Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif was the second Alaouite sultan of Morocco and the principal ruler of the long Alaouite consolidation of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He was born in 1645 in the Tafilalt, the home oasis of the Alaouite sharifian lineage, and succeeded his half-brother Moulay al-Rashid in 1672.
His reign of fifty-five years — among the longest in any documented Moroccan dynasty — established the territorial, military, and administrative basis of the Alaouite state. He recovered Tangier from England in 1684 and Larache from Spain in 1689; he reduced the Saadian-period autonomous polities of the Souss, the Drâa, and the Tafilalt to direct rule; he consolidated the Beraber tribes of the Middle Atlas and the Aith Atta of the Anti-Atlas under varying degrees of nominal allegiance.
The defining institutional achievement of his reign was the constitution of the Black Guard (Abid al-Bukhari), a permanent slave-soldier corps drawn from the descendants of African enslaved populations and from new acquisitions through the trans-Saharan trade. The corps numbered as many as 150,000 at its peak and provided a standing army loyal directly to the sultan rather than to tribal or regional intermediaries, the principal innovation of late-medieval Moroccan governance.
Moulay Ismail relocated the imperial capital to Meknes in the 1670s and undertook the construction of the vast palace-and-fortification complex that gives the city its present-day character: twenty-five kilometres of crenellated walls, the Bab Mansour, royal stables for twelve thousand horses, and an elaborate hydraulic system. The Meknes complex was inscribed by UNESCO in 1996 and remains the principal monument of Alaouite imperial culture. He died at Meknes in 1727; his successors did not preserve the Meknes capital, which lost imperial status by mid-century.