Mawlay Ismail came to the Moroccan throne on 16 April 1672. The notables of towns and tribal groups swore allegiance to him, except for those of Marrakesh, where his nephew Ahmad ibn Muhriz had already proclaimed himself sultan. Ismail defeated his nephew’s supporters in the Hauz, entered Marrakesh, and initially forgave the inhabitants for delaying their allegiance.

Ahmad ibn Muhriz continued plotting and encouraged revolt in Fez. Ismail forced him to flee into the Sahara, secured Fez’s surrender, and then chose Meknes as his capital. He ordered the construction of palaces, houses, walls, stables, warehouses, gardens, and ponds, creating a royal centre that the source compares with Versailles.

Ismail continued the campaigns begun by his predecessors to remove European colonial enclaves. His forces retook al-Mahdiyya, then called al-Mamura, in 1681 after cutting off the town’s water supply and taking its Spanish occupants prisoner. Tangier was entered by the Moroccan army in February 1684 after the English evacuated and demolished its towers and fortifications.

Larache was recovered in November 1689 after a siege lasting more than five months. The town had been ceded to Spain in 1610 in exchange for assistance to Muhammad Shaykh in his struggle for the Moroccan throne. Arzila was recovered in 1691 after the besieged inhabitants fled by ship during the night, leaving the Moroccan army to enter the port.

Mawlay Ismail believed that the strength of a nation depended on military power but feared that soldiers and commanders might become too powerful. He therefore sought to establish a militia composed of slaves, reviving an earlier Saadi practice. Muhammad ibn al-Qasim Alilish helped identify men connected to the earlier register, and Ismail enrolled them whether slave or free.

The recruitment policy provoked public shock and a long dispute with the ulama of Fez, because Islamic law was understood to forbid enslaving free men. Correspondence between the sultan and Shaykh al-Islam al-Fasi debated the legality of the policy. In December 1698, Ismail stated that he had freed those enrolled and held them in mortmain for the defence of Islamic territory; in 1708, he forced approval of the Diwan al-Abid.

The Bawakhir militia was then stationed in forts and citadels throughout Morocco and helped maintain peace and security in the unified country. Ismail also distributed provinces among his sons in 1699, but rivalry and revolts led him to remove nearly all of them from office in 1717, retaining only Mawlay Ahmad al-Dhahabi as governor of Tadla.