Tingitanian Mauretania was one of the numerous African
granaries of Rome. She also supplied the Imperial
armies with their famous African cavalry, and among
minor articles of exportation were guinea-hens, snails,
honey, euphorbia, wild beasts, horses and pearls.
The Roman dominion ceased at the line drawn between
Volubilis and Sale. There was no interest in
pushing farther south, since the ivory and slave trade
with the Soudan was carried on by way of Tripoli.
But the spirit of enterprise never slept in the race,
and Pliny records the journey of a Roman general—Suetonius
Paulinus—who appears to have crossed the
Atlas, probably by the pass of Tizi-n-Telremt, which
is even now so beset with difficulties that access
by land to the Souss will remain an arduous undertaking
until the way by Imintanout is safe for European travel.
The Vandals swept away the Romans in the fifth century.
The Lower Empire restored a brief period of civilization;
but its authority finally dwindled to the half-legendary
rule of Count Julian, shut up within his walls of
Ceuta. Then Europe vanished from the shores of
Africa, and though Christianity lingered here and
there in vague Donatist colonies, and in the names
of Roman bishoprics, its last faint hold went down
in the eighth century before the irresistible cry:
“There is no God but Allah!”
III
THE ARAB CONQUEST
The first Arab invasion of Morocco is said to have
reached the Atlantic coast, but it left no lasting
traces, and the real Islamisation of Barbary did not
happen till near the end of the eighth century, when
a descendant of Ali, driven from Mesopotamia by the
Caliphate, reached the mountains above Volubilis and
there founded an empire. The Berbers, though
indifferent in religious matters, had always, from
a spirit of independence, tended to heresy and schism.
Under the rule of Christian Rome they had been Donatists,
as M. Bernard puts it, “out of opposition to
the Empire”; and so, out of opposition to the
Caliphate, they took up the cause of one Moslem schismatic
after another. Their great popular movements
have always had a religious basis, or perhaps it would
be truer to say, a religious pretext, for they have
been in reality the partly moral, partly envious revolt
of hungry and ascetic warrior tribes against the fatness
and corruption of the “cities of the plain.”
Idriss I became the first national saint and ruler
of Morocco. His rule extended throughout northern
Morocco, and his son, Idriss II, attacking a Berber
tribe on the banks of the Oued Fez, routed them, took
possession of their oasis and founded the city of Fez.
Thither came schismatic refugees from Kairouan and
Moors from Andalusia. The Islamite Empire of
Morocco was founded, and Idriss II has become the legendary
ancestor of all its subsequent rulers.
