Sayyida al-Hurra, Moroccan Queen

This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers. The show is famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller, Danny McBride, Riz Ahmed and Mary Steenburgeon. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio App Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hota Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hota Kotby. You know, I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy. Like when my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really anybody hoping to stand out. You're not hired just to fill time into space. You're hired to fill the space with you. Listen to Joy 101 with Hota Kotby on the I Heart Radio App Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Our hometown is not a test tube. 90 miles northeast of Nashville, a battle for the future of America plays out in one small town. Developers with right wing ties have purchased hundreds of acres of land. We need cities on a shining hill. This is our town. A podcast about what happens when a small town becomes the site of a social experiment and fights back. I guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now, did you? Listen to our town on the I Heart Radio App Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guild Season 3 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous situation that destroyed two families. It's a scorched earth war that shows just how far someone will go to get what they want. Cindy said I had to choose between the truth and my family and I had to choose the truth. Listen to season 3 of Burden of Guild on the I Heart Radio App Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I was looking back over the year at the episodes that I researched and written of this show and I felt like it was just a little too heavily concentrated in the 17 through 20th centuries. Maybe 18 through 20th to be more fair. I feel you. Yeah, so I on purpose went to look for something from a little longer ago than that and I landed on say to Alhura who has been on my short list for quite a while and who lived in the 15th and 16th centuries. We've talked about her very briefly on the show before that was back in 2016 and that very brief conversation was mostly about how we didn't have a lot of information. There are some new English language papers that have been published about her since that time, but there are still a lot of unknowns about her. A lot of European accounts of say to Alhura's life characterized her as a pirate and that is how we described her in that incredibly brief conversation in 2016 that was mostly about not knowing anything. After getting into this research more, I don't really think pirate is the best word or if it just doesn't tell the whole story very well. Sayeda Alhura is a title and it has been translated from Arabic in multiple ways that all have connotations of being honored, noble or powerful as well as independent. All her titles have also been used for other powerful Muslim women in history, including Arwa Al-Sulahi who ruled Yemen in the 12th century. Some scholars have concluded that Sayeda Alhura's given name was probably Fatima or Aisha. A couple of sources say that it might have been Lala but that is also a title with a meaning along the lines of Lady. There is also an argument that even though it is typically a title Alhura was her given name because it appears that way on her second marriage contract. If that is the case, she may have been named after an earlier woman who had earned that same title. Sayeda Alhura's father was Mule Ali Ibn Rashid and Mule is another title. It essentially means Prince. He was a Sharif meaning he traced his lineage back to the family of the prophet Muhammad. His ancestors included King Idris I who founded the first independent Muslim dynasty in what is now Morocco. At different points in his life Ali Ibn Rashid lived in both Morocco in northern Africa and in Grenada on the Iberian Peninsula. That included serving Sultan Muhammad the 11th in Grenada starting in about 1460. While he was in service to the Sultan, he married Sayeda Alhura's mother Zura Fernandez. She grew up near Cadiz and she had converted from Catholicism to Islam. Ali Ibn Rashid founded the Moroccan city of Shafshawan in 1471. Today, Shafshawan is known as the blue city because so many of the buildings in the Medina are blue. But those very very distinctive blue walls and roofs are a more recent development with a lot of different stories about how and why the color came to be used. At first, Shafshawan was mainly a Casbah or Fortress meant to help defend northern Morocco from the Portuguese. After Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Grenada in 1492, it also became a home to an increasing number of Jewish and Muslim refugees who were fleeing from what is now Spain. We should back up for a second for some context on all of that first defending northern Morocco from the Portuguese. So Morocco and the Iberian Peninsula of course face each other across the state of Gibraltar. And this straight is strategically very important for its connection between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean and for connecting northern Africa to the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe. Saeuta is on a small isthmus on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco and that has been an important military and commercial port for thousands of years. Portugal gained control of Saeuta in 1415 and from there started trying to claim additional territory in Morocco. Most of the cities that the Portuguese tried to occupy