was done by enormous forced labour, including thousands of European Christian captives taken by the Barbary corsairs, held in subterranean prisons whose passages you can still glimpse. He kept a feared standing army, the Black Guard, drawn largely from sub-Saharan Africa and bound to the sultan personally. He was, by every account, a ruler you did not cross. The grandeur of Meknes and the suffering behind it are inseparable, and good guiding acknowledges both.

What I find compelling is how much of him survives intact. Meknes is the least touristy of the four imperial cities, which means you often have the great gate, the granaries of Heri es-Souani with their cool vaulted halls, and his vast mausoleum — one of the rare religious sites in Morocco open to non-Muslims — almost to yourself. Pairing Meknes with the nearby Roman ruins of Volubilis makes a superb, uncrowded history day, and Moulay Ismail's enormous shadow is the thread that ties it all together.