Meknes-Tafilalet

One administrative region connected two worlds. Meknes-Tafilalet stretched from Sultan Ismail Ibn Sharif's 17th-century imperial capital through the Middle Atlas, across an ecological gradient, down to Sijilmasa—the medieval terminus where Saharan gold caravans ended and Mediterranean trade began. The 800 kilometers between them represented not distance but transition: from Mediterranean agriculture to Saharan oasis, from European-facing empire to trans-Saharan commerce, from living imperial city to abandoned trade ruins.

Meknes became Morocco's capital in 1672 under Sultan Ismail Ibn Sharif, who ruled until 1727. As one of Morocco's four imperial cities, it commanded agricultural hinterlands and Mediterranean trade connections. The northern section of the region operated in a different metabolic mode than its southern extreme—temperate-zone cultivation, year-round rainfall, European trade orientation. But the administrative logic of Meknes-Tafilalet lay not in ecological coherence but in controlling the full gradient from Mediterranean to Sahara, from production zone to trade gateway.

Sijilmasa, founded 757 AD near modern Rissani, became one of the wealthiest cities in the medieval Maghrib. As the northern terminus of western trans-Saharan trade routes, it processed West African gold arriving from Walata and the Niger River, exchanging it weight-for-weight with Saharan salt. The Almoravid dinars minted at Sijilmasa circulated across the Mediterranean. Between the 8th and 14th centuries, Arab merchants in Sijilmasa controlled the gold flow that financed Islamic empires from Morocco to Egypt. The Ziz River oasis—at 77,000 km² the world's largest—supported date palm cultivation that fed caravans and urban populations. Then, in 1393 AD, Sijilmasa collapsed. Trade routes shifted, political power fragmented, and the city that had controlled trans-Saharan commerce for 636 years became ruins stretching five miles along the Ziz.

In September 2015, Morocco's regionalization reform split Meknes-Tafilalet along functional lines. Errachidia and Midelt provinces (the Saharan/oasis section) joined the new Drâa-Tafilalet region, linking the Ziz valley to the Draa valley further south. Meknes and its provinces merged into Fès-Meknès, connecting two imperial cities. The administrative division recognized what already existed: these were never ecologically or economically unified zones. They were gradient interfaces artificially bound by administrative convenience.

Through 2026, the Tafilalet oasis continues date cultivation along the Ziz, serving domestic markets rather than trans-Saharan caravans. Meknes remains an agricultural center with European trade ties. The gradient persists—Mediterranean to Saharan—but the economic integration that once justified a single administrative unit dissolved centuries before the 2015 reform made it official. Sijilmasa's ruins remain the clearest evidence: sometimes the trade routes move, and the cities they sustained become archaeological sites rather than living economies.