were on the coast and Shafshawan is about 60 kilometers or 37 miles inland in the Riff Mountains. This landscape and the distance from the coast offered some additional protection from the Portuguese. And as for Spain conquering Grenada starting in the eighth century, Muslims from Tangier and other parts of northern Africa conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula. The region under Muslim control became known as Al Andalus. Christians started trying to retake the peninsula almost immediately but these efforts were largely unsuccessful until the 11th century. The Christian reconquest known as the Rikonquista escalated after Pope Innocent III declared a crusade in 1212 and by the middle of the 13th century the Nazarid Kingdom of Grenada was the only part of the Iberian Peninsula still under Muslim rule. Ferdinand III of Castile recognized Grenada as a vassal state in 1238 but conflict between Muslims and Christians and among different Muslim factions within Grenada continued. Then in 1492 Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella of Eragon and Castile conquered Grenada and that ended the Rikonquista. That same year Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra decree which forced all Jewish people living in their territory to convert to Christianity or be expelled. We did an episode about all of that in 2014. Earlier in the Rikonquista Muslim communities surrender terms had typically included that they could continue to practice their religion. But the reality was that Muslims faced increasing persecution as more and more of the Iberian Peninsula came under Christian control. Ferdinand and Isabella also moved away from this at least nominal religious tolerance and in 1502 Muslim residents of Castile were ordered to convert to Christianity or leave. Muslims living in Eragon got the same order in 1526. Sayyidah Alhura was born in the midst of all of this change and conflict. Various sources put her birth at sometime between 1485 and 1495 and her brother Ibrahim was born in 1490. So all just within a few years of the fall of Grenada. While the date of her birth is unclear and sources are kind of contradictory about whether she was born in Morocco or in Grenada. We do know she was raised in Chef Shawan, which grew from a fortress to a multicultural and multilingual community. Its leadership was Muslim. It was part of a Muslim sultanate, but it was also home to Christians and Jews and Moriscos, which is the term for Muslims who had been forced to convert to Christianity. Arabs, Europeans, Africans and people from a number of. as the tribes, also known as Berbers, also lived there. This wasn't completely egalitarian or peaceful, there were clear privileges associated with being Muslim and there could be conflicts among these different religious and cultural groups. But Chef Shao and Gruu, into a diverse and thriving community, even in the face of this ongoing conflict with Portugal. Saeed Al-Hara was a Sufi Muslim, and she was educated by some of Chef Shao and's most respected scholars. She learned multiple languages, including Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese. In 1510, she married the governor of Tituan, Mule Al-Mondry. There's a bit of debate about which Mule Al-Mondry this actually was. Some sources argue that it was Abu Hassan Al-Mondry, also known as Ali Al-Mondry, who refounded the city of Tituan while others argue that it was actually Muhammad Al-Mondry, who was either his grandson or nephew and became governor of Tituan later. So Tituan is a port on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco, north of Chef Shao and south of Tituan. Today it's a UNESCO World Heritage site. It had been an important port connecting Morocco to Al-Andalus, starting around the time of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Tituan was destroyed by a Castilian force in 1400 and then by a Portuguese force in 1437. Tituan was rebuilt for the third time in 1484, and it functioned as a largely independent city state within the Witasid Sultanate. Like Chef Shao and Tituan became home to people who wanted or were forced to leave the Iberian Peninsula after the fall of Grenada and the expulsion of Muslims from Spanish territory. This caused some difficulties, including violence between the new comers who were largely from the Iberian Peninsula and the Jabala Confederation who lived in the region. These groups eventually came to terms, though, especially when it came to trying to repel Portuguese invasions. Site Al-Mondry was a political one. It brought together the ruling families of Chef Shao and Tituan. Both of these were vassal states of the Witasid Sultanate, and that was who ruled Northern Morocco. This united two very powerful families and two powerful vassal states. It combined their forces to both resist European incursions into Morocco and to try to unite various ethnic groups and tribes and different factions within Morocco. It's likely that Site Al-Hurza's education and upbringing allowed her to assist and advise her husband in his role as governor, starting from the very beginning of their marriage. Over time, she became an informal co-ruler with that authority becoming more formal when her husband was away on diplomatic or military matters. Since Tituan was a port, this probably also allowed her to learn more about maritime and naval matters. Site Al-Hurza's husband died in around 1519. His brother wanted to take control of Tituan, but her brother, Ibrahim, who had become vizier to Sultan Ahmad Al-Watassi in Fez named her as Al-Mondry successor. It really was not typical for