Moroccan Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur was interested in acquiring a sugar island in the Caribbean in cooperation with England. What if Morocco did get a sugar island in the Caribbean? Which island are they most likely to get? Could they have held it in the long term?
There is very little evidence that he had actual ambitions in this direction, for a start he didn't have a navy.
No he wasn't.
He was interested in telling the English he wanted a sugar island in the Caribbean. That's not remotely the same thing.
I wrote an article about this based on the analysis on al-mansur's diplomatic letters to european monarchs made by Stephen Cory in his 2013 book but in short, Al-Mansur promised a lot of different european monarchs a lot of different things, it's really best not to take him at face value.
There is very little evidence that he had actual ambitions in this direction, for a start he didn't have a navy. For a second, Morocco was already the owner of a huge amount of sugar plantations filled with black slaves in the sus valley.
Just out of curiosity, is there any viable POD that could give Morocco a substantial navy, and if so, what butterflies would it have on the outside world?
Thank you for the clarification.
Just out of curiosity, is there any viable POD that could give Morocco a substantial navy, and if so, what butterflies would it have on the outside world?
Just out of curiosity, is there any viable POD that could give Morocco a substantial navy, and if so, what butterflies would it have on the outside world?
Essentially, the main english-moroccan trade at this time was sugar for guns. The Moroccans grew sugar and the english sold them guns in return. The plan you're talking about was a joint anglo-morrocan invasion of spain which would see southern spain reconquered by the muslims and the english gain a sugar island so they'd have a second source of sugar. Since this wasn't in Moroccan economic interests, the deal would involve the moroccans taking some control of it, so they'd also get a share.
But I like I said it was a proposal the English were meant to turn down, Al-Mansur's country was suffering from famine, plague and rebellion, he needed to make a big gesture like this to continue the bluff that they were doing fine actually. It wasn't something he actually could pull off. He just wanted to tell the mosques 'look, we're planning something cool, isn't it a shame those cowardly Englishmen wouldn't follow through'.
There was a long term decline in Moroccan naval power from the 14th century onwards, where you stop seeing Moroccan armies land in Iberia and the Balearics and start seeing them much on the defensive.
There were unofficial navies, of pirates and traders but mostly out of the power of the government, you see this with the Wattasids marrying local coastal rulers to get control of their navies.
By the time the Saadi dynasty emerges, you have the additional complication of the Portuguese having conquered most of the great Moroccan ports. The Saadi's emerged as a power among the interior tribes resisting domination from those portugese ports. So it's difficult to switch to a navy focus when you don't have control of your coastline.
Rabat and Sale were used as ports during this time by morisco immigrants to morocco expelled from spain but they were built on the bou regreg river, which is very shallow and limits the size of your ships. The sale corsairs, the morisco pirates were limited to very small ships, mostly without guns, as a result. They were a nuisance but they could never be a navy, certainly not to cross the atlantic.
If, say, the Marinids seized the Canary Islands before Castile did, as suggested by @iainbhx at http://forum.sealionpress.co.uk/index.php?threads/muslim-guanche.3222/, they would have a good base for New World expeditions.
There was a long term decline in Moroccan naval power from the 14th century onwards, where you stop seeing Moroccan armies land in Iberia and the Balearics and start seeing them much on the defensive.
There were unofficial navies, of pirates and traders but mostly out of the power of the government, you see this with the Wattasids marrying local coastal rulers to get control of their navies.
It was worth considering the English Armada of 1589 which was meant to free Portugal from Spain but failed miserably. Ahmed had agreed to invade Spain at the same time as England to draw off their armies. But he then took the plans to Spain and got them to agree to return to him the port of Asilah, one of many Moroccan port cities still controlled by the Iberian Union, in return for Morocco staying neutral. A little before that Spain believed they had negotiated an agreement to swap one city for another only to find Ahmed betrayed them and was not interested in giving up any cities. Ahmed’s bold words were often empty, he knew the limitations of his state and wasn’t ready to lead them into a bloody war he might not win. His greatest achievement was that his enemies took his boasts seriously even when he had an empty hand to bluff with.
