Spanish commentators and intellectuals have recently repeated that when Portugal seized Ceuta in 1415, “Morocco did not exist.”
The argument transforms a military conquest into the occupation of an empty space, free of political ownership or historical continuity. So as to deny Morocco its historical right to its northern cities, the solution is to make Morocco disappear altogether.
The claim collapses under the simplest historical scrutiny. Between 788 and 1415, the city known as Sebta was administered by successive Moroccan dynasties for more than six centuries.
The Idrissids, founders of the first Muslim Moroccan state, brought it under their authority. The Almoravids later made it a strategic naval base. it was from Sebta that Yusuf ibn Tashfin crossed the Strait in 1086 to defeat Alfonso VI of Castile at Zallaqa.
The Almohads maintained it as a major military and commercial port. Under the Marinids, the city reached a peak of urban and defensive development, protected by extensive fortifications whose main gate still bears the name “Gate of Fez,” after the Marinid capital.
This was not a loose tribal zone or a no-man’s-land. It was a functioning city with a sovereign authority, a monetary system, a Friday sermon pronounced in the name of the king of Morocco, arsenals, libraries, mosques, and a dense commercial life. Portuguese sources themselves describe a well-defended urban center that required a large expeditionary force- tens of thousands of men and nearly two hundred ships- to capture. One does not mobilize such resources to take a political vacuum.
The argument that “Morocco did not exist” in 1415 rests on an anachronistic double standard. If the absence of modern borders and institutions is enough to erase a polity from history, then the same logic must be applied to Europe in the same year.
In 1415 the Iberian Peninsula was divided among Castile, Aragon, Navarre, Portugal and the Nasrid Emirate of Granada. The dynastic marriage that would later produce the Spanish monarchy had not yet occurred.
Borders shifted, dynasties rose and fell, and political forms evolved everywhere. That reality is accepted for Europe. It is denied only when it concerns Morocco.
The 1415 expedition was Portuguese, not Spanish. Spain inherited Ceuta much later. Yet some Spanish voices still treat the Portuguese conquest as the foundational moment of a Spanish city while simultaneously denying any historical link between pre-1415 Sebta and the Moroccan state!
In Ceuta, The Gate of Fez still stands as a silent reminder of the Marinid order that governed the city. Contemporary Arabic accounts describe a prosperous urban center on the eve of the conquest. These are not nationalist inventions of the twentieth or twenty-first century; they are the record of the time.
