Sultan Ismail and his 500 wives

3/4/22- We took the 6 hour road trip to Meknes last night so that today we could wake up and met up with another local tour guide who brought us around the city. He taught us about the old Sultan of Meknes, Moulay Ismail. He apparently had 500 wives/concubines and over 1,000 children. I specifically asked our guide if this was a fact or just legend and he said it was a fact. We learned that the difference between a sultan and a king is that a sultan rules over multiple countries while a king is over just one. This particular sultan had a stable that could fit 12,000 horses. He had a mixture of Berber horses and Arabian horses but they used the Berber horses more often in war because they 1) were a lot stronger and bigger than the Arabian horses and 2) they neighed less than the Arabian horses. The guide also told us of a Spanish prisoner who was taken captive and the Sultan told him if you can design a prison that will hold 46,000 people you can be set free. So the prisoner got to work and designed an underground jail that is so big when French journalists went down to explore the tunnels they got lost and never came back up... The tour was very informational. After the city tour we drove to Volubilis, an ancient Roman empire city. We had a tour there where we were shown all the different houses and we learned that the rich people lived on one side of the city while the poor lived on the side closer to the entrance so that if enemies came they would be the first to be killed. After Volubilis we continued on to the blue city of Chefchaoun. We hiked our way through the steep streets to our hotel where we dropped off our bags then went out and explored the town. A random guy brought us around and showed us some of the sights in the city. We got some crepes and drank some questionable hot chocolate then went back to the hotel.