At the death of Hassan I, the groundwork was already laid to bring to the throne his favorite son, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz. Only fourteen years old at the time, the young prince was kept in the shadow of the regent Ahmad ibn Musa, popularly known as Ba Ahmad, the former palace chamberlain, who shamelessly doled out patronage for personal gain and filled the most responsible posts in the makhzan with his closest relatives. A clever and ruthless man commonly known as “the steel wire,” Ba Ahmad was worried that the new sultan’s legitimacy might be compromised because of his young age, so he carefully orchestrated his image to make him acceptable to a skeptical public. When the tribes of the south rose in revolt in 1895, cutting Marrakesh off from the rest of the country, the teenaged ʿAbd al-ʿAziz was placed at the head of a hastily composed mahalla stiffened with reinforcements from the immensely powerful tribe of the M’tougga, one of the great Berber confederations of the Atlas, and sent to the south. The expedition was a success, and ʿAbd al-ʿAziz triumphantly entered Marrakesh in March 1896 with Ba Ahmad at his side, leading an endless procession of captured horses, camels laden with booty, and a straggling column of prisoners, their chains jangling in the dust as they labored through the streets of the city. The staging of these early years was mainly theatrics; but with the passing of time, the Moroccan people began to peek behind the scenes and to observe the confused choreographies of a dynasty in distress.