t Erremel, part at Meknez, and the rest in the seventy-six forts
which the Sultan built for them throughout his domain. May the Lord be
merciful to his memory!"

Such was the army by means of which Ismael enforced the _corvee_ on his
undisciplined tribes. Many thousands of lives went to the building of
imperial Meknez; but his subjects would scarcely have sufficed if he had
not been able to add to them twenty-five thousand Christian captives.

M. Augustin Bernard, in his admirable book on Morocco, says that the
seventeenth century was "the golden age of piracy" in Morocco; and the
great Ismael was no doubt one of its chief promoters. One understands
his unwillingness to come to an agreement with his great friend and
competitor, Louis XIV, on the difficult subject of the ransom of
Christian captives when one reads in the admiring Ezziani that it took
fifty-five thousand prisoners and captives to execute his architectural
conceptions.

"These prisoners, by day, were occupied on various tasks; at night they
were locked into subterranean dungeons. Any prisoner who died at his
task was _built into the wall he was building_." (This statement is
confirmed by John Windus, the English traveller who visited the court of
Moulay-Ismael in the Sultan's old age.) Many Europeans must have
succumbed quickly to the heat and the lash, for the wall-builders were
obliged to make each stroke in time with their neighbors, and were
bastinadoed mercilessly if they broke the rhythm; and there is little
doubt that the expert artisans of France, Italy and Spain were even
dearer to the old architectural madman than the friendship of the
palace-building despot across the sea.

Ezziani's chronicle dates from the first part of the nineteenth century,
and is an Arab's colorless panegyric of a great Arab ruler; but John
Windus, the Englishman who accompanied Commodore Stewart's embassy to
Meknez in 1721, saw the imperial palaces and their builder with his own
eyes, and described them with the vivacity of a foreigner struck by
every contrast.

Moulay-Ismael was then about eighty-seven years old, "a middle-sized
man, who has the remains of a good face, with nothing of a negro's
features, though his mother was a black. He has a high nose, which is
pretty long from the eyebrows downward, and thin. He has lost all his
teeth, and breathes short, as if his lungs were bad, coughs and spits
pretty often, which never falls to the ground, men being always re