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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.
There was time, before sunset, to go up to the hill from which the ruined tombs of the Merinid Sultans look down over the city they made glorious.
But there, in a nettle-grown corner of a ruinous quarter, lay hidden till yesterday the Chapel of the Tombs: the last emanation of pure beauty of a mysterious, incomplete, forever retrogressive and yet forever forward-straining people. The Merinid tombs of Fez have fallen; but those of their destroyers linger on in precarious grace, like a flower on the edge of a precipice.
From the Merinid hill we had noticed a long façade among the cypresses and fruit-trees of Eldjid. This was Bou-Jeloud, the old summer-palace of the Sultan's harem, now the house of the Resident-General, where lodgings had been prepared for us. The road descended again, crossing the Oued Fez by one of the fine old single-arch bridges that mark the architectural link between Morocco and Spain.
This indifference to the completed object which is like a kind of collective exaggeration of the artist's indifference to his completed work has resulted in the total disappearance of the furniture and works of art which must have filled the beautiful buildings of the Merinid period.
The private house, whether merchant's dwelling or chieftain's palace, is laid out on the same lines, with the addition of the reserved quarters for women; and what remains in Spain and Sicily of Moorish secular architecture shows that, in the Merinid period, the play of ornament must have been as was natural even greater than in the medersas.
Nothing endures in Islam, except what human inertia has left standing and its own solidity has preserved from the elements. Or rather, nothing remains intact, and nothing wholly perishes, but the architecture, like all else, lingers on half-ruined and half-unchanged. The Merinid tombs, however, are only hollow shells and broken walls, grown part of the brown cliff they cling to.
The demoralized Almohads called them in as mercenaries to defend their crumbling empire; and the Merinids came, drove out the Almohads, and replaced them. The Merinids renewed the struggle with the Sultan of Tlemcen, and carried the Holy War once more into Spain. The conflict with Tlemcen was long and unsuccessful, and one of the Merinid Sultans died assassinated under its walls.
The short and stormy passage of the Beni-Merins seems hardly to leave room for the development of the humaner qualities; yet the flowering of Moroccan art and culture coincided with those tumultuous years, and it was under the Merinid Sultans that Fez became the centre of Moroccan learning and industry, a kind of Oxford with Birmingham annexed.
But the crown of El Kairouiyin is the Merinid court of ablutions. This inaccessible wonder lies close under the Medersa Attarine, one of the oldest and most beautiful collegiate buildings of Fez, and through the kindness of the Director of Fine Arts, who was with us, we were taken up to the roof of the Medersa and allowed to look down into the enclosure.
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