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Fez, for two centuries and more, was in a double sense the capital of Morocco: the centre of its trade as well as of its culture. Culture, in fact, came to northwest Africa chiefly through the Merinid princes. The Almohads had erected great monuments from Rabat to Marrakech, and had fortified Fez, but their "mighty wasteful empire" fell apart like those that had preceded it.
It is no doubt because the Almohads built in stone that so much of what they made survives. The Merinids took to rubble and a soft tufa, and the Cherifian dynasties built in clay like the Spaniards in South America. And so seventeenth century Meknez has perished while the Almohad walls and towers of the tenth century still stand.
Military orders were established in Spain; and the kings of Castile, Leon, and Navarre, aided by sixty thousand crusaders from Germany, France, and Italy, defeated Mohammed, the chief of the Almohads, with great slaughter, in a decisive battle near Tolosa . The Spanish crusade built up the little kingdom of Portugal, and the states of Castile and of Aragon.
The complete conquest of the Moors was prevented by the strife of the Christian kingdoms with one another. These allies of the Arabs built up a kingdom for themselves, reconquered Valencia, and taxed to the utmost the power of the Christians to resist their progress. New sects of fanatical Moslems, the Almohads, having conquered Morocco, passed over into Spain.
"Dust to dust" should have been the motto of the Moroccan palace-builders. Fez possesses one old secular building, a fine fondak of the fifteenth century, but in Morocco, as a rule, only mosques and the tombs of saints are preserved none too carefully and even the strong stone buildings of the Almohads have been allowed to fall to ruin, as at Chella and Rabat.
In spite of these brilliant beginnings the rule of the dynasty was short and without subsequent interest. Based on a fanatical antagonism against the foreigner, and fed by the ever-wakeful hatred of the Moors for their Spanish conquerors, it raised ever higher the Chinese walls of exclusiveness which the more enlightened Almohads and Merinids had sought to overthrow.
Fugitives from Spain came to the new city when Moulay Idriss founded it. One part of the town was given to them, and the river divided the Elbali of the Almohads into the two quarters of Kairouiyin and Andalous, which still retain their old names. But the full intellectual and artistic flowering of Fez was delayed till the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Preaching the doctrine of a purified monotheism, he called his followers the Almohads or Unitarians, to distinguish them from the polytheistic Almoravids, whose heresies he denounced. He fortified the city of Tinmel in the Souss, and built there a mosque of which the ruins still exist.
Somewhat later the Wild Berber hordes of the Almoravides and the Almohads, crossing from Africa to usurp the Ommeiad dominions and carry on the holy war with greater energy, aroused new fears and provoked in the threatened kingdoms a fanaticism equal to their own.
The brief Almoravid dynasty left no monuments behind it. Of the Almoravid Fez and Marrakech the chroniclers relate great things; but the wild Hilalian invasion and the subsequent descent of the Almohads from the High Atlas swept away whatever the first dynasties had created. The Almohads were mighty builders, and their great monuments are all of stone.