women to take on this level of power, but Site Al-Hurza seems to have earned the people's trust they accepted her in that position. The overall prominence of her family may have played a role in this as well, and it is likely that this is when she earned the title of Site Al-Hurza if it indeed is a title in her case. We will talk more about her story after we pause for a sponsor break. And Sean Clements. The show is famously super accessible, so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller. The definition of what is a movie is kind of changed any way too, right? What do you think it is now? It's images and words being spoken captured by some sort of technology. Danny McBride, you love it. Oh, that's fantastic. Can you make it on you make your own? That's great. I call him Tarot Reed. That's a good name. They're all named after cast members of American pie. Yeah, I call. I don't. I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leachy Sobiaski. Yeah, I don't think she was an American pie, but I just haven't looked it up. She was prominent in the same time. Yeah, then Mary Steenberg. Why are you guys talking to me? I'm worried. Why are you talking so down to me that you think I don't understand your little play? I just really, I get it. Trying to set you up for success here. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nick Tutoro. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, the longest shot or Spike Lee's Black Plansman, but I'm also from Queens, which means I know pizza. And on my new podcast, Delivering Happiness with Nick Tutoro, I deliver pizza from Prince Street pizza to a new guest. We deliver pizza now? Then we sit down for a real conversation. I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins. What are you doing, my bell? To Alex Rodriguez. Just let you people know we're talking to one of the goats here. To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind is I am. And now we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Tutoro. Let's go happiness, Delivering Happiness. Mariano Rivera. I'm going to start growing up. And many, many more. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Tutoro. And listen now. I'm Hota Kotby, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hota Kotby. If you know me, you know, I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover those things together through meaningful conversations with fascinating people. You have something in your guts. You go with it. And Sean Johnson recalled the moment she realized her now husband Andrew was the one. He was just so unapologetically himself and knew nothing of Hollywood. He hadn't been on a plane before without his family. It was so pure. Listen to Joy 101 with Hota Kotby on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guild season three podcast. It started more than seven years ago when Cindy and Kenny were two 40-somethings who had just gotten engaged. Days later, they walked into a scorched earth war they never saw coming. Turn on the lights your hands find your back. The cops give it to my house and turn me into jail. And to Cindy's surprise her fiance Kenny was charged with abusing one of her children. I never once doubted Kenny and I always doubted the accusation. On season three of Burden of Guild you'll hear a story about the length someone will go to in order to get what they want. This case has got to be one of the most despicable. Listen to season three of Burden of Guild on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When Saida Elvira became governor of Teh-to-Anne, in addition to the ongoing conflicts with Portugal and Spain, Morocco was facing an economic decline. Earlier we mentioned Portugal capturing port cities along the Mediterranean coast. That was largely the work of Portuguese prince Enrique de Avise, who is known in English as Henry the Navigator. That moniker comes from his funding of exploratory voyages down the Atlantic coast of Africa, which he mostly did not personally participate in. He just paid for. These voyages traded for goods and precious metals and enslaved people along the African coast as well as capturing territory and establishing forts and ports. European sea voyages down the African coast continued after Henry the Navigator's death in 1460, including through the voyages of Vasco de Gama of Portugal who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1497. Vasco de Gama was not the first European to sail around the southern tip of Africa, but he was the first to successfully go from there to the Indian subcontinent. Ultimately, his voyages helped establish a maritime trade route between Western Europe and South Asia. A sea route to India reduced to the need for goods to be moved across Africa and through Morocco when being transported to and from Western Europe. So as more goods traveled by sea, the Moroccan economy started to decline and its merchant class started to shrink. That was in addition to the ongoing conflicts with European powers over territory and growing divisions within Morocco about whether to continue fighting them. For example, After the death of Said Al-Hara's father, her brother Ibrahim took his place in Shafshawan and took a more conciliatory approach with the Portuguese. This included signing an armistice with the governor of Sao Ta in 1538. In the face of all of this, Said Al-Hara needed to find a way to protect Te Tuan and help it prosper. According to some accounts, she teamed up with two Ottoman privateers, Orouche and Hizier Reyes. Reyes is another title used in the Ottoman Empire for naval officers. Orouche and Hizier