Ahmad al-Mansur, the Golden sultan, sent an army across the Sahara for gold
Ahmad al-Mansur came to Morocco's throne on a battlefield in 1578 and grew rich ransoming Portuguese nobles. Nicknamed the Golden, he built a dazzling palace, courted Elizabeth I against Spain, dreamed of Islam reaching the Americas, and sent 4,000 men across the Sahara to seize the gold of the Songhai Empire.
Born in 1549, Ahmad was the fifth son of Mohammed ash-Sheikh, the first Saadi sultan. After his father's murder in 1557, he and his brother Abd al-Malik fled their elder brother and spent 17 years among the Ottomans in Algiers and Constantinople, absorbing Ottoman training and culture. Contemporaries described him as deeply learned, a lover of books, calligraphy, mathematics and mystical texts.
In 1578 Abd al-Malik, by then sultan, died fighting the Portuguese at Ksar el-Kebir, and Ahmad succeeded him on a wave of prestige. Ransoms for Portuguese captives filled the treasury, and that December work began on the El Badi Palace in Marrakesh, a lavish setting for ambassadors that took some fifteen years to finish. But armies, spies, building and a propaganda campaign for his claim to be caliph drained the money, and he spent far more than he took in.
He played the great powers against each other. Formally acknowledging the Ottoman sultan while acting independently, he warmly received a Spanish embassy, minted coins in his own name and dropped Murad III from Friday prayers. When the Ottomans prepared to invade, he bought peace with a tribute of more than 100,000 gold coins. In 1600 he sent an ambassador to Elizabeth I proposing an alliance against Spain, and a letter of 1601 imagined Islam prevailing in the New World. French physicians served at his court and later taught Arabic in Paris.
Gold was the answer to his deficits. On October 16, 1590, exploiting civil strife in the Songhai Empire, he dispatched an army under Judar Pasha, a Spanish convert. At Tondibi its guns routed a Songhai force of 40,000, and Timbuktu, Djenné and Gao were sacked, but holding territory across the desert proved impossible and it slipped away within decades. In 1602 he used fatwas to discourage tobacco. He died on 25 August 1603 and lies in the Saadian Tombs of Marrakesh.
Source: Ahmad al-Mansur
