Among The
Population Are Three Or Four Thousand Jews, Some Of Them Of Great Wealth
And Consequence.
The merchants are active and intelligent, carrying on
commerce with Fez, and other places of the interior, as also with the
foreign ports of Genoa, Gibraltar, and Marseilles.
In the middle ages,
the Genoese had a great trade with Rabat, but this trade is now removed
to Mogador, Many beautiful gardens and plantations adorn the suburbs,
deserving even the name of "an earthly paradise."
The Moors of Rabat are mostly from Spain, expelled thence by the
Spaniards. The famous Sultan, Almanzor, intended that Rabat should be
his capital. His untenanted mausoleum is placed here, in a separate and
sacred quarter. This prince, surnamed "the victorious," (Elmansor,) was
he who expelled the Moravedi from Spain. He is the Nero of Western
Africa, as Keatinge says, their "King Arthur." Tradition has it that
Elmansor went in disguise to Mecca, and returned no more. Mankind love
this indefinite and obscure end of their heroes. Moses went up to the
mountain to die there in eternal mystery. At a short distance from Rabat
is Shella, or its ruins, a small suburb situated on the summit of a
hill, which contains the tombs of the royal family of the Beni-Merini,
and the founder of Rabat, and is a place of inviolate sanctity, no
infidel being permitted to enter therein. Monsieur Chenier supposes
Shella to have been the site of the metropolis of the Carthaginian
colonies.
Of these two cities, on the banks of the Wad-Bouragrag, Salee was,
according to D'Anville, always a place of note as at the present time,
and the farthest Roman city on the coast of the Atlantic, being the
frontier town of the ancient Mauritania Tingitana.
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