were both known by a number of names and titles and are sometimes conflated into one pirate. Barbarossa also known as Redbeard. Barbarossa actually means Redbeard in Italian. But simply calling these men pirates does not really seem correct. They were born on the island of Lesbos and what's now Greece which was Ottoman territory at the time. Their father was a potter and they and their other brothers started out in that trade before becoming sailors. Orouche and Hizier were both experienced at sea by the end of the Reconquista and eventually that experience did start including attacking Spanish and Portuguese ships in the Mediterranean. Soon they were hired as privateers in service of Korkud who was one of the sons of Ottoman Sultan by a zeal the second. Korkud was executed in a dispute over the line of succession in 1513. So for a time these brothers didn't really have any official backing. But in 1516 the amir of Algiers asked for their help dealing with the Spanish and after Orouche's force captured the city from them the Ottomans named him Governor. Spain later retook the city and Orouche was killed in 1518 but Hizier's force drove the Spanish out once again in 1529. Eventually Sulimah and the magnificent who we covered on the show in 2014 made Hizier Governor of Rhodes. His forces later captured Tunis and afterwards Sulimah named him Grand Admiral of the Ottoman Empire. He was later named Chief Governor of Ottoman North Africa and he died in Constantinople in 1546. In addition to attacking and harassing Spanish and Portuguese ships and settlements before his death Orouche Raiz carried Muslim and Jewish refugees from the Iberian Peninsula to Morocco. That took place mostly between 1504 and 1510 and he earned the nickname Baba Orouche or Father Orouche for doing this. Saeed Al-Hero was part of this effort to rescue people who were trying to flee the peninsula. Sources are a little contradictory about exactly what Saeed Al-Hero's relationship was with Orouche and Hizier. In some accounts she actively hired them as privateers and others it was more like she allowed her own leaders and commanders to work with them or she just tacitly allowed them to operate out of Tetsuán. There are other similarly contradictory descriptions of her work with other privateers and pirates in the Mediterranean. She also built a shipyard which the Ottoman Empire both used to build ships and as a port to attack the Portuguese and the Spanish and she expanded the fleet that her husband had amassed one that both defended Morocco and attacked and captured its enemies. This included capturing Europeans and holding them for ransom. There's documentation of prisoners of various nationalities being held in prison in Tetsuán and Saeed Al-Hero's negotiations with those home nations to get them released. That ransom money and the cargo from captured ships helped Tetsuán really thrive economically. As for calling them pirates it is definitely true that Aruche and Hizier didn't always have some kind of official authorization for what they were doing at sea. Sometimes they did but sometimes they were acting on their own. But Saeed Al-Hero was the official authorization. She was governing Tetsuán and this was a time when a lot of leaders and governments hired civilians to attack their enemies at sea in addition to or instead of their own navies. Some sources frame Saeed Al-Hero's enslaving of prisoners or imprisoning them and then ransoming them back to their countries of origin as sort of a dividing line making her a pirate rather than just a leader who was legitimately using maritime mercenaries to defend her territory. But at this point taking enemies prisoner and ransoming them back to their native countries was relatively common. A lot of countries were doing this long before they became famous as Corsairs. One of Aruche and Hizier's brothers was killed by the Catholic military order known as the Knight's Hospitaler while on a trading voyage and Aruche was captured and imprisoned by them until Hizier paid a ransom to get him out. Spain and Portugal were also kidnapping and enslaving Africans and over the course of the 16th century every major European power was involved in trafficking people out of Africa. In the paper Saeed Al-Hero and early modern decolonial Muslim exemplar Dr. Jason Idris Sparks points out that a lot of what Saeed Al-Hero was doing seems pretty comparable to the actions of her contemporary Queen Elizabeth I, including Elizabeth's hiring privateer Francis Drake and eventually nighting him. Beyond that a big motivating factor for both Saeed Al-Hero and the Barbarossa brothers was defending Muslim territory including their own homes against European incursions or retaliating against attacks on Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula. During their lifetimes the brothers' home of Lesbos was also attacked and besieged during wars between the Ottoman Empire and Venice. We've already talked about how Saeed Al-Hero grew up in a place that was home to refugees who had to flee the Iberian Peninsula and after her marriage her home of Tatuan was continually under threat. We talked in our recent flying gang episode about the rise of piracy in the Caribbean in the 18th century being tied to international disputes and economic factors but all of the stuff that we have been talking about seems a lot more directly personal to Saeed Al-Hero and the Barbarossa brothers than the Caribbean was to a lot of the European pirates who operated out of there. More broadly accounts from the Arab world are more likely to frame Saeed Al-Hero's actions in her work with