Abd al-Malik of Morocco
Abd al-Malik was the Saadi sultan of Morocco for two years, an exile who had spent seventeen years at Algiers and Constantinople, fought at Lepanto on the Ottoman side, and came home in 1576 with an Ottoman army to take the throne from his nephew; when that nephew brought the king of Portugal into Morocco with a crusading army in 1578, Abd al-Malik, already dying, met them at Ksar el-Kebir on 4 August, let them march into the angle of two rivers, and won the battle of the three kings from a litter, dying of his illness in the course of it and having his death concealed until the day was won. He was a son of the sultan Muhammad al-Shaykh, who had founded the dynasty's power and was murdered by Turkish guards in 1557, and when his brother took the throne he fled east. He served the Ottomans as a soldier and learned Turkish, Spanish and Italian, and when his brother died in 1574 and the crown went to the brother's son Abu Abdallah, he persuaded the sultan Murad III to lend him janissaries. He took Fez and Marrakesh in 1576 and sent the Ottomans home with the price of their help, keeping a Turkish-drilled army and a policy of playing Constantinople against Madrid. Abu Abdallah went to Lisbon. Sebastian of Portugal, twenty-four and wanting a crusade, landed at Asilah in July 1578 with some twenty thousand men, Portuguese, Castilian, German and Italian, and marched inland in the August heat against advice. Abd al-Malik, ill with what the sources call a fever and may have been poison, had perhaps fifty thousand, and drew the Portuguese into a bend of the Wadi al-Makhazin with the tide rising behind them. He died in the litter as the battle opened; his secretary kept it secret and gave orders in his name until the Portuguese broke. Sebastian was killed, Abu Abdallah drowned crossing the river, and Abd al-Malik's brother Ahmad, proclaimed on the field, took the name al-Mansur and the ransoms of the Portuguese nobility, which paid for the palace at Marrakesh. Portugal lost its king, its army and, within two years, its independence to Spain.
- Lived: 1541 CE – 1578 CE
- Nationality: Moroccan
- Roles: sultan, monarch
