Seventeenth-century statesmen routinely served into their seventies without mandatory retirement
Evidence
The fact that this Jaudar served in London as late as 1637 might at ļ¬rst sight cast some doubt on his identiļ¬cation with the conqueror of Gao and Timbuktu, but if we assume that the Jaudar was in his mid-twenties when he was entrusted with command of the Sudan expedition, then he would have been in his seventies in London. We tend to take for granted that our modern practice of requiring senior servants of the state to retire on their pensions in their sixties has always prevailed. That was not the way things were done in the seventeenth century, and there is no reason to reject the evidence from the Moroccan embassy that Jaudar served in London. ā L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1600
Categorization
- CANDY: A conqueror of Timbuktu serving as Moroccan ambassador to London at age seventy-plus is a great conversation fact.