privateers as a legitimate form of warfare and it also may have had religious elements including a religious obligation to protect Muslims and Muslim lands. A depiction of her at the Casbama Museum in Chef Shaoen calls her a "princess of jihad," a term that combines both struggle and duty in the context of Islam, framing her so-called piracy as a holy war that she had a spiritual mandate to take on. Before we move on, the northern coast of Africa, known at the time as the Barbary coast, became very heavily associated with piracy and the idea of Barbary pirates. The number of pirates operating in this area really increased in the early 1600s and that was decades after the deaths of Saeed Al-Hero and Orish and Hizir Reis. But some of the cities that the brothers captured and transferred to the Ottoman Empire became known as part of the Barbary states which employed state-sponsored piracy which you could also call "privataring" against European and later American ships. Sometimes the Barbarosa brothers in particular are characterized as really planting the seeds of this flourishing of "barbery piracy." Many European powers paid tributes to the Barbary states so their ships would be left alone. But the US did not want to do that, ultimately leading to the 19th century Barbary Wars. These wars ended with an overall victory for the United States with treaty terms that put an end to these tribute payments. But piracy continued from the northern coast of Africa until the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. "Oh, let's talk about more about Saeed Al-Hero after a sponsor break." Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. The definition of what is a movie is kind of changed, anyway, too, right? Danny McBride, you love Nova. That's great. I call him "Terro Reed." It's a good name. Yeah, I call. I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Lee Chisobi Eski. The console limo. Yeah. Then Mary Steam Virgin. Look, >> I'm not sure if you're going to be so down to me that you think I don't understand your little play. >> I just really trying to set you up for success here. >> Listen to Hollywood handbook on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. >> I'm Nick tutorial probably know me from NYPD blue the longest shot or Spike Lee's black landsman but I'm also from Queens, which means I know pizza and I'm a new podcast delivering happiness with Nick the tour I deliver pizza from Prince Street pizza to a new guest. >> We've never been pizza now and we sit down for a real conversation. I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins what are you doing on the Alex Rodriguez just let you people know we're talking to one of the goats here to bill bar. >> I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of them my desire. >> And now we even have more great guest coming up including the great John to Turo. >> It's called happiness delivering happiness. >> I really love and many many more open your free high heart radio app search delivering happy to spend Nick to Turo and listen now. >> I'm Hota caught me host of the podcast joy 101 with Hota caught me. If you know me you know I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy so this podcast let's us uncover those things together through meaningful conversations with fascinating people like one of my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really anybody hoping to stand out. >> You're not hired just to fill time in space you're hired to fill the space with you you have something in your guts you go with it. >> And Sean Johnson recalled the moment she realized her now husband Andrew was the one. >> He was just so unapologetically himself and knew nothing probably what he hadn't been on a plane before without his family. It was so pure. >> Listen to joy 101 with Hota caught me on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or review get your podcasts. >> I'm Nancy glass host of the burden of guilt season 3 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous situation that destroyed two families it started more than 7 years ago when Cindy and Kenny were to 40 some things who had just gotten engaged days later they walked into a scorched earth war they never saw coming. >> To put your hands on your back the cops give it to my house and to me and jail. >> And to Cindy's surprise her fiance Kenny was charged with abuse in one of her children I never once doubted Kenny and I always doubted the accusation. >> On season 3 of burden of guilt you'll hear a story about the length someone will go to in order to get what they want. >> This case has got to be one of the most a spicable listen to season 3 of burden of guilt on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. >> To get back to say to Alhura she govern Ted one for more than 20 years and during that time the city state really prospered. >> In 1541 roughly two decades after the death of her first husband Sultan Ahmed al-Watassi of Fez asked to marry her. >> At this point she would have been in her 50s or maybe early 60s. Typically the Seltans bride to be would travel to Fez to be married there. >> It was a Sultan it within capital somewhere else they would travel to that capital and then they would remain there in the capital after the wedding. >> But say to Alhura refuse to leave Ted one the Sultan traveled to her and after the wedding she stayed where she was and continued to rule Ted one. This is not how it normally worked at all. >> I have a story for what is a normal wedding on our behind the scenes like her earlier marriage this one was political. >> As we said earlier while