Morocco

The English word Morocco descends from Portuguese Marrocos, the name Lisbon's merchants gave to the city of Marrakesh in the fifteenth century. Yusuf ibn Tashfin founded Marrakesh in 1070 CE as an Almoravid military base at the edge of the Sahara, and within a generation it had become the wealthiest city in the western Maghreb. Portuguese navigators working the Atlantic coast began writing Marrocos on their charts for the territory around it, and the name spread to the entire region.

The deeper root is Amazigh, the language family of the Berber peoples of North Africa. The Tachelhit phrase Mur n'Akush, meaning Land of God, is the most often cited origin of Marrakesh, though some connect it to Amur n-Wakuš, an older territorial designation predating Arab rule by centuries. Arab geographers of the twelfth century recorded the city as Marrakush, preserving the Amazigh sound in Arabic script. The name traveled westward through trade networks before Portuguese sailors carried it onto their Atlantic charts.

Before Morocco named a country, it named a leather. Moroccan goatskin, tanned with sumac bark and dyed in deep reds and yellows, was already reaching Venice and Amsterdam in the sixteenth century. Samuel Pepys noted Morocco leather bindings in his diary; Elizabethan shoemakers paid premium prices for it. The word appeared in English trade records as early as 1589, well before most English people could have found the country on a map.

France established a protectorate in 1912 and standardized Maroc in its administrative French. Spain kept its northern zone under Marruecos. Britain held to Morocco, anchored in that fifteenth-century Portuguese spelling. When independence came in 1956, King Muhammad V chose al-Mamlaka al-Maghribiya as the Arabic name, meaning the Kingdom of the West, but every European language kept the name of the Almoravid city that started it all.