A much easier war to get would actually be Morocco allied with Spain against the Ottomans. The Turks claimed to be rightful overlords of Morocco and at least once in Al-Mansur’s reign built up an invasion force ready to enforce that which Spain would have disputed before Ahmed managed to talk them down.
And if you desperately want Ahmed to notch up his fourth empire, there is an obvious target. The Borno Empire of modern day Chad and Nigeria. In 1582 the Sultan of Borno sent an embassy to Morocco in which he asked for Moroccan aid in his jihads against pagan neighbours and in return he would recognise Ahmed as his caliph and feudal master. In the next few decades other West African Muslims would be offered the same deal by Morocco, it would be the Songhai’s refusal of this that led to their doom. Ahmed was not looking North as much as he was looking South. He wanted to unite Muslim Africa, indeed he wrote a huge amount of letters to Egyptians and Algerians criticising Ottoman rule in the hope that they’d throw out the Turks and invite him in in their place, and the allegiance of Bornu was a huge feather in his cap. If a Sultan of Bornu attempted to break that, Ahmed would have the motive and opportunity to annex them directly, which would have huge effects on the history of West Africa.
I feel like al-Mansur being the only non-European leader during the Age of Discovery to express any interest in going in the New World (were there any other people outside of Europe who have ever expressed interest prior to the 19th century?) indicates that he had ambition, even if it was mainly in service of a madcap diplomatic technique and domestic propaganda.
His Songhai campaign shows he really tried to turn Morocco into a little empire that stretches beyond the Maghreb. What if he had succeeded, and had able successors? Would Morocco become a trans-Saharan empire over time, with the resources to be a minor player in European politics similar to the Ottomans?
Sure, when al-Mansur was writing letters to Elizabeth and other European leaders he was puffing himself up, but if Morocco had gotten far enough in its West African ambitions, and secured a firm alliance with England, what if a resurgent Morocco had the extra resources to look to the New World? I don't mean full-fledged state-sponsored colonization or anything expensive like that. I mean maybe a gradual program that's something like this:
1. Embedding Moroccan mariners/navigators in English voyages
2. Developing a navy; not for New World exploration but for wars in Iberia/North Africa/West Africa, which if successful could drive interest westwards.
2.5. Could an Anglo-Moroccan force seize Madeira or the Azores? Could the Anglo-Moroccans and Portugeuse have seized the Canary Islands?
3. Eventually, a joint English-Moroccan expedition, in the name of countering Spain/ the Iberians
4. Moroccans being involved in New World exploration and colonization, not in an official state capacity but as traders, pirates, adventurers, etc.
5. Something temporary but noteworthy like Moroccan Saint Pierre and Miquelon, or the Moroccan equivalent to New Sweden or New Netherland- a very modest little colony that ends up conquered eventually but solidifies this nation's presence in the New World.
Would be interesting how this affects race relations down the line, assuming Englishmen still end up ruling North America and using chattel slavery. North and West Africans being involved in North America wouldn't butterfly it away- makes me wonder if it might even accelerate the slave trade. But I wonder if race relations might evolve differently throughout the centuries. If the English have semi-regular contact with a Morocco empire that stretches from North Africa down to the Sahel, would they be less likely to see Africans as the Other, and more likely to see them as fully human?
I've always wondered why Morocco wasn't involved in the later Barbary Wars. Guess Morocco is neither located on the Barbary Coast, nor had the naval capacity get into the corsair business.
What if, for starters, he did attack Spain and not betrayed Elizabeth [During the English Armada].
I read a claim that Barbary corsairs had raided the Grand Banks at some point, enslaving Basque fishermen. I have no idea if that's true or not, but if that was something they liked to do, maybe they could have established a semi-permanent base in the area... such as settling in Saint Pierre and Miquelon or even Newfoundland.