Ted one was a vassal state of the Wadassid Sultanate it operated largely as an independent entity. >> So this was a marriage between the Sultan and the leader of one of the Sultanates most prosperous and powerful vassal states. >> By extension it also made a connection between the Sultan and Said al-Hura's family home of chef shawin. >> This drew comparisons to the marriage of Ferdinand Isabella uniting the kingdoms of Eragon and Castile and that's seen as the foundation of Spain is a modern state. >> More generally Said al-Hura was probably the most powerful woman in Morocco and the Wadassid Sultanate which controlled northern Morocco was trying to strengthen itself against the Saudi Sultanate which ruled western Morocco from its capital in Marrakesh. >> But as this was happening Said al-Hura's rule in Ted one started to slip ongoing disputes with the Portuguese city of Sauta ultimately led Sauta to cut off trading ties with Ted one. This didn't totally cut off Ted one's wealth by any stretch but the city did see a drop in prosperity. >> Then in 1542 Said al-Hura's son-in-law Mule Ahmed Al-Hasan Al-Mondri overthrew her in a coup. >> He cut ties with the Wadassid Sultanate and apparently expected the Saudis to take over. That is ultimately what happened. The Saudis captured Fez in 1549 and they moved the capital of the Sultanate to Fez in 1603. The family of Said al-Hura's late first husband and at least one of her surviving brothers sided with the Saudis during all this. The Saudis retook a lot of the territory in Morocco that Portugal had seized and occupied. While Said al-Hura was not directly involved with this, her ongoing maritime efforts against the Spanish and Portuguese are seen as helping set the stage for the Saudis to reclaim more territory. Morocco also fought off the Ottoman Empire's attempt to take control in the 16th century and remained an independent Sultanate until after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 that we mentioned earlier. After that, international disputes in and around Morocco escalated, including the scramble for Africa by the European powers and Morocco ultimately becoming a protectorate of France in 1912. Morocco regained its independence in 1956. >> Meanwhile, Saota was Portuguese territory during Said al-Hura's lifetime. It was passed to Spain in 1580. Saota and Matia on the northern coast of Morocco both continue to be Spanish presidios today. Saota has been in international news as we are recording this. When the episode comes out, that will be two weeks in the past and I do not know how the situation will have developed by them. >> After she was overthrown by her son-in-law, Said al-Hura was stripped of her possessions and she returned home to Chef Shaoen. She still had family there. We do not know much about her life after that, but we do know that she died on July 14, 1561. At that point, she would have been in her 60s or 70s. According to some accounts, she retired to a Sufi lodge in Chef Shaoen and spent the rest of her life focused on spiritual and religious pursuits. As far as we know, she never had any children. There is some speculation that one reason for the lack of documentation about her life and rule of Tatuan is that later leaders of the city found her legacy threatening or they didn't want to acknowledge how much it had flourished while she a woman was in charge. A lot of the contemporary or near contemporary mentions of her are from Europeans, which is also connected to why she is so often framed as a pirate rather than as the leader of a city state or the queen of the saltnet. As we said at the top of the show, there have been some papers about Saeed Al-Hara in recent years. One is the paper by Dr. Jason Idris Sparks that we mentioned earlier. It was published in the journal Religions in 2025 and it makes a case that Saeed Al-Hara is an early example of decolonial thought. Another is by Dr. Amal Elheimer of the University of Kansas. She grew up in Morocco and traveled there to look for information on Saeed Al-Hara. She found primary and secondary sources that weren't available in English and then translated those herself and talked to historians in Morocco who knew more about her. In addition to this more recent academic work in 2016, there was a TV series about Saeed Al-Hara on Moroccan television. I don't know much more about that other than that it happened. I'm so glad you picked this one. Oh good. She's interesting to me. Do you have listener mail for us? I do have listener mail viewers from Netflix. I'm going to have to read it from my phone because of reasons. This says, hi, ho, Holly and Tracy. Kel here from the Morocco trip. I hope you're both doing well. Hi, Kel. I did it on purpose. Pick this because it's Kel from the Morocco trip. That is a coincidence. But we love Kel. But we love Kel. Kel said, I meant to write in about sneakers and then unearthed happened and I had to write you about Shakespeare and so now I get both Shakespeare first. I was very excited to hear the news on unearthed about the firm location of Shakespeare's London House, which I had somehow missed. I did my MFA in staging Shakespeare, and we spent two weeks each year studying at the reconstructed globe and poking about Southern hot tip. Look up the pronunciation of that if you don't already know it. One fun thing about England is that the country is so old and their structures have been in the same place for so long that you often run into situations like this. They'll locate something of historical interest but can't excavate because there is a different building of historical interest built