ay disappointed.

The delay drove us to wondering about these mysterious Saadian Sultans,
who, though coming so late in the annals of Morocco, had left at least
one monument said to be worthy of the Merinid tradition. And the tale
of the Saadians is worth telling.

They came from Arabia to the Draa (the fruitful country south of the
Great Atlas) early in the fifteenth century, when the Merinid empire was
already near disintegration. Like all previous invaders they preached
the doctrine of a pure Islamism to the polytheistic and indifferent
Berbers, and found a ready hearing because they denounced the evils of a
divided empire, and also because the whole of Morocco was in revolt
against the Christian colonies of Spain and Portugal, which had
encircled the coast from Ceuta to Agadir with a chain of fortified
counting-houses. To _bouter dehors_ the money-making unbeliever was an
object that found adherents from the Rif to the Sahara, and the Saadian
cherifs soon rallied a mighty following to their standard. Islam, though
it never really gave a creed to the Berbers, supplied them with a
war-cry as potent to-day as when it first rang across Barbary.

The history of the Saadians is a foreshortened record of that of all
their predecessors. They overthrew the artistic and luxurious Merinids,
and in their turn became artistic and luxurious. Their greatest Sultan,
Abou-el-Abbas, surnamed "The Golden," after defeating the Merinids and
putting an end to Christian rule in Morocco by the crushing victory of
El-Ksar (1578), bethought him in his turn of enriching himself and
beautifying his capital, and with this object in view turned his
attention to the black kingdoms of the south.

Senegal and the Soudan, which had been Mohammedan since the eleventh
century, had attained in the sixteenth century a high degree of
commercial wealth and artistic civilization. The Sultanate of Timbuctoo
seems in reality to have been a thriving empire, and if Timbuctoo was
not the Claude-like vision of Carthaginian palaces which it became in
the tales of imaginative travellers, it apparently had something of the
magnificence of Fez and Marrakech.

The Saadian army, after a march of four and a half months across the
Sahara, conquered the whole black south. Senegal, the Soudan and Bornou
submitted to Abou-el-Abbas, the Sultan of Timbuctoo was dethroned, and
the celebrated negro jurist Ahmed-Baba was brought a prisoner to
Marrakech, where his chief sor