The Wattasi was the last Berber line to reign in Morocco, being succeeded by the house of Sa’adi, whose members were Sherifs, or “nobles”—that is, descendants of the Prophet—and came originally from Arabia. This change of dynasties took place about the middle of the sixteenth century, and Morocco, though four fifths of its population is Berber, has been known as the Shereefian Empire and has been ruled by Arab sultans ever since. Under the sway of the Sa’adi the Moorish dominions were pushed southward to Timbuktu, but the line ran out in drunkards and degenerates; another Shereefian family, the Filali of Tafilalt, was then invited to undertake the task of government and by 1649 they were masters of Fez. The reign of the Filali, more generally known as the Alides, who still hold the Shereefian umbrella, the present sultan being the twentieth of the line, has been, with very few exceptions, a record of cruelty, tyranny, debauchery, corruption, and revolution. The most beneficent of them, Mahomet XVI, had an Englishwoman in his harem, so that his successor, the wretched Yazid, whose reign was mercifully of short duration, was English on his mother’s side—a curious circumstance for an Oriental country. During the reign of Abd-er-Rahman II occurred the war with France, brought on by Morocco’s espousal of the cause of Abd-el-Kader, and as a result of this conflict the Moors renounced their claims to Tlemcen and France consolidated her Algerian possessions. Upon the death of Sultan Hasan in 1894 there came to the Shereefian throne his son by a Circassian slave-girl: Abd-el-Aziz IV, then a lad in his teens. The young ruler showed himself sincerely desirous of bettering the condition of his distracted country by introducing foreign reforms, but lack of experience made him an easy prey for schemers and speculators, who pandered to his worst traits and squandered his fortune. This aroused the resentment of his people, and in 1902 the Berber tribes of the Algerian frontier rose in rebellion under the leadership of a fanatic named Jelali Zarhoni, popularly known as Bou Hamara, who claimed to be fighting on behalf of the imprisoned brother of the sultan. Finding himself powerless to subdue the rebellion, Abd-el-Aziz borrowed money from France to reorganize his army, thereby providing the French with an excuse which they used later on for intervention. To complete the demoralization of the empire, a local chieftain, Mulai Ahmed er-Raisuli, made himself master of the district round Tangier, terrorizing the country-side and holding even foreigners to ransom. His kidnapping from Tangier itself of a Greek named Ion Perdicaris, an American by naturalization, brought from President Roosevelt the brusque demand for “Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead,” a demand which was backed up by an American naval demonstration in Moroccan waters.