Publisher's Synopsis
The Moroccan sultan Mulay Zaydan (r. 1603-1627), a great bibliophile, had the misfortune to lose his books: captured at sea by the Spaniards in 1612, they were deposited in El Escorial where they have been kept ever since. This misfortune had the happy consequence of preserving one of the very few ancient libraries in the Muslim world. This book offers the first comprehensive study of the Saadian collection. It first examines how Mulay Zaydan, but also his father, Ahmad al-Mansur (r; 1578-1603), and one of his brothers collected the books that were theirs and traces the history of the library. It gives us a unique insight into the book of this period in Morocco, its aesthetics and techniques, and the attentive readers that were the Saadian sultans. Finally, it offers a detailed analysis of the choices of these literate princes and a mapping of their intellectual interests by following the thematic classification of the collection, which essentially overlaps with that of the Muslim world at that time.
