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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry.

At various points on our trip to Morocco last year,

our guides talked about the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755.

It started at our very first stop on our very first full day in Morocco at Hassan Tower in Rabat.

So Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqab al-Mansur commissioned a mosque at the end of the 12th century,

but then he died before construction on it was finished and it was never completed.

Before his death, a red sandstone minaret had been built to about half its

planned height. It was supposed to be the tallest minaret in the world once it was done,

but of course it was never finished. And then there were also some exterior walls and hundreds

of columns. A lot of these columns collapsed in the earthquake, and today their

remnants are sort of standing before the minaret at different heights, depending on how much

of them is left. So this earthquake kept coming up over the rest of the trip. Our guides would

say that a site had been uncovered in the earthquake or

damaged in the earthquake, and it made me really curious because they kept saying Lisbon.

Over and over, they were talking about the Lisbon earthquake, but this earthquake was

obviously also a big enough deal in Morocco that people are still talking about it at historic sites 200 years later.

I had definitely heard of this earthquake before because it is depicted in Voltaire's Candide,

which I have read and have also seen a theatrical adaptation of, but I did not fully connect the setting of Candide

to the realities of an actual historic event.

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