The Japanese sent ships to Mexico
the Ottomans questioned sailors from Columbus's voyages and the Kingdom of Kongo sent several of their ambassadors to Brazil in the 1600s.
But yes, the fact he asked for a sugar island is telling, I agree. I think it's more telling about the sort of person he wanted to appear as but I can hear arguments for it being indicative of his actual ambitions.
But yeah I don't think it's impossible for that not to happen and for Morocco to maintain their control over West Africa.
Though I think some of the difficulties are hard to remove, the traders going to the coast rather than Timbuktu seems inevitable, I can buy a mroe successful Malian annexation.
My gut instinct is that it's easier to get something like that with an earlier Pod when Morocco is stronger and the Christian Iberians are weaker but yeah, it's not a ridiculous series of events.
More likely it's that the Arabs/Berbers remain white than Africans are seen as better off.
Another interesting one, my gut instinct is that the Armada would still lose because it was shambolic and then the Spanish would turn on Morocco. Which is presumably also what the Moroccans concluded.
I've written three stories where muslim corsairs do establish bases in the New World, I certainly don't think it's impossible. But you need them to hold onto the ships of the European renegades and capture more of that ilk, really. The majority of corsair ships were far too small for that voyage.
That's post-Age of Discovery, I was thinking before the 19th century. Japan's rapid industrialization and ascension into colonial imperialism is a special case and yeah they were very interested in Latin American settlement. Also that also seemed to be the era of non-sovereign "colonies" that did involve settler communities with or without state support, but didn't actually lead to the sponsoring government taking over the land (other than Texas in a roundabout way, I guess).
I'd place Japanese colonies in Mexico and Latin America on the same level as Mormon Colonies, Italians and Welsh in Argentina, French and Germans in post-independence Texas. Fair, they did have interest in settling the place and profiting from it, but they presumably they didn't want to directly own it like a hypothetical 17th century Moroccan colony would have..
I did not know about either of this! I'd be interested in learning more about it. Particularly because I've always been interested in what if Kongo had survived and continued to be on the periphery of European relations, sort of like the Maghreb/Ethiopia of West Africa, perhaps. The Ottomans seem more unlikely I guess.
Thanks for more reading material with which I can explore these ideas with.
The Date Maru sailed from japan to Mexico in 1613. Prior to the Sakoku, the Japanese had a decent navy and quite a lot of Japanese Christians moved to Spanish mexico, they were the only non spanish allowed to own weapons.
But he could buy back free people who had been sold. Throughout the 16th Century, agents of the Kongolese King visited São Tomé and Príncipe, a stop off point between Kongo and Brazil, and found nobles and elites who had been illegally sold and bought them back. In 1604, they went further and travelled to Brazil itself to buy back slaves who had been taken to the plantations, the result was probably the first ever New World slaves to be returned to their homes in Africa.
In 1624, a Dutch fleet arrived in Angola to launch a joint attack on Luanda with the Kongolese. The Kongolese didn’t show up, and the Dutch withdrew. Philip’s gamble had worked to preserve his colony and with that danger passed, no more Catholic slaves were returned.
And the days of the Kingdom of Kongo being treat as a part of Christendom on a comparable level to the European Kings were numbered. This was their high point in terms of influence in Europe, over the next century civil conflict and wars with Portugal reduced their power to a point where the Iberians no longer needed to care about their sensibilities. It is interesting to imagine the effects of the Spanish enforcing that rule on Christian Slaves being sent back to Africa for longer but it's hard to picture them ever doing so.
I wouldn't really say any of them are what you want. One was a throw away thing in a timeline about England (which you can find here), one was a story about a weaker Morocco (which you can find here) and the third was a timeline about an all out Ottoman-Spanish War after Malta falls in 1565 which I won't link to because it was never finished.
In none of it was the corsairs the focus.
