Dynastic History | El Badi Palace قصر البديع, Marrakesh — Marble Paid For In Sugar

Work began in Shawwal 986 — December 1578 — a few months after Ahmad al-Mansur came to the Saadian throne on the death of his brother at Wadi al-Makhazin. Much of the building account survives because so much of the palace was bought abroad. Montaigne, travelling in Italy, noted craftsmen near Pisa cutting tall marble columns for the sultan of Morocco, paid for in sugar, weight for weight; the Museum With No Frontiers file on the palace still cites him for it. The sugar came from the refineries of the Souss and Chichaoua. From 1591 a second income arrived: al-Mansur's expedition across the Sahara took Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné, and the trade it secured earned him the byname al-Dhahabi, the Golden.

That road carried people as well as gold. The Timbuktu jurist Ahmad Baba was deported to Marrakesh in 1594; Britannica records that he was allowed to teach while held, and he did not reach home again until 22 April 1608.

The works were finished in 1002 AH (1593–94), and al-Mansur kept adding until his death in 1603. Archnet's survey gives a court roughly 110 metres square, a pool some 95 metres long, four sunken gardens, and artisans brought in from several countries, Europe among them.

Then it was taken apart for Meknes. Archnet dates Moulay Ismail's stripping order to 1696 and says the extraction alone ran ten years; another account puts the order at 1119 AH (1707–08). What stands is pisé wall, the sunken orange gardens, the pool and the storks. The Almoravid Koutoubia minbar is displayed here.

📸 Cover: the sunken gardens and pool of the stripped palace, R Prazeres, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons