Fez in the age of the Marinides

The author of the book, Roger Le Tourneau (1907 - 1971), was a major figure in Middle Eastern studies. His career began at the Collège Moulay Idriss of Fez. He joined the French Resistance during World War Two and went on to hold many prestigious positions in France.

Fourteen century Fez under the Moroccan Marinid Sultanate was one of the most important Muslim cities, only Cairo could lay claim to greater importance.

Fez stood at a crossroads and profited from trade routes: north to the Mediterranean, south to the Sahara and beyond, west to the Atlantic and east to Algeria and the Arabian kingdoms.

It was a city of learning and religion where students devoted themselves to the study of the Arabic tongue and Islamic science; where writers distinguished themselves in poetry, history, theology and juridical speculation.

Fez remained the capital of the Marinides for two more than centuries.

Le Tourneau describes Fez under the Marinides as:

A reasonable city...where commerce and money count for a great deal, but are not everything; where the artisan, the worker in general, feel themselves respected and are not ashamed of their modest situations in life; where the life of the mind fortunately counterbalances the desire for gain; where religious feeling is intense and deep, but does not turn to excess, to persecution and vicious strife, where the court itself has never crushed the city with its importance and its majesty. Fez is not, as has often been said, the city of mystery, but the city of good sense and good living.

Sadly, no cartographer listed.

A quarter of the city housed a Christian militia, composed of Castilians or Catalonians whom the Marinides had taken into their service at an early date.

Noted explorer, scholar and jurist Ibn Battutah retired to Fez in 1354 after 75,000 miles of travel. Tim Mackintosh Smith’ book Travels with a Tangerine on the adventurous life of Battutah is well worth your time.

Here is a report from a more recent traveller, John Prioleau, writing in 1922:

It is with something more than curiosity or even awe that one first gazes on Fez…For so many years back in history this amazing city has been a secret locked in the hills of Morocco, so many tales have been told of it, so very few people have ever set eyes on it, that to one's imagination it has become a sort of Western Forbidden City, as mysterious, as inaccessible, as unreal as the Celestial town at Peking. Fez! It has always been a name to stir the dullest imagination…it still has that magic, and it will always have it.

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