The history of Islamic bindings is hampered by the lack of evidence about the date and place of production of the bindings. As the library of the Saadian sultans of Morocco (now in San Lorenzo de El Escorial monastery) was captured by Spain in 1612, many bindings are still in the condition they were in at that date. In this article, I discuss the Ottoman influences on sixteenth-seventeenth century Morocco through the analyses of some of the Maghrebi manuscript bindings kept in the El Escorial collection, using either Ottoman plates or local imitations of the latter. In the light of this study, it will be possible to find some clues about the local production during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and to show how the traditional Moroccan binding techniques started to disappear by the end of the sixteenth century and to be replaced by Ottoman techniques throughout the seventeenth century. All this evidence leads to far-reaching conclusions: more than just a matter of techniques, it is indicative of a change in aesthetics and, more broadly, of the cultural and intellectual relationship between Morocco and the Ottoman Empire, which had reached Algiers by that time.