on top of it. There may not be anything to excavate with this building, but this is the case with the actual Shakespeare's Globe Theater. They found the location of the foundations and half of it is under a car park, but the other half is under a building that is also landmarked, 18th century, if I remember correctly. They can't do any excavating without disturbing the nearby structure, even though we'd love to dig around in the globe's dirt. Nearby, there are also the foundations of the Rose Theater, where Shakespeare performed prior to the building of the Globe and later a rival theater. Its foundations were discovered when they went to build a huge office building in the '80s, actors from Lawrence Livia to Dustin Hoffman and Judy Densch were out protesting trying to keep them from bulldozing the site. In the end, they built the building over top of the theater, but altered the structure at the bottom to preserve the foundations. It's pretty spectacular engineering and now we have a viewing space can continue to research and they sometimes put on events. A quick note on sneakers and swing dancing, since I talk so much about Shakespeare and early modern theaters I could go on all day. First of all, thank you for explaining to me why all my British friends call them plimpsoles. Second, I wondered if you knew that Keds/Plimpsole-style shoes were the favorite shoes of former podcast subject, Frankie Manning, Whites, Lindy Hopper's, and other swing dancers. The picture used on the cover of his autobiography is of him and another dancer doing an air step and both of them are wearing that style of shoe. These shoes are still favored by swing dancers today, although in a twist I find hilarious, we often have to put leather on the sole so they will spin during turns. The rubber grip on the bottom of today's shoes is often too much for dancing, but I assume that the material/texture was different in the 30s and 40s and they had the right amount of traction on the wooden dance floors. A future podcast on Norma Miller, another of Whites, Lindy Hopper's, would be fantastic. I saw her speak at New Orleans when she was close to 100 and she was a real spitfire flirting with the guys and still dancing. He asks, "We're very excited to be coming to Germany and Chetje with you this fall until then, Kelt." So thank you so much, Kelt, for this email, for a couple of reasons. One, I love all of this about the Shakespeare. - Me too. - Great. I don't think I remembered or maybe didn't know. You had an MFA in staging Shakespeare. That's great. - The other reason is I meant to talk about wearing kids for swing dancing in the behind the scenes of the sneakers episode. And then I forgot. - You did? - Did we talk about it in the behind the scenes? No, 'cause I didn't, did you swing dance? Do you swing dance? - Yeah, so. - I never knew. - Yeah, this is a thing that I did a while ago. We were owned by a company that gave us a health and wellness benefit and you could get reimbursed for a gem membership or class you were taking and I could get reimbursed for swing dancing classes. - So fun. - And I went through multiple levels of swing dance classes and then I took some Lindy Hop classes. Lindy Hop was a lot of fun. And people talked about liking to wear kids for their lending hopping. And I got a pair of kids that were super cute. And then did find them too grippy on the floor when I would go out social dancing. That was the thing that I did a while. One of the reasons was to get out of my comfort zone. - Yeah. - I am not always comfortable in group settings. I'm not always good at talking to people. Social dancing was a lot of fun. I have not done it in many years. I think the last swing dancing that I did was when Patrick and I took classes before our wedding and we danced our first dance at our reception. (laughing) And I don't think we have done it since. - I also have very strong memories of that dance. - Oh. - Because probably not for the reason. I mean not that it wasn't very sweet. - Is it because you were afraid the beads were gonna fly off my dress? - Yeah. - Yeah. - They did not. - Or if they did not, too, an appreciable amount. - Well, I, in case any listeners don't know or remember, I made Tracy's wedding dress. - I added a lot of beads that we hadn't discussed. (laughing) I was like, more bead fringe, which in my defense was terrific. But as you guys were whipping around, I was like, oh dear, Greedo, please don't let beads fly everywhere and make this entire venue like a hazard for everyone because they were little tiny seed beads. But they didn't, they all stayed in place. I'm happy to report. - They stayed there. - So thank you so much, Kel, for this email. And for giving me the chance to say something that I meant to say in our behind the scenes episode on sneakers, which I forgot to talk about. - And for being grand, we love Kel. - I had a great time with Kel in Chef Shawan. We can talk more about Chef Shawan in the behind the scenes of this episode. - Can't wait. - So thanks for writing Kel. I look forward to seeing you again. If you would like to send us a note where it history podcast at iHeartRadio.com. If you would like to see the show notes to this episode where we list all of the papers and other resources that we used, including the two that we specifically mentioned, that is at history podcast at iHeartRadio.com. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app at anywhere else who like to get your podcasts. (upbeat music) - Stuff you missed in history class is a production of iHeartRadio. 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