Identifier: inmorocco00wharuoft (find matches)
Title: In Morocco
Year: 1920 (1920s)
Authors: Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937
Subjects: Morocco -- Description and travel
Publisher: New York Scribner
Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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CTURE III The brief Almoravid dynasty left no monumentsbehind it. Fez had already been founded by the Idrissites,and its first mosques (Kairouiyin and Les Anda-lous) existed. Of the Almoravid Fez and Marra-kech the chroniclers relate great things; but thewild Hilahan invasion and the subsequent descentof the Almohads from the High Atlas swept awaywhatever the first dynasties had created. The Almohads were mighty builders, and theirgreat monuments are all of stone. The earliestknown example of their architecture which hassurvived is the ruined mosque of Tinmel, in theHigh Atlas, discovered and photographed by M.Doutte. This mosque was built by the inspiredmystic, Ibn-Toumert, who founded the line. Fol-lowing him came the great palace-making Sultanswhose walled cities of splendid mosques and towershave Romanesque qualities of mass and propor-tion, and, as M. Raymond Koechlin has pointedout, inevitably recall the robust simplicity of themaster builders who at the very same moment ( 268 )
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From a photograph from the Scriicc dca licaux-Art.t an Marnc Fez—Medersa Boiianvana NOTE ON MOROCCAN ARCHITPXTURE were beginning in France the construction of thefirst Gothic cathedrals and the noblest feudalcastles. In the thirteenth century, with the coming ofthe Merinids, Moroccan architecture grew moredelicate, more luxurious, and perhaps also morepeculiarly itself. That interaction of Spanish andArab art which produced the style known as Moor-ish reached, on the African side of the Straits, itsgreatest completeness in Morocco. It was underthe Merinids that Moorish art grew into fullbeauty in Spain, and under the Merinids that Fezrebuilt the mosque Kairouiyin and that of theAndalusians, and created six of its nine Medersas,the most perfect surviving buildings of that uniquemoment of sober elegance and dignity. The Cherifian dynasties brought with them adecline in taste. A crude desire for immediateeffect, and the tendency toward a more barbaricluxury, resulted in the piling up o

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