b. 1558
Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, also rendered Abd al-Wahid bin Mas‘ud, was a senior Moroccan official and principal secretary to the Saadi sultan Ahmad al-Mansur. In 1600 he led a Moroccan embassy to England, arriving at Dover in August with a substantial retinue. The mission took place after decades of expanding commercial contact between Elizabethan England and Morocco and at a moment when both governments were considering how cooperation might weaken Spain.
The ambassador spent several months in England and met Elizabeth I at court while negotiations considered trade and possible joint action against Spanish power. A striking contemporary portrait of him in Moroccan dress survives and has become one of the best-known visual records of Muslim diplomatic presence in Elizabethan England. The grander military proposals came to little, but the embassy remains evidence of the international reach of both courts at the turn of the seventeenth century.
Abd el-Ouahed appears in S. W. Perry’s The Sinner’s Mark, where his 1600 embassy becomes part of the political and intelligence plot surrounding Nicholas Shelby, Robert Cecil and the ageing Elizabeth I. The historical mission also connects the final Jackdaw mystery back to Nicholas’s earlier experiences in Morocco.
