Ahmad al-Mansur
Ahmad al-Mansur came to the Moroccan throne because three kings died at one battle, and paid for his reign by conquering Timbuktu. He had spent seventeen years in exile in the Ottoman lands after his family lost a succession dispute, which gave him an education in administration he used for the rest of his life. At Ksar el-Kebir in 1578 - the battle of the three kings - the invading Portuguese king Sebastian was killed, the Moroccan sultan died of illness during it, and the deposed claimant the Portuguese had come to restore drowned in flight. He was the surviving brother, and became sultan that afternoon. The ransoms paid for the captured Portuguese nobility funded the state for years, and Portugal itself, having lost its king and its army, passed to Spain within two years. He built the Badi palace at Marrakesh out of Italian marble bought with Sudanese sugar. In 1590 he sent an army of some four thousand men, half of them European renegades with firearms, across the Sahara against the Songhai empire. It won at Tondibi in 1591 because arquebuses beat cavalry, and it took Gao and Timbuktu. The conquest destroyed the Songhai state, gave him the gold and slave trade and the title al-Dhahabi, the Golden, and produced an occupation his commanders could never pacify. He corresponded with Elizabeth I about a joint attack on Spain. He died of plague in 1603, and his sons fought a civil war for fifteen years that undid most of what the Songhai gold had bought.
- Lived: 1549 CE – 1603 CE
- Nationality: Moroccan
- Roles